Bird’s Opponents: Who Are They and What Do They Have to Say?

It seems to her like a page from the Old West. Rose Elizabeth Bird, pioneer woman in a man’s domain, circling her wagons for an epic stand over the California Supreme Court. She gazes out and listens to the war whoops of a confident, raucous and largely anonymous enemy filling the horizon.

She calls them the “bully boys” and derides their motives for making her turbulent career as chief justice of the Supreme Court one of the biggest battles of the forthcoming 1986 elections.

To lots of Californians, most of these Bird opponents are unknown figures, too far out of sight and mind at this early date to discern the color of their hats, to decide if they are the good guys or the bad guys.

Unusual Nature of Campaign

This is the unusual nature of the election campaign facing Bird and five other of the seven Supreme Court justices up for election Nov. 4. Justices stand by themselves on the ballot. The vote is “yes” or “no” on each. There is no opposing candidate with whom to make contrasts.

In essence, anybody can--as lots have--proclaim themselves principals in the building campaign to oust Bird and the liberal voting majority on the court.

Storefront committees started popping up as far back as two years ago, and other groups are still jumping in. It is already a multimillion-dollar political effort. Some opponents have the big picture of justice and law-and-order in mind; others cry out with a single complaint.

Those in the forefront of the various campaign organizations are family members of murder victims who rage at a court they brand too lenient, and professional consultants who cast a cold ideological eye on a liberal judiciary that has churned up tremendous controversy during these conservative political times. There are prosecutors who want a more receptive ear on the bench, politicians who want their names in the news, and farmers with a bitter old grudge.

In some ways, the organized Bird opponents have been defined in the campaign debate by the most radical and outrageous among them, thanks, at least in part, to the Bird camp’s generic assault on them all as right-wing political opportunists.

“The courts are the latest pressure point for New Right politics. Politicians, special-interest ideologists and crime victims are mere props for these headline hunters and money makers,” says Steven M. Glazer, spokesman for the Bird campaign committee.

On the other hand, it is a common theme of Bird opponents that it is she who is the radical, an out-of-step liberal soft on criminals and heartless to their victims.

So, in this showdown over who is the more radical, what about these opponent groups? Who runs them and what do they have to say for themselves?

At the top of the list in terms of money, campaign experience and political connections are two separate organizations with Southern California headquarters.

One group operating out of Westwood is run by a veteran Republican-affiliated campaign consultant and relies on victims, victims’ families and prosecutors to make its case against Bird. The organization is called Crime Victims for Court Reform. It seeks the ouster of Bird and associate justices Joseph P. Grodin and Cruz Reynoso.

The second organization, called Californians to Defeat Rose Bird, is based in Orange County and is built around another big-league political consulting and fund-raising firm. Involved are a couple of dozen Republican elected officials, tax crusader Howard Jarvis and a network of associates, as well as an assortment of prosecutors and police chiefs. In addition to Bird, Grodin and Reynoso, Justice Stanley Mosk also is targeted for defeat.

Only judges appointed by Democratic governors are under attack. The two newcomers appointed by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian have not attracted organized opposition. They are justices Malcolm M. Lucas and Edward A. Panelli.

Using state-of-the-art direct mail appeals, old-fashioned endorsements, county-by-county organizing, networks of conservative political activists, both campaign organizations are building for the forthcoming bouts of television advertising, so often decisive in California elections.

Anthony Murray, the dour former California Bar Assn. president who is leading Bird’s reelection campaign, attributes to them sinister and selfish motives, money and the glory of the conservative cause. Mostly money.

“The politicians--they’re in it for politics. The operatives--they’re in it for the money. Nothing could be clearer than that,” says Murray, who notes that professional consultants get a fee plus a percentage of all the advertising money spent. Typically, the fee is 15% of the amount spent on commercial time. In a $3-million advertising campaign, commissions alone would reach $450,000.

The families of murder victims enlisted by one group or the other are viewed by Bird’s campaign as pawns caught up in the unfamiliar rituals of politics. “They are the victims of more than criminals,” says Glazer. “They are the victims of consultants.”

One thing for sure, the operatives behind the two primary opposition groups are formidable--and controversial--combatants.

Crime Victims for Court Reform is directed by Bill Roberts, who in the narrow world of professional political consultants is one of the warlords. He was co-manager of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the governorship of California, director of President Gerald R. Ford’s 1976 unsuccessful reelection campaign and manager of most of George Deukmejian’s dark horse campaign for governor in 1982.

Along the way, Roberts has come to know discord. Deukmejian fired him in the closing days of the 1982 campaign against Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black, after Roberts speculated publicly about racial prejudice among voters. And he has never lived down his remark that he felt it was OK for a consultant to lie during a campaign.

‘Change the Coach’ Call Heard

His organization has recruited families of more than 30 murder victims. In each instance, the killer had his death sentence overturned by the Bird court. Kern County Dist. Atty. Ed Jagles has assumed a high profile as spokesman for the organization. Also part of the group’s leadership is a Southern California salesman named Don Floyd, whose son was killed by a drunk driver and who has since lashed out at the whole judicial system. Floyd was a leader in previous unsuccessful efforts to recall Bird.

Bird backers contend that Floyd symbolizes the unfairness of some attacks against her. The case of the drunk driver never got to the high court and Bird never had anything to say about it. Bird and her associates are not accused of handing down rulings favorable to drunk drivers. If anything, the opposite is probably more accurate. But Floyd seethes with rage about the whole process and, as he puts it, “If you don’t like the way the people play the game, change the coach.”

Bird’s communication director Glazer complained, “They’re willing to throw out a damn good judge for their perceived wrongs with the entire criminal justice system.”

Crime Victims for Court Reform is not without spokesmen whose anguish is more directly traceable to the Bird court, however. There is Robert Henderson of Murrieta, whose son Jim was one of three USC film students gunned down in a 1978 multiple murder. Henderson recalls the prosecutor in the case warning him that the Supreme Court would find grounds to overturn a jury’s sentence of death for the killer. It did.

“It just burns inside of me that everything happened just as I was warned,” Henderson said. “I don’t want to look like a radical. I’m not out for vengeance. But personally I hate it that as a society we’ve let our judicial system decay to where the criminals have all the rights and the victims have nothing.”

He continued: “I read where the chief justice calls us ‘bully boys.’ Goodness, has she got it backwards. If there’s a bully boy, it’s anybody who can hold a rifle to a girl’s chest when she’s pleading for her life and unload a clip into her. That’s a bully boy. . . . And that’s what happened when my son was killed.”

Growers Involved

Also supporting the group are two large and financially resourceful agricultural organizations, the Farm Bureau Federation and the Western Growers Assn. Farmers remember Bird as the cabinet secretary under former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. who oversaw the drafting of the state’s landmark farm labor law. Many growers recall that as a black day in history.

The second major campaign organization is called Californians to Defeat Rose Bird. It is closely identified with a pair of specialized campaign professionals, Bill Butcher and Arnold Forde. They have propelled themselves into the forefront of technological campaigning, using computer-generated political mailings to raise enormous sums of money in small contributions from armies of voters. They also have prospered as masters of the attack, or negative-style, campaign.

Affiliated With Jarvis

The pair have long been affiliated with Jarvis and his anti-tax crusades. This time around, Jarvis, though still able to turn a snarl into a headline at age 83, has spread himself out between this campaign and a pair of new tax initiatives. A larger profile for the group has been assumed by state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), candidate for the U.S. Senate. Another 22 GOP legislators plus scores of local officials back the effort.

Day-to-day operations are controlled by 33-year-old Stu Mollrich, who is managing his first statewide campaign after running some GOP legislative contests and directing advertising for a pair of ballot initiatives.

At the start, the group claims a donor base of 80,000 Californians. They showed off what they could do with such legions by having supporters recently flood newspapers with unprecedented numbers of letters to the editor decrying Bird’s record. Other mailing lists of potential donors have been purchased from such sources as conservative direct mail pioneer Richard A. Viguerie. And available to the firm, as Butcher told a recent national convention of political consultants, are mailing lists reaching 90 million American families.

$2 Million Raised

So far, the organization estimates it has raised $2 million and spent $1.75 million, a good chunk of it covering the costs of raising the money. This is much more than any other organization in the race has raised.

Over the years, controversy has become almost a third word in the Butcher-Forde company name.

There was a much-publicized legislative campaign in which Butcher-Forde mailings questioned whether an opposition candidate was married to his wife and whether his wife was the mother of his children. He was and she was, and he won anyhow. There was a campaign in which Butcher-Forde mail blared out that an opposition candidate was facing charges of fraud and perjury, using only small print inside to reveal that these were rhetorical charges between rival candidates, not from an official of government. And so on through a history of bare-knuckle campaigns and bruised feelings.

Bird supporters attribute both a quest for money and conservative ideology to Butcher-Forde’s involvement in the anti-Bird campaign. “Political mercenaries, political hit men and their next target for profit is Rose Bird,” says spokesman Glazer.

‘Call Opponent Names’

In response, Mollrich says: “There is that old saying, when you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. And when you have neither, you just call your opponent names.”

As for ideology, many of the principals of Californians to Defeat Rose Bird may accept the label “right-wing.” But Butcher-Forde raises and distributes money for clients sometimes without regard to philosophical leanings. Notably, the organization raises funds and membership for a committee dedicated to preserving the national Social Security system. Recipients of their campaign contributions include liberal Democrats as well as conservative Republicans.

In addition to the big-2 groups, a half dozen or more organizations or committees have maneuvered for attention in the campaign to make Bird the first modern-day justice ever to lose a confirmation election. What separates them from the major committees is either lack of money, experience, focus or commitment.

Richardson’s Campaign

State Sen. H. L. Richardson (R-Glendora), whose name is synonymous with rock-hard conservative politics in California, was active in a smaller and ultimately unsuccessful effort to defeat Bird at her first confirmation election in 1978. He has plunged in again, or at least vowed to.

Richardson, however, has been quick to announce and slow to follow through on other political efforts in recent years, and just this month he suddenly announced he was going to run for lieutenant governor this year. Where this leaves his campaign against the chief justice probably will not be clear for some time.

So far, under the auspices of his Law and Order Campaign Committee, originally established to fight gun control, Richardson has raised money to use against Bird and produced a video cassette film for limited distribution to his supporters. The movie accuses the chief justice of being a judge with a soft heart for those with a criminal resume.

Other politicians like Deukmejian are outspoken in opposition to Bird and the other liberal justices, but not as part of any organized group. The governor appoints replacements for any justices defeated in the election.

Prosecutors in Action

An organization called the Prosecutors Working Group has also made a splash in the campaign. It is a newly formed political arm of the California District Attorneys Assn., which has never before publicly waged a campaign against justices of the Supreme Court. The group has taken on the liberal majority this time, charging the court with forgetting that justice is a two-edged sword.

Many of the prosecutors also are active in other political committees against Bird, leaving the group more as a resource for reports, speakers to civic clubs and the like, than as a campaign organization.

But just the fact that district attorneys have put their professional association on the line in opposition to the court is a development perceived with alarm by Bird’s supporters. One of the most intensive efforts of the chief justice’s reelection drive so far has been to try to discredit the prosecutors’ case-by-case “white paper” assault on the Bird record in overturning death sentences. The court has overturned 52 of 55 death penalty appeals that have come before it since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977. Bird herself has voted to overturn all 55.

Family Coalition Formed

Another group, called the Family Coalition of California, entered the fray in a most unorthodox way. The conservative coalition had been an obscure one-man operation created by Santa Monica GOP activist John Kurzweil. It went public only once before to raise a clamor against state legislation granting homosexuals job discrimination protection.

Then last year, with the help of ambitious young Assemblyman Don A. Sebastiani (R-Sonoma), Kurzweil established a spin-off group called the Supreme Court Project to oppose Bird. But finding the field already crowded with such groups, the project was recast by Kurzweil as a supposedly “impartial” force that would publish thoughtful information about the race.

Its first effort was a booklet written by Phillip E. Johnson, a professor of law at UC Berkeley’s distinguished Boalt Hall and a law clerk under former U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren. Johnson criticized Bird for decisions on the death penalty, reapportionment and for being “a dedicated protector of the financial interests of lawyers.”

Seeks Objective Image

Although Kurzweil concedes he and backers of the project strongly oppose the chief justice’s reelection, he said he is hoping his group will be viewed as somewhat objective. “There is an imbalance of intellectual discussion,” he explains, adding that he might entertain requests to publish pro-Bird viewpoints at some point.

The Bird campaign has enlisted at least 225 academics on its side, viewing them as crucial assets to back up the chief justice’s assertion that the independence of the judiciary is at risk in the high-pressure world of campaign politics.

Finally, there are groups and individuals who have dabbled on the fringes.

Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), another U.S. Senate candidate, bought a couple of radio advertisements and a stuffed turkey named “Rosie” last year and set up shop as the California Birdwatchers Society. He attracted both news coverage and criticism for his efforts. More moderate Bird opponents worried that his tactics diminished the issues in the court election and might stir up sympathy for Bird.

Dannemeyer’s Turkey

Sure enough, as evidence of the alleged extremist nature of her opponents, Bird’s supporters still point to Dannemeyer’s stuffed and mounted turkey, which he used as a photo prop at a state Republican Party convention. The idea was that delegates could come have their picture taken with “Rosie.” There is little evidence that his Birdwatchers group exists anymore except in name.

An earlier report that the 35,000-member Pro-Life Council would purchase advertising against Bird has been denied as a misunderstanding by its executive director, Brian Johnson. He said the organization opposes Bird on grounds that her decisions support abortions, but he said there would be no public campaign undertaken.

The competition among others nevertheless remains keen to be heard. There are all varieties of opponents known chiefly by their work--the ROSE BUSTER T-shirt and button entrepreneurs, the seller of bumper stickers reading BUMP-HER, and the courthouse moonlighters passing out the bumper stickers about the rapist-killer who terrorized Los Angeles. They read: FREE THE NIGHT STALKER; REELECT ROSE BIRD.