Democrat Not Overly Taxed by Details or Broadsides

His back against the wall, Democrat Brad Sherman faced a rambunctious bunch of Thousand Oaks Rotarians--the kind that boo and hiss at the mention of the word “lawyer.”

It was supposed to be a debate between congressional candidates. But Republican rival Rich Sybert was a no-show. So Sherman, a Harvard-educated lawyer and state tax official, was there alone to field questions from a suspicious crowd of mostly Republican businessmen:

Would he have voted for the 1993 tax increase? Does he find President Clinton’s morality lacking? Would he help Clinton “gut” welfare reform next year?

“I can see why Rich isn’t here,” Sherman quipped. “He thinks this group is too conservative for him.”

The Rotarians roared with laughter.

Although Sherman sprinkles humor throughout his speeches, he is so serious about winning that he has already lent $390,000 of his own money to help finance his campaign to replace retiring Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills).

“I’m going to put everything I’ve got into the race,” said Sherman, who moved from Santa Monica to Sherman Oaks last year to run in the 24th Congressional District.

Sherman, 41, said he covets a seat in Congress because he wants to help dump Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House and use his expertise as a certified public accountant and tax attorney to make the government more efficient.

“Most people who run for Congress are not CPAs and they don’t understand taxes,” he said. “Nearly every discussion in Congress is about budget management and taxes. That’s an important area where I can make a contribution.”

The race also gives Sherman an opportunity to emerge from the arcane world of tax policy at the state Board of Equalization.

“I do welcome branching out,” said Sherman, who is eager to cast votes on a wide array of issues. “I am pro-business, pro-environment, pro-education and pro-choice.”

For six years, he has been an elected member of the obscure but powerful five-member board that hears appeals on state income tax matters and oversees the collection of sales, gas and cigarette taxes.

Sherman is the only CPA or attorney on the five-member board and he relishes the work, delving deeply into the intricacies of the tax code.

Although widely respected as a tax authority, he sometimes exasperates other board members, business leaders and even his own staff by poring over the smallest details.

“He has an iron-trap mind, but he is into minutiae,” said Fred Main, vice president and general counsel of the California Chamber of Commerce.

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Business representatives and staff tell stories of him going on and on to chisel a compromise in tax regulations, changing a sentence here, a comma there. His slow, deliberative speaking style can sometimes exacerbate the frustration.

“He’s a tax nerd, but I think we need more people like him,” said Valerie Salkin, one of Sherman’s former staff members.

“He is more focused on policy than politics,” Salkin said. “He is the kind of person we need in Congress and in the government because he is so knowledgeable.”

Sherman accepts criticism about his zealous attention to detail.

“If the worst rap on me is that I do my job too carefully, I’ll live with that,” he said. “If my colleagues are a little impatient, I try to deal with that the best I can.”

He takes some issue with being called a nerd.

“I’m a regular guy, with nerdish tendencies,” said the balding, bespectacled Sherman. “I’m a recovering nerd.”

Sherman readily admits that he is more bookish than the average politician. He was extraordinarily shy as a boy, he explains, and has worked hard over the years to improve his social skills, which he now rates as average.

His longtime friends agree that he is smoother now.

“Brad always has a reputation of being a straight-arrow guy with a knack for figures and numbers and accounting,” said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-San Bernardino), who has been a family friend for decades.

“I never saw him as having a big political flair,” Brown said. “But it turns out that he does better than I thought he would.”

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Born in Los Angeles on Oct. 24, 1954, Sherman grew up in Monterey Park. His father was an executive in a technical school, his mother a part-time secretary. Sherman’s two main interests emerged early in life: business and politics.

At 6, he was selling snow cones, and by 14 he had established the Sherman Stamp Co., which bought stamps wholesale and sold them retail to collectors. To operate the mail-order business, he obtained a resale number from the Board of Equalization and paid sales taxes.

His parents were active in the Monterey Park Democratic Club and Sherman was licking stamps, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts with his mother, Lane, by age 6.

“The Brad Sherman you see today is the same person he was in the fourth grade,” said Josh Shinder, a friend since childhood. Young Bradley was always canvassing the neighborhood for political or other purposes.

“When we used to go trick-or-treating, he would hold out his bag for candy and then hold out this tin box for coins for UNICEF,” Shinder said.

Sherman studied accounting at UCLA and stayed politically active working on George McGovern’s Democratic presidential campaign. Graduating summa cum laude, he worked as an accountant for 1 1/2 years then went to Harvard Law School.

“He thought Harvard was easy,” said Robert Grossman, a former law partner. “He was disappointed; he thought it should be more challenging.”

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After earning his law degree, Sherman practiced tax law for a decade and then ran for a seat on the state Board of Equalization. He personally bankrolled his first race, selling three condominiums he owned to lend his campaign $400,000.

“Ever since I’ve known him, he’s talked about public service,” said Carlos Recio, a law school buddy. “He doesn’t care about money, but really he cares about public service. It’s astonishing, because he could be a millionaire given his business sense.”

Soon after his election, Sherman became chairman of the board at age 36, the youngest in history.

Board of Equalization members act principally as a tax court, trying to help businesses, industries and individuals sort through problems. And Sherman said his opponent’s characterization of him as a tax collector is really a misnomer.

Weighing tax policy can be tricky, though. One person’s needed tax relief is another’s loophole.

If a tax board member too easily grants loopholes to businesses, he can be accused of caving in to special interests, shortchanging the state treasury and forcing the rest of the state’s taxpayers to make up the difference.

But if the board member too jealously safeguards the treasury, shunning any such appeals, he will be hit by complaints of being antagonistic to business.

Sherman gets criticized from both sides of the debate.

He has not lived up to expectations of some liberals, who had hoped he would continue in office what he was doing as a Common Cause representative--railing against “special tax breaks” for oil and mining industries while championing relief for low-income taxpayers.

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Nor do business leaders view him as a sure-fire ally.

“He is not the devil incarnate as a tax collector, but he is not a great friend of the business community either,” said Fred Main of the California Chamber of Commerce. “He helps when he can, but he doesn’t go far out of his way.”

Sherman considers these testimonials to his moderate credentials.

“If you are not being criticized from the left and the right, you are probably not a moderate,” he said.

Working in the arcane world of tax policy, Sherman has managed to have some fun.

With his penchant for puns and clever wordplay, he led the fight against Gov. Pete Wilson’s “snack tax” that placed sales tax on candy, chips, cookies and other junk food.

Sherman opposed the tax, saying it would be a nightmare for grocers, who would have to make the distinction between a cupcake, which was taxed, and a muffin, which was not.

“Perhaps the voters of my district made a mistake in electing a tax lawyer,” he said at the time. “They should have elected Julia Child.” His quip ran in papers across the nation.

“He’s like his daddy,” said his mother, Lane Sherman. “He can tell the same story and change it ever so slightly, that even I’m laughing. . . . It’s the one-liners that just break me up.”

Most of his accomplishments fit the dull, but important, category.

For instance, Sherman persuaded President Clinton to side with California in a successful Supreme Court case that allowed the state to keep nearly $2 billion in taxes collected from foreign-owned businesses in the state.

He helped rewrite the tax code in 1993 so that out-of-state companies that sell their products in California are hit with higher taxes than those manufacturers that employ California workers to make their products and ship their products around the country.

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The legislation that he sponsored, he said, helped preserve manufacturing jobs.

He joined with Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who was then state controller, to successfully block Wilson’s effort to delay about $400 million in tax refunds to low-income renters. Wilson wanted to keep the refunds to help balance the budget.

On the political stump, Sherman concedes he is not the most charismatic politician to ever run for Congress. But that does not seem to bother him one bit.

“He’s not going to go out there and look like a pro football quarterback and that’s OK,” said Grossman, his former law partner. “He’s very comfortable with himself.”

Sherman, a politician who shows an ability to laugh at himself, often begins his speeches with self-deprecating jokes about his looks and position in government.

He pokes fun at his male-pattern baldness by handing out combs to prospective voters, with the refrain, “You can use one more than I can.”

In debates, he mocks envy of his Republican opponent’s blessedly full head of thick, brown hair: “Rich, where do you get the really good Rogaine?”

Sherman is not the only one making fun of his appearance.

Cartoonists, too, have delighted in skewering him with their sharp pencils.

The National Cartoonists Society has posted dozens of caricatures of Sherman on their World Wide Web page on the Internet to protest what they consider an overly strict and complex web of state tax laws on illustrations and other artwork.

Sherman said he is puzzled why the cartoonists are picking on him. After all, he said, he recently voted to exempt cartoonists from a state levy on artwork.

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But the cartoonists say his track record shows he is far from friendly in helping resolve their tax troubles. The Web site even hawks T-shirts of Sherman as the “Bean Counters Poster Child.”

“We wanted to strike back when it hurts most,” said Daryl Cagle, a Woodland Hills artist who put together the Web page. “This is the best guy to choose. Here he is running for Congress in an area that has a lot of cartoonists and artists. If he did this at any other time, who would care?”

Sherman’s opponent has joined the pack, lampooning his looks.

The Sybert congressional campaign sent out the first attack mailer of the fall season featuring a large, particularly goofy picture of Sherman.

“Don’t laugh,” the brochure’s headline said, “This tax collector wants to be our Congressman.”

Sherman said the flier made him chuckle.

“I’ve cast 10,000 votes at the Board of Equalization,” Sherman said. “If the worst thing he can say about me is that I’m bald, then that is a tremendous compliment.”