The Accidental Candidate, Dogged Simon Soldiers On

The accidental candidacy of Bill Simon Jr. began in the fall of 2000, when Simon -- staring down his 50th birthday, recovering from his father’s death, feeling a void in his life -- was hit up for a political donation by a state Republican official who offered up the requisite praise that fund-raisers use to lather up donors: Why don’t you run?

Three months later, a team of Sacramento consultants was cranking out glossy booklets featuring Simon’s beaming visage and mapping out a dark-horse strategy for him to win the Republican nomination for governor.

The neophyte candidate had moved to California 10 years earlier, voted sporadically and had never been involved in state politics.

His most prominent backer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was the lame-duck mayor of a city 3,000 miles away who was going through a messy divorce. And to win the GOP nomination, Simon had to get past former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.

While Simon’s top strategists were confident, other campaign staffers assumed they were laboring on a lost cause.

Implausibly, lightning struck three times. Giuliani went from late-night TV punch line to national hero for his leadership during the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City. Riordan ran an erratic, unfocused campaign.

And Gov. Gray Davis, whose top political advisor used to telephone the Simon campaign to urge attacks on Riordan, decided to go after the former Los Angeles mayor himself, pumping $10 million into a barrage of negative primary ads.

An odd mix of tentativeness and confidence, caution and impetuousness has defined the Simon campaign, an effort that will go down in the annals of California politics as either one of the most ill-conceived or brilliantly daring runs for higher office the state has ever seen.

On the stump, Simon could not answer some basic questions about state policy, deferring instead to his aides. He looked so stiff and formal in primary debates that the campaign called in a speech coach.

But he doggedly stuck to his message and his sunny smile, trudging up and down California while his aides mounted a stealth campaign to nail down the conservative right wing.

In the final two months before the March primary, as Riordan flopped, Simon surged from 4% in the polls to an overwhelming victory.

It has not been easy since.

The rookie candidate’s campaign, riven by infighting, has struggled to adjust to the demands of a general election against Davis, a notoriously tough campaigner and champion fund-raiser.

Simon’s campaign reeled as the family business was hit with a $78-million verdict in a fraud lawsuit, since overturned, and tax controversies. Simon laid off half his staff and went through four campaign managers before Labor Day.

“This campaign,” said one rueful insider, “turned Cinderella into a Greek tragedy.”

Yet Simon has been written off before. Times when all seems gloomy, says Simon, can conceal opportunity.

He quotes his late father, conservative icon and former Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon: “You may not be able to decide whether the time is right for you ....[But] you’d better grab it, because the opportunity may not be around again.”

GOP Was Hungry

The opportunity that Bill Simon grabbed was presented, unknowingly, by John McGraw, a software executive who, in the fall of 2000, was winding down his term as chairman of the California Republican Party.

It was a dismal time for the state GOP. George W. Bush was about to lose big in California. Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature. Democrat Davis had trounced his last Republican opponent in 1998 and, in those pre-energy crisis days, was considered safe in the 2002 election. His only challenger was Secretary of State Bill Jones, the last remaining Republican in statewide office.

The GOP was hungry for new faces.

Simon was also hungering. He spoke to one of his siblings of feeling a “void” in his life. His father, a brilliant, domineering man who towered over much of his eldest son’s life, had died in June. Simon had already scaled back his role at the family investment firm to spend more time on charity, but he felt that he should do even more. He traveled the country, speaking on the importance of religion in American political life.

Then McGraw, the state party leader whose job consisted partly of hitting up wealthy Republicans for money, met Bill Simon for the first time in late October.

Simon wrote a check for $2,000, then mentioned the poor shape of the party, McGraw recalled. McGraw gave his standard response: It’s easy for people to gripe and write a check, but we need candidates. “Someone like you,” he told Simon, “should consider running for statewide office.”

Simon peppered McGraw with questions. He had lived in California for only 10 years. Would that be a problem? This is a state full of newcomers, McGraw replied. How can a novice run? How much would it cost? Their meeting ran for several hours.

For years, people had wondered when Bill Simon Jr. would make a run for office.

In his native New Jersey, Simon recalled, friends would make vague suggestions about running. His father was a Cabinet member and Republican power broker. Billy, as he was known to friends and family, was a former federal prosecutor with an outgoing, choirboy persona.

The low-key talk persisted after Simon moved to California. Stephen Kaplan, a Los Angeles businessman and friend of Simon, remembers a charity banquet in 1999 where, after Simon gave a passionate speech on public service, Kaplan and others urged him to run.

“The response was always, ‘Politics can be a very nasty game,’ ” Kaplan recalls.

But after McGraw’s visit, the idea stuck.

Soon after, at a think-tank gathering in Washington, Simon ran into Ed Meese, who had served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff in Sacramento and later as U.S. attorney general. People were talking to him about running for governor of California, Simon said.

“Don’t dismiss it out of hand,” Meese counseled.

“That conversation with Ed made me think this was not a pipe dream,” said Simon, a longtime Reagan admirer.

Simon also recalls an encouraging call from Riordan, then mayor of Los Angeles. The two attended the same Santa Monica church, where they had worked together raising money for the parish.

Riordan, says Simon, suggested that he run. Although the former mayor does not remember that conversation, he does recall urging Simon to run weeks later, when his family and Simon’s were skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“I did recognize a bit of myself in him,” Riordan said. After a career in business, he said, politics is “kind of another mountain to climb.”

Riordan’s encouragement helped push Simon closer. After his talk with the mayor, Simon took his wife, Cindy, aside at their Sun Valley condominium and told her that he was thinking of running for governor.

“It was uncharted territory,” Cindy Simon recalled in an interview. “Bill’s the type of guy, he would never do anything I was opposed to .... He wanted to be sure I was comfortable with it. We really talked about it, back and forth and back and forth, and the more we talked about it, the more I saw why he was doing it.”

Fateful Encounter

A month later, Simon met Sal Russo.

Russo is a veteran Sacramento consultant and former Reagan staffer known for his fondness for running the campaigns of sunny, optimistic conservatives. Simon flew to Sacramento Feb. 1 to question him about a possible political race.

The meeting with Russo, his partner Ron Rogers and consultant Jeff Flint, as well as John Herrington, a former Reagan Cabinet member who would become Simon’s campaign chairman, began at 3 p.m., eventually shifting from Russo’s high-rise offices to dinner conversation at the consultant’s nearby home.

They discussed Simon’s public service. They discussed his concern with education -- his frustrations in trying to start charitable programs in Los Angeles schools, the difficulty he and his wife were having finding an appropriate public school for their oldest son. They talked about whether Simon should run for governor or, as some were counseling him, shoot for a lower office like state treasurer or attorney general. Russo told Simon that the top of the ticket was what mattered.

The things that would come back to haunt Simon -- his tax returns and allegations of fraud against his family business -- would not come up until later. That first evening, the only warning Simon got from the assembled consultants was that his opponents would throw everything possible at him.

“At the end of the evening,” Russo recalls, “I was a little surprised. He said ‘OK, I’d like to go forward.’ I said, ‘Don’t you want to think about it?’ And he said ‘No, I’ve made up my mind.’ ”

While he had decided to run, Simon was content to let his consultants do the talking. He did not even attend the first Republican convention of 2001, just weeks after his decision. He opted instead to take a long-scheduled family skiing trip while his consultants passed out glossy fliers to the GOP elite. Some confused Simon with his more famous father, Herrington recalls.

Testing the Waters

The consultants designed a series of “benchmarks” that would allow them to test the waters before declaring a Simon candidacy. Could they raise enough money? Could they get enough volunteers? Could they get the right staff?

“Bill very much wanted to leave an escape, where he could give the money back and decide not to run,” said Kaplan, Simon’s friend and now a campaign fund-raiser. “I think he wanted to convince himself that it wasn’t folly, that he could run and win .... At the time, it wasn’t like a lot of people outside of Pacific Palisades knew who he was.”

By contrast, everyone knew who Richard Riordan was. And everyone wanted to know whether the mayor would run for governor.

Russo and Simon went to Riordan’s home in August to sound him out. Riordan was accompanied by political consultant Arnold Steinberg, who recalled that Simon kept asking Riordan whether he was going to run. Steinberg, who had advised the mayor in prior races, was convinced that Riordan could have talked Simon out of the race. But the mayor made no effort to do so, though he would later decide to jump in himself.

Meanwhile, the Simon campaign was hitting its benchmarks and mapping out what one insider called an “under the radar” strategy.

Simon would concentrate on three issues. Two were ones the candidate himself had raised: the faltering California economy -- victim of what Simon argued was over-regulation and poor fiscal stewardship -- and education.

Another Simon concern was that the promised land of California he had heard so much about back East seemed to be falling apart at the seams. That became the third issue, a focus on the state’s infrastructure. They’d be able to sell the novice Simon as a serious, issues-based candidate.

The campaign would tout Simon’s record not only as a businessman, but as a former prosecutor and charity leader. This would counter the contention that business was no training ground for government.

Finally, the campaign would nail down conservatives who would feel abandoned by the more moderate Riordan. But they would do so quietly, so as not to paint themselves into a corner in the general election. Simon hit the right-wing talk radio circuit. He recruited the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, a strongly anti-gay religious leader, and hired Sheldon’s son to help get social conservatives to the polls, but did not mention him in speeches.

The Simon campaign kept in touch via e-mail with leaders of various anti-gun groups, antiabortion activists and libertarians. When Simon said something of interest to those groups, the statement would be forwarded via e-mail with a request that it be spread around to like-minded people, rather than putting out a news release for general consumption, insiders said.

Work Ethic

During the primary, Simon vowed to be “the hardest-working candidate” in the race. Certainly, he was the most disciplined.

Wherever he was, whomever he talked to, whatever questions were asked, he would smile and repeat, over and over again, two things, without getting into details: He was going to cut taxes and fix the budget, education and infrastructure.

“He doesn’t think he’s the king of Siam, but his life experience has taught him that if you work like a dog, keep your head down and your nose clean, you’ll make it,” said Susan Campbell, a friend from Simon’s tenure at the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.

But Simon stubbornly resisted one prompt from his campaign staff: He would not attack his friend Riordan.

Both Bill and Cindy Simon were uncomfortable about going after a family friend. Some days, news releases were ready to roll out on fax machines and e-mail loops, quoting Simon criticizing the former mayor, only to have Simon refuse to launch the planned criticism at the day’s events. The releases were pulled back.

That refusal to engage Riordan worried the Davis campaign, which saw Riordan as its eventual opponent.

Garry South, Davis’ brash political strategist, would regularly call the Simon campaign. In early January, South was telling the Simon people they had missed their opportunity. “You’ve already lost!” South shouted to Simon strategist Jeff Flint, Flint recalled.

The Davis campaign took matters into its own hands. It struck at Riordan with an ad accusing the former mayor of flip-flopping on abortion. Riordan stumbled in explaining his position.

On Jan. 29, at the end of a swing through the Central Valley, Simon joined in at last, if only mildly.

“It sounds like Dick [Riordan] has taken both sides of the issue,” Simon said during a campaign stop at a tractor yard in Stockton. “This isn’t the first time Dick has taken positions on an issue that are inconsistent.”

Still, Simon balked at running ads against Riordan, advisors recalled. He finally relented after Riordan attacked him in an ad. At an appearance the Friday before the primary, Riordan called Simon “a sanctimonious hypocrite” and “an unelectable extremist.”

Republican primary voters disagreed. Simon trounced Riordan in the primary by 18 points, eight weeks after sitting at 4% in the polls. To him and his staff, the plan had worked.

Now they had to take on Davis. It was a difficult transition.

“There were no contingency plans to run for the general election,” said Herrington, the campaign chairman.

That lack of planning showed. Since May, the campaign has had four campaign managers. Simon was distracted by his refusal to release his tax returns and the unexpected $78-million fraud verdict. His poor fund-raising forced him off the air for much of the summer.

In late August, Simon abruptly laid off half his staff. Sacramento workers were informed by campaign manager Rob Lapsley. Simon, who was at the Hyatt down the street, did not enter the office. He called his former employees within the next day, he said.

“I think Bill is a lot stronger person than he’s shown himself” to be, Riordan said in an interview. “He needs to get out there and show he’s a strong, tough leader.”

‘Do You Know Me?’

Five weeks before election day, Simon unveiled a new ad. Its opening line -- “Do you know me?” -- was an indictment of how his campaign had faltered since the primary.

For long stretches, it appeared the consultants were in charge, not the candidate. Simon disavowed his responses to a questionnaire distributed by a gay Republican group in which he pledged to back a gay pride day. He said an advisor had used an “auto-signature” to attach the candidate’s name to the response.

Last week, Simon accused Davis of illegally raising money in a state building, an allegation that proved false. A Simon strategist apologized to the governor, saying Simon was pushed by consultants to make the charge before investigating.

In an interview, Simon said he had deferred to his consultants’ advice during much of the campaign, trying to follow their script.

He laughed as he recalled how, after his robotic performance in the first primary debate, a speech coach was summoned by the campaign staff to drum into his head that he needed to smile less.

In the end, Simon said, grinning, he wasn’t sure how much that advice stuck. “At the end of the day, you’re yourself,” he said.

His ability to endlessly repeat a simple message helped him win the primary, the candidate said. But he hinted at the growing pains since, as he struggles to articulate why voters should choose him over Davis.

“You get so many different people telling you different things,” Simon said. It is time, he said, to be himself, regardless of the consequences.

“Now that’s got to be a goal for the campaign,” he said. “Paint a picture of Bill Simon as he is, and let the people decide.”

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