Truth in Advertising a Loser in Dornan-Sanchez Mailers

If you live in the 46th Congressional District, you probably have read these claims in political mailers that have come to your door:

* Democratic candidate Loretta Sanchez wants to cut funding for military training.

* Her campaign is being run by a convicted felon.

* Incumbent Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) wrote a bad check on the infamous House bank to fix up his Virginia home.

* He repeatedly voted to cut Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars.

But you might not want to take the above at face value, because both sides concede that not every detail may be true.

At best, some contain errors due to typographical mistakes or sloppy research. At worst, some are outright cynical distortions.

What voters can believe, however, is that in a breakneck campaign such as this, truth is road kill.

Dornan and Sanchez will spend as much as $1 million in their drive to win Tuesday’s election in the predominantly Democratic and Latino district in central Orange County. Much of it will go for campaign mailers sent directly to voters.

The most serious charge against Dornan about the truthfulness of his ad campaign comes from the nonpartisan voter information group Project Vote Smart, which sends questionnaires to candidates and compiles voting records on incumbents. Sanchez filled out the group’s congressional survey, which Dornan cited 11 times as a source in a campaign mailer that attacks her positions on issues ranging from abortion to taxes.

The group--whose founders include former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford and House Speaker Newt Gingrich--called Dornan’s “misrepresentation” of Sanchez’s views “one of most blatant abuses we have seen” in dealing with some 14,000 candidates this year.

For instance, one Dornan brochure--titled “On the Issues”--says Sanchez wants to cut funding for military training, wants to fund “all political campaigns” with public money and is against tax-free medical savings accounts.

Sanchez supports none of those positions in the survey, said Project Vote spokesman Kyle Dell, who characterized Dornan’s charges as “falsehoods.” According to the survey, Sanchez supports increased funding for training, public financing only for congressional candidates who comply with spending limits, and offers no position on medical savings accounts.

In addition, Dornan takes some of Sanchez’s answers in the Vote Smart survey and twists her responses, Dell said. For instance, the mailer says Sanchez supports “the status quo track leading to the bankruptcy of Medicare,” when her answer was: “Medicare--maintain status.”

“Bob Dornan is ethically challenged,” said Richard Kimball, Vote Smart board president. “He has knowingly used our reputation to give credibility to a false attack. He knew we did not say these things about Sanchez. It is false, wrong, unethical. He is doing it knowingly.”

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Dornan defended his mailer, saying “typos,” or typographical errors, by GOP researchers caused the misstatements about her positions on military pay and medical savings accounts. The other characterizations of her positions are “our interpretation,” he said.

Vote Smart “is left of center and for them to stick their nose in my race is offensive in the extreme,” he said.

Campaigns often rely on mail because it allows direct communication with the voter, who may not be following the race in any other way. Some campaign pieces define the candidate positively or the opponent negatively. Others zero in on a position popular with voters--such as fighting crime--and show the candidate is right on the issue.

GOP consultant Mark Thompson would like to send reams of information to voters to help them make an informed decision, but he doesn’t believe anybody would read it.

“As a result, there is exaggeration and bright colors and bold headlines and outrageous statements, because you only have 30 seconds of the voters’ time,” he said.

Another Dornan strategy is to paint Sanchez as a fraud and untrustworthy.

One mailer states she ran as a Republican for Anaheim City Council in 1994. Another sent to Latinos suggests she changed her party to run for Congress. The facts: She has been a registered Democrat since February 1992.

A Dornan mailer sent out this week states in red type that “Sanchez’s Campaign is Being Run by a Convicted Felon.”

But that too is false: The campaign actually is run by John Shallman. He has no criminal record and is a respected campaign consultant, whose lawyers warned in September he would sue the Dornan campaign for defamation if the charge were repeated.

The mailer makes no reference to Shallman but identifies Howard Kieffer as her current campaign manager. Kieffer--who in the 1980s was convicted of grand theft, forgery and federal tax fraud--was a business associate of Sanchez, as she has often acknowledged. But he has no connection to her current campaign. During the primary last spring, however, Kieffer gave her a $1,000 donation and she rented an office for her campaign at his place of business.

Dornan concedes that the Kieffer mailer, prepared for him by the National Republican Congressional Committee, should have included the word “primary.” But in a subsequent mailer, the word “primary” wasn’t included either, and in fact, the campaign piece is entirely devoted to Sanchez’s relationship with Kieffer, whom the mailer calls “a key advisor to her campaign.”

Distortions and half-truths in political campaigns are hardly new.

“If we could read transcripts for those running for the Senate in ancient Greece, they would be as full of misrepresentations, distortions and character assassinations as anything we see today,” said Stu Mollrich, a Newport Beach direct mail guru who has run many statewide political campaigns.

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The Sanchez mailers aren’t always completely truthful, either.

A Sanchez campaign theme is to portray Dornan as a loyal warrior for House Speaker Gingrich in carrying out an “extreme” Republican agenda. One of her tactics is to define Dornan as part of the government establishment, removed from the concerns of his district.

In seeking to do that, Sanchez makes a claim that Dornan bounced a check during the House banking scandal. A bright red headline says: “He Forced the Congressional Bank to Pay to Fix-up His Virginia Home.”

The charge is false: According to the House Ethics Committee, Dornan was listed as bouncing one check at the House bank in 1991 but the panel later dropped him from its list of representatives with overdrafts, saying the bounced check wasn’t Dornan’s fault.

“We have dozens of articles that say he bounced a check and was ridiculed for it, and [missed the] one that says he was exonerated,” insists Shallman, Sanchez’s campaign manager.

Sanchez mailers also knock Dornan for allegedly having “repeatedly voted to cut Medicare.”

The accuracy of what Republicans call the “Mediscare charge” is tied up in the national debate about the GOP budget vetoed by President Clinton, which led to the shutdown of the federal government earlier this year.

Is Medicare being cut?

The GOP says no. They proposed to increase the amount of money spent on Medicare, while cutting the rate of growth in Medicare spending, as part of a plan to make sure the program survives.

Democrats say it is a cut. The GOP measure would have meant reduced benefits and a doubling of premiums for seniors because the Republican proposal would not match inflation or the increasing number of retirees.

In another mailer, Sanchez says “her common sense financial guidance saved taxpayers $300 million while serving as financial advisor for the Orange County Transportation Authority.”

But that is at least an exaggeration: Sanchez’s campaign acknowledges that the mailer mistakenly said OCTA when it should have said the Transportation Corridor Agencies, a joint-powers authority building three new toll roads. But even then, it would be a stretch to claim she saved that much money, according to one person involved in the project.

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Nevertheless, Sanchez insisted she was instrumental, as a financial advisor to the TCA, in persuading the agency not to side with investment bankers who wanted the agency to sell long-term bonds in 1986 to finance several billion dollars’ worth of projects when interest rates were 9%. Instead, the TCA got some short-term financing and was able to sell its long-term bonds in 1992 for 7%.

Amortized over 30 years, that savings is at least $300 million, Sanchez argues.

Bruce Nestande, a business consultant involved in the financial discussions as a member of the California Transportation Commission, remembers it differently. Only the investment bankers, “the pushers of bonds,” were telling the agency to go long-term in the bond market in 1986, he remembered.

“That was such an easy one that no single person can take credit for developing that conclusion,” said Nestande, a Republican. For Sanchez to take credit for the savings is “not factually correct. It is puffery.”

No matter the degree of truth, the mail wars will continue in the final days of the campaign.

Dan Wooldridge, a veteran political consultant who is involved in neither race and has authored his share of hit pieces, offers this advice: “Voter beware.”

“The more outrageous the charge and the later it comes in the campaign, the less likely that any of it is true,” he said. “Those things are the acts of desperate politicians or consultants trying to refloat sinking ships.”