Gore Campaign Shuffles State Staff, Plans L.A. Office

Less than nine weeks before the California primary, Vice President Al Gore’s campaign has shuffled its state leadership and plans to publicly shift into higher gear next week by establishing a political beachhead in Los Angeles.

Although there was consensus that the resignation of Gore state manager Kathy Bowler was health-related, some political activists said her departure was one more stumble by a campaign that has been fighting off perceptions of weakness for months.

Bowler will be replaced next week by longtime Gore loyalist Sky Gallegos, who served as deputy political director for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign in California and later worked in Los Angeles for the vice president’s political action committee. She has been serving as the campaign’s Western states coordinator, based at the Nashville headquarters.

The Gore campaign will open its Los Angeles office early next week. The lack of a presence in the biggest electoral state’s biggest media market has been openly lamented by Gore partisans. The campaign will also announce a steering committee of political veterans committed to Gore.

All told, the measures are meant to kick-start a campaign in a state that, despite its electoral heft, has taken a back seat to the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire because of the strong challenge posed there by former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley.

Gore campaign officials insisted that their personnel moves will have little practical effect, although others scoffed.

“There’s only one way to read it: disarray,” said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe.

Gore supporters here hope that the campaign is signaling an invigoration of the California operation, whose lack of momentum has caused some to fidget.

“We are all worrying what’s happening, or what’s going to happen,” said one well-known Gore supporter who declined to speak for attribution.

Bradley’s senior California advisor, Gale Kaufman, took subtle delight in characterizing the vice president’s latest moves in California.

“The fact that it’s January and they’re without a director and coming up with yet another new plan--I feel a lot more comfortable that we’ve had the same plan since last spring,” she said.

Whether the Gore moves simply further the perception of weakness or underscore a substantive problem, political veterans here believe that California remains Gore’s to lose. To a person, they say the vice president’s greatest concern is a colossal collapse in Iowa and New Hampshire that could quickly erode his support here.

Although Bradley advanced in other states last fall, a December Field Poll in California showed the vice president leading the former senator among likely Democratic voters by a strong 44%-17% margin, almost exactly the gap seen in a September poll.

Bradley has fiercely solicited support among independents and voters of all stripes, and has counted on a boost from California’s blanket primary, which allows voters to cast their ballot for a candidate of any party.

But two recent polls show Bradley still behind under that system. According to Field, when all the candidates were listed on the same ballot, Gore commanded 25% of the vote to 12% for Bradley. The leading Republican, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, came in at 23%.

A December poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found similar results, with 24% for Gore, 15% for Bradley and a slightly higher 28% for Bush.

Perhaps as worrisome for Bradley, 29% of Democrats told the Field Poll in December that they did not know enough about him to say whether they liked him--suggesting that he has yet to make the sale with the state’s traditionally hard-to-reach electorate.

Garry South, who engineered the gubernatorial victory of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 1998, said the lack of voter knowledge about Bradley is a crucial liability. To show how difficult it is for even a successful politician to become well known, South noted that even though Davis had a landslide victory and a heavily publicized start in office, only 63% of the state in one poll could name the governor.

“The knowledge about Al Gore doesn’t go down very deep,” he said, “but people know the man, they feel comfortable with him and Bill Clinton is still enormously popular here.”

Gore’s strongest advantages are his institutional endorsements by elected officials--such as Davis--who can twist the arms of courtiers and support from organized labor, which has proved to be a particularly potent force in recent elections.

“Gore has labor, Gore has the teachers, Gore has many of the traditional Democratic constituencies that can spend money. The question is: Will they be motivated enough to really put out?” said Jeffe.

Bradley’s California team, which with eight paid staff members will still be twice as large as Gore’s even when the vice president raises his presence next week, is banking on enthusiasm, particularly from voters entranced by the former Knicks forward’s somewhat iconoclastic campaign.

“We are getting an awful lot of support from people who didn’t get involved in the political process [until now],” said Bradley’s California leader, Kaufman. “They are not the party regulars, by and large.”