Is There a Worse Voter Phobia Than Fear of Fliers?

It’s election season, and you know what that means--never an empty mailbox.

You can turn off the radio and channel-surf the TV. You can leave the newspaper in the driveway. You can avert your eyes from the billboards. But you can’t not pick up your mail, and they know it.

So six days a week now, the political fliers come tumbling out, bright and glossy, in stirring red, white and blue, tree-hugger green, or prison-bar gray--big pictures, big type, big messages, big money.

Here in my mailbox is one of those pay-per-endorsement mailers with a picture of Howard Jarvis, dead these 15 years now, clenching his fist and hollering at me to save Proposition 13 by voting for Joel Wachs--who got religion after first opposing Prop. 13.

Here’s Steve Soboroff in one cheery mailer, holding a thesaurus (maybe looking up another antonym for “politician”), helping a girl with a math problem--and then kind of scaring me in the next mailer with small, grim photos of his competitors rendered in sinister, mugshot gray.

Collect the whole series. Lay them out on the kitchen table. They’re as stylized as comic books, as static as the religious art of the Middle Ages. It’s symbolism triumphant over realism, as told in pictures: Here I am among trusting children. Here I am in the halls of power, taking control and/or challenging authority. Here I am wielding a paintbrush/rake/broom, literally cleaning up this city. Here I am with my beautiful family, and how could I have a great family if I weren’t a great guy?

I sought an expert’s analysis from Carol Wells, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics here in Los Angeles. She was no help, for good reason. “We don’t deal with campaign mailers. They’re boring--almost identical flags and photos and maybe some multicultural babies . . . they’re totally mainstream and the bulk of things we do are countercultural.”

And then I thought, hold on here. I’ve been getting these things for years. I’m an expert, a mailbox Kremlinologist:

When crime is the issue du jour, you’ll see a candidate photographed with cops, smacking a stern fist into an open palm to show he means business. When it’s education, as it is this year, you’ll see the candidate in a school library or classroom, looking aggrieved at the crummy state of our schools, or pleased to be among fine young people who don’t deserve such crummy schools. Candidates who can afford it attach a vote-by-mail form, a gesture of civic high-mindedness (“Whoever you vote for, be sure to vote”).

The tech is higher, but the iconography hasn’t changed, election to election, since the day John F. Kennedy took off his suit coat and slung it over his shoulder. To this day, the candidates are still slinging.

*

Who reads these mailers?

You do, they hope, or they wouldn’t spend so much money on them.

The campaigns read them ferociously, looking for the encoded and the obvious. Is there a union “bug,” showing the mailer was printed by union printers? Not having it can hurt a Democrat; it’s as good as saying, “This message brought to you by scabs.”

They look for the nudge and for the knife, for outrage--that gets press coverage. The GOP mailer for Soboroff uses classic political shorthand to clang the alarm against “Jimmy” Hahn--”a puppet for the old Tom Bradley political machine”--Antonio Villaraigosa--”slush fund . . . captive of city employee unions”-- and Joel Wachs--”masquerades as a fiscal conservative . . . gadfly . . . big talker.”

Them’s fighting words, and Wachs is going mailer-to-mailer with Soboroff over Republican and Valley votes in an “Oh, yeah?” flier that my colleagues Jim Rainey and Matea Gold write about in today’s paper. Voila, press coverage!

Even the downballot races have tantalizing mailers:

* The “please support my husband” letter from the wife of federal prosecutor Jack Weiss, accompanied by a Jack Weiss-for-City-Council potholder. I thought potholder politics went out with Watergate, but maybe, like Bill Clinton, they keep coming back.

* The bilingual mailers of council candidates Scott Wildman and Eric Garcetti (which could do with a bit of proofreading).

* City Council candidate Robert Nakahiro’s bold cover picture of himself wearing not the standard suit and tie but a white T-shirt.

Keep watching your mailbox. Come April 10, one of them may be a winner.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com