Robert Gouty, 73; Political Advisor to GOP Candidates

Robert Gouty, a San Gabriel Valley-based political consultant who guided many of the area’s conservative Republican legislators into office and was known for having an instinct for the jugular, has died. He was 73.

Gouty died Oct. 6 of heart failure at his home in Covina after having been in a semi-coma for nine months.

For about 30 years, he worked out of a storefront Covina office, where he served as a political consultant for everyone from Ronald Reagan to former Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty to former Rep. Robert Dornan of Garden Grove. His clients also included Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), Rep. Gary G. Miller (R-Diamond Bar), state Sen. Bob Margett (R-Arcadia) and scores of others.

A specialist in direct mail, Gouty also handled the campaign mailings for all of the Republican state legislators in Illinois and Florida.

“I’d say he was one of the premier Republican consultants in California, especially in Southern California,” said former Democratic political consultant George Pla, who waged half a dozen campaigns against Gouty candidates. “He was a tough player who really believed in what he was doing, and I respected him very much.”

Gouty’s supporters always praised his political instincts.

“He’s probably one of the most talented people around,” then-Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia), who hired Gouty for his campaigns, told The Times in 1989. “He’s a guy who wants to win more than he wants the money.”

That desire prompted Gouty’s opposition to label him a “smear artist” and a “dirty trickster.”

“He’s basically done attack campaigns,” Pla told The Times in 1989. “Just put mud all over somebody, and sometimes you’ll beat him.”

Today, Pla said: “A political consultant is oftentimes rougher than a candidate because they have to be; otherwise they’re not going to get the job done. I’d characterize him as a hardball player in a contact sport.”

Short and stocky, Gouty was a feisty, blunt, sometimes profane political professional who adhered to his own casual dress code, which did not include neckties.

Born in St. Louis, he graduated from the University of Missouri, where he was a place kicker on the football team. He served as an Army infantryman during the Korean War, and in his early years worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, a New Orleans newspaper and NBC News as well as in advertising.

He moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a screenwriter in the mid-1960s and bought a house in Covina. But, quickly discovering a crop of local politicians in need of an advisor who could show them how to win elections, he launched Robert Gouty Co.

A pragmatist, he avoided extreme positions and dogmatic activists such as militant abortion foes.

“I’ll tell you,” he told The Times in 1989, “conservatives don’t like people raising hell and getting carted off by the police. It reminds them of the Vietnam War and the hippies.”

Gouty believed that people care most about where they live, their own family and their own property--and that the candidate who focuses on those concerns will be successful.

“This was a guy who had a real gut instinct for what it was that voters were thinking,” said Dreier, whose first campaign for Congress in 1978 was run by Gouty. “He clearly had rough edges to him, but underneath it was a great intelligence, a great perceptivity and a wonderful, warm charm.”

Gouty, who said he would never disseminate what he knew to be a lie, always viewed his profession in a harsh light.

“Politics,” he said, “is not a place for shrinking violets. You’ve got to get in there and do what you have to do. You’re not there to make friends. Every time you beat somebody, you make an enemy.”

Gouty, who attributed his three divorces and one annulment to his own orneriness, left no survivors. His one child, Greg, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1990 at age 20.