Assembly Candidates Pulled Plug on Some Campaign Mailers

You’ve seen the mailers that went out in the hard-fought 39th Assembly District campaign, some of them nasty, others bland.

So what about the campaign literature that was ready to go but didn’t make it into mailboxes?

Take the flier prepared by unsuccessful candidate Jim Dantona.

The piece featured paired photographs of Dantona and the 39th District’s current--and popular--Assembly member, Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who is retiring this year because of term limits. With the photos was a recent letter from Katz to Dantona, thanking him for his support in the past.

But the letter was apparently a rather generic one that Katz’s office sent out to several other constituents who have supported the veteran legislator over the years. And when Katz got wind of Dantona’s flier, consternation kicked in that it appeared to imply an endorsement of Dantona, although Katz studiously avoided making any endorsement whatsoever in the race to succeed him.

So he called Dantona’s campaign and demanded that the mailer not go out.

“Richard found about it and said don’t, so we didn’t,” said Larry Levine, Dantona’s political consultant.

“It was not implying an endorsement,” Levine said. “The statement was that Jim Dantona will carry on in the tradition of Richard Katz.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.”

Candidate Tony Cardenas won the primary with 45% of the vote, well ahead of Dantona, who finished second.

And then there was the mailer prepared by the other major candidate in the 39th District, Valerie Salkin. Through her “opposition research,” Salkin had discovered a rather neglectful voting pattern on Cardenas’ part in elections tracing all the way back to the early 1980s.

A flier hammering Cardenas on that fact was ready to “drop,” as political lingo terms it. But it stayed in the mail house.

Why?

Credit Dantona, who had already hit Cardenas with a piece on the very same thing, beating Salkin to the draw.

“We sensed that it wouldn’t get us any mileage at all,” said Sue Burnside, Salkin’s consultant. And “it seemed like when he was hit the first time by Jim it didn’t do much at all.”

A House Divided

On election night, Dantona, gunning for the Democratic nomination in the 39th Assembly District, gathered his family, friends and staff at the Casa Torres Restaurant in Sylmar for what turned out to be a celebration of second place.

The setting seemed to make sense: The restaurant’s part-owner, Alberto Gonzalez, is a friend and supporter of Dantona’s who had donated campaign office space to Dantona in the northeast Valley.

But weren’t those signs for Cardenas, the eventual winner, posted up around the restaurant in the days before the election?

Yes--and chalk that up to Raphael Torres, a Cardenas booster and the restaurant’s other owner.

Gonzalez didn’t mind the schism within the establishment. He himself is “friends with both” Cardenas and Dantona, he said diplomatically on Tuesday night, as Dantona’s nearest and dearest scarfed down Mexican food and strawberry margaritas.

So who actually received Gonzalez’s vote on election day?

Fortunately, the decision was out of his hands.

“I don’t live in this district,” he said.

Coincidentally, the restaurant was a three-minute walk through a couple of parking lots from where candidate Salkin also nervously awaited election results in her campaign office. A person could literally throw a baseball and hit her headquarters, someone remarked.

“Ya got a baseball?” quipped Dantona political consultant Levine.

Not What He Had in Mind

A tough illegal immigration bill was one of Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson’s top priorities for this legislative session. So when the House overwhelmingly approved an immigration reform package earlier this month, many were surprised that the Woodland Hills Democrat voted no.

Beilenson had co-sponsored the legislation and spoken out in favor of key elements during debate. But he watched as provision after provision that he considered essential were eliminated before his eyes.

It was especially the deletion of any cuts in legal immigration and the lack of a mandatory worker-verification system for employers that prompted Beilenson to part ways with his colleagues and become the lone local lawmaker to oppose the bill.

“The bill is ineffective in my opinion,” he explained. “We did all of the wrong things. We end up with a bill that does not do the things I, and I think most of the people, want us to do.”

For the retiring Beilenson, the immigration debate was supposed to have been a last hurrah before locking his congressional office for good at year’s end. But he said he considered it one more legislative tussle in a long string of them.

“I feel very strongly that we’re going to--not I but the rest of them in the next Congress--have to lower the rates of legal immigration,” he said.

Beilenson found himself debating his colleague, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), who opposed the legal immigration cuts.

“Eight out of 10 Americans polled say, ‘Deal with the problem of illegal immigration before you touch legal immigration,’ ” Berman thundered on the floor. “It is fundamentally wrong to take the justifiable anger about our failure to deal with the issue of illegal immigration and piggyback on top of that anger a drastic . . . cut in permanent legal immigration, a cause and a force that has been good for this country.”

From another podium a few feet away, Beilenson rattled off population statistics to argue that the country as a whole would suffer if it did not curb its growth.

“Fueled by both legal and illegal immigration, the population of the United States is growing faster than that of any other industrialized country,” Beilenson said.

On another point, Berman and Beilenson found themselves on the same team.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) successfully pushed through a controversial amendment that would allow states to ban public schooling for illegal immigrant children.

It was supported 257 to 163, with Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) and Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale) voting in favor. Beilenson, Berman and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) all opposed the measure and hope it will not survive in the Senate’s bill heading toward a vote next month.

Speak Easy

During a recent Los Angeles City Council meeting, two community activists--otherwise known as gadflies--spoke to the panel for a total of 55 minutes on various issues.

That is quite a significant amount of time considering the council’s meetings usually last only two or three hours.

But it’s not how long the activists talk but what they say that concerns Council President John Ferraro, who represents parts of North Hollywood.

Some of the comments from regular speakers are so vitriolic and nasty that Ferraro introduced a motion recently asking the city attorney’s office to come up with restrictions on what the public can say in front of the council.

While imposing limits on free speech raises a slew of concerns, Ferraro said he merely wants to improve the decorum at the meetings by barring speakers from making offensive, slanderous or even racist comments.

In response to Ferraro’s motion, the city’s chief legislative analyst said that it is within the council’s power to set such restrictions. A report by the analyst said several other cities, including Burbank, Santa Monica and Seal Beach, have adopted similar restrictions.

But in most of those cities, the power to decide what is out of bounds and what is protected by the First Amendment is in the hands of the “presiding officer.” In the case of the council, it’s Ferraro.

A recent heated and lengthy exchange between a speaker and a council member over whether a term was racist was an example of how difficult Ferraro’s role could become.

In this case, the debate was never settled and Ferraro did not bar the speaker from using the term.

Ferraro said he hopes the city attorney’s office will set up guidelines that will help him decide when a public speaker is out of line and should be silenced.

Chu and Martin reported from Los Angeles, Lacey from Washington, D.C.