Besmirching a Victory Too Hastily

Just a hunch, but Laura Casas Frier may be the only member of Porter Valley Country Club who marched in the funeral procession for Cesar Chavez. It is tempting to say she lives in two worlds, but that is untrue. None of us does.

Laura Casas Frier was a stranger to me when she called the other day to vent frustration. She wasn’t feeling as good as she was at midnight on Election Day, when she was thrilled that her candidate, Richard Alarcon, had pulled ahead. Casas Frier had worked the phone banks for three long days, just one among hundreds of volunteers. All that hard work had paid off.

“Even if we end up losing,” she told me when Alarcon’s lead had shrunk to 33 votes, “this was a tremendous victory. . . . We showed people their vote matters.”

And that is why Casas Frier, a Granada Hills resident, was so upset that some people, including me, would suggest that Alarcon’s edge might be attributed to a last-minute, low-blow mailer to Latino voters from state Sen. Richard Polanco, chairman of the California Latino Caucus. Polanco implied that former Assemblyman Richard Katz was party to an Orange County scandal in which uniformed security guards were posted at polls to intimidate immigrant voters. Katz, in fact, was involved--in the efforts to expose the incident and in litigation that forced Republican officials to finance Latino voter registration efforts.

From what Casas Frier had read, she didn’t like Polanco’s letter. But it wasn’t so much the smearing of Katz--Alarcon, she said, had been smeared, too--as the sense that the mailer had diminished the honest, sincere efforts of so many volunteers.

The election still hanging in the balance, it seemed like a good idea to meet Casas Frier after all the ballots were counted.

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Laura Casas Frier greets me at the front door of the new, handsome, beautifully landscaped home in the Greyhawk Ranch development that speaks well of the state of the American Dream. Husband Ken works at Disney in finance. Laura, Van Nuys High Class of ‘77, is a graduate of Cal State University Northridge and the University of Santa Clara Law School. She worked in the insurance industry before deciding to stay home to raise the couple’s three children.

The home is graced with family photographs, vibrant portraits of the kids, fading black-and-white images of ancestors. Laura, born in Mexico City, points to a picture of a great-grandfather who built American railroads. She points to a maternal grandfather being sworn in as a state legislator in Mexico; as a teenager, she says, he had fought alongside Pancho Villa. A taste for politics, it seems, runs in this family. At Cal State Northridge, Laura Casas was elected a student senator. Her passion has been promoting and defending Latino interests.

Toward these ends, Casas Frier is vice president and past president of Comision Femenil of the San Fernando Valley, a group that promotes educational opportunities for Latina youth. It provides scholarships and stages an annual conference at CSUN in which Latina professionals encourage and counsel hundreds of teenage girls about education and career options. She is also active in a Valley group that founded the Transitional Home for Battered Women.

It was through these activities, she says, that she got to know Richard Alarcon’s wife and, through her, the councilman. When Alarcon’s campaign asked her to join their get-out-the-vote effort, Casas Frier says she was eager to help. In this internecine Democratic battle in a safely Democratic district, the conventional wisdom had the white Jewish candidate favored over the Latino Catholic candidate. In their rhetoric, both candidates played down the ethnic differences, but the history at the polls showed an important cultural divide. White voters--and particular Jewish voters--had been much more likely to turn out than Latinos. The key for Alarcon, then, was to get these “low-propensity” voters to the polls.

And that’s where Casas Frier and hundreds of others stepped in. They distributed thousands of yard signs. They called likely Alarcon supporters to ask for their votes, called to remind them to vote, called them on Election Day to ask whether they had voted yet. No? Your car broke down? We’ll send someone to drive you to the polls.

Casas Frier describes the effort with pride. At the campaign headquarters, when returns showed Alarcon pulling into the lead, she says, she was one of the many people who cried tears of joy.

And so, she tells me, don’t give the Polanco hit piece too much credit. Too many people put heart and soul into that campaign.

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Certainly many factors may have contributed to Alarcon’s victory--or rather, his apparent victory. A recount may yet make that premature headline seem prophetic.

Casas Frier hands me a Mayor Richard Riordan letter endorsing Alarcon. In the open primary, how many Republicans might have been influenced by the popular Republican mayor? As for the Polanco letter, “I’m sorry, this did not turn the election,” she says dismissively. “That’s all Katz has left: sour grapes.”

But any campaign is more than the sum of its parts, and there’s no telling what bit of mail might have made the difference. Alarcon’s camp complains that Katz’s earlier mail was every bit as negative and untruthful. Polanco aide Bill Mabie suggests that Katz played a race card himself in a hit-piece parody of Alarcon’s memorable “I am not Richard Alatorre” mailer. What counts as an ethnic appeal may be in the eyes of the beholder. There is not enough space to list all the recriminations.

Laura Casas Frier, meanwhile, is satisfied in the belief that Alarcon and his volunteers, if not Polanco, fought the good fight, proving to so many people that their vote matters.

And that is why, she reminded me, even if Alarcon loses a recount, this was “a tremendous victory.”

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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St. , Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.