Labeling a Candidate Is Their Specialty

There are political operatives in this town who would give plenty to see the stuff Ken Anderson has stashed in his back shop.

It may be a dubious privilege, but Anderson is the man who gets to see the political hit pieces before they hit.

His North Hollywood direct mail plant is cranking out 500,000 items of political mail daily for nearly two dozen candidates in Tuesday’s Los Angeles city election--including six of the most prominent contenders for mayor.

That gives Anderson, 46, a soft-spoken Minnesota native, one of the best seats from which to watch the political scene.

On Wednesday morning, one $25,000 machine in his plant was gluing address labels on a four-color mailer for mayoral candidate Michael Woo. Six feet away, a similar machine whirred as it placed labels on tens of thousands of mailers for candidate Nate Holden. On a third, a slate card for Richard Katz, another mayoral hopeful, was being labeled with the names of registered voters at the rate of 300 pieces per minute.

The irony of all these strange bedfellows rarely fazes Anderson. Indeed, such paradoxes are commonplace at USA Direct Mail.

“I do both Republicans and Democrats, and I’m one of only a few mail houses that’ll do both sides in an election. . . . I tell the client if we’re going to be doing mail for the other side in the same race. Then it’s their choice.

“We’re the first to see it all,” said the West Hills resident as he stood next to mountains of mailbags headed for the post office.

Since April 6, Anderson’s shop has been running on overtime to keep up with the political envelope stuffing, address labeling and postal delivering.

Although awash in politics, Anderson steers clear of partisanship.

“This is a business,” he said. “But sometimes I’ll see a piece and I’ll jump up and say: ‘That’s not true!’

“I’m not immune to what’s happening. But the bottom line is that my customers come first, and my political leanings are not an issue,” Anderson said.

Some of the mailers never make it into voters’ mailboxes. The storage area at his nondescript plant contains bags of fully printed mailers that candidates prepared as a defensive reply if a rival reveals something inglorious. “We release them but only when we get a call that the hit piece they’d been anticipating has gone out,” he said.

During a tour of the back shop, a visitor was repeatedly warned not to read items being processed.

The business is sensitive, and snooping is not unknown. He said a few political consultants have tried in vain to sneak into his back shop.

Even the garbage here is sacrosanct. “We don’t throw leftovers in the garbage,” Anderson said.