Stern Brings Lifelong Passion For Politics To Mayor's Race

Get Seattle mayoral candidate David Stern talking about politics - a lifetime avocation - and pretty soon he'll tell you how he sent his mother out campaigning from door to door at night in the pouring rain.

It was Bernice Stern's first campaign - for the King County Council - and David Stern told her that if she showed up on doorsteps dripping wet, people would invite her in for coffee and never forget her.

It worked, of course. In 1969, Bernice Stern trounced Luke Graham, then a power in the state Democratic Party.

And it was pure David Stern, who smiles mischievously as he retells the story, thrusting his head toward his listener to make his points in a habit that makes him look slightly stoop-shouldered.

Through 36 political campaigns and 30 years as the owner of an advertising firm, Stern's trademark has been the attention-getting bon mot or catchy gimmick.

After all, he's considered the creator - as part of an advertising campaign for University Savings Bank - of the once near-ubiquitous "Happy Face" image which seems to have bored a hole into the American psyche.

In his first run for mayor in 1989, Stern - a self-described optimist who firmly believes a positive attitude produces solutions to problems - used the Happy Face as his campaign logo. It didn't work. After spending almost $215,000 - nearly $125,000 of it his own money - Stern washed out of a 13-way primary with barely 5,500 votes.

Among the catchy things he's done, Stern helped elect Warren Chan to King County Superior Court in 1968 by commandeering the output of the city's fortune-cookie factories w ith the help of Chinese-American restaurateur and County Council member Ruby Chow.

For several weeks before the election, the only messag found inside the cookies was "We are fortunate to have a man like Chan."

And in 1982, when he needed an executive for his advertising agency, Stern ran a newospaper ad that brought reporters - and free publicity - to the door of the renovatd Capitol Hill mansion where he had his offices. "If you're under 60, don't apply," said Stern's ad, capitalizing on a snappy reversal of the job market's usual expectations.

So perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise two weeks ago when Stern found a way to escape a second ignominious primary defeat with a $16,000 run of newspaper ads attacking The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial boards for not interviewing him.

As a result, Stern pulled ahead of former Supreme Court Justice William Goodloe to challenge incumbent Mayor Norm Rice in the Nov. 2 general election.

In fact, neither of the newspapers' editorial boards interviewed mayoral primary candidates. Although news reporters several times summarized the views of Rice and his six challengers, clearly neither editorial staff felt the mayor's challengers were serious candidates. Stern's showing - 26 percent of the primary vote - surprised them and gave credibility to his criticism that Rice hasn't done enough to control crime or dealt with other symbols of urban decay - panhandlers and the homeless on downtown streets and downtown stores closing.

Rice got a surprisingly low 57 percent in the primary.

Stern, 56, is a third-generation Seattleite whose relatives have stamped their names here and there on the city's institutions.

"I have a love affair with this city," he says, describing his childhood growing up among the almost-mansions of the upper middle class surrounding Roanoke Park on north Capitol Hill. Stern's mother was a powerhouse on the County Council through the 1970s, pushing reform of the then-patronage-based county bureaucracy and promoting farmland-preservation. His father, Edward Stern, a finance-company executive who died in 1980, was president of the Urban League and the American Jewish Committee. A relative, Bailey Gatzert, was mayor in 1875 and got an elementary school named after him.

His wife of 32 years, Margaret, was a factor in his successful primary showing. As Stern tells it, his wife didn't want him to have any regrets the day after the primary if he'd lost by a thousand votes. She urged him to go ahead and borrow the money to pay for the anti-newspaper ads.

The couple lives in the Leschi neighborhood overlooking Lake Washington. They have two daughters, Debbie, 31, a public-school teacher in the Los Angeles area, and Ruth, 28, who works in Washington, D.C., for the Clinton administration.

A graduate of now-closed Lincoln High School, Stern got a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Washington. Even as a student, his offbeat wit and drive stood out, says Tony Ward-Smith, a public-relations consultant who met Stern at the UW. "He was one of those guys in that crowd who started popping out because he was a promoter even at that time."

As Ward-Smith expected, Stern left the UW with a tail wind. By 1963, only a few years after his graduation, Stern started his own advertising company. It's a volatile industry, and others who've survived praise Stern's tenacity.

"It's easy to get in the business but it's tough to stay in it, so I think that's a real accomplishment," said Don Kraft, chairman of the EvansGroup, one of the city's largest advertising firms. "He can always think in a way that's a little beyond the square for a lot of people."

Others suggest Stern's independence has another source: Like many creative people, they say, Stern has a big ego. That may explain his enchantment with being a behind-the-scenes kingmaker. Parallel to the growth of his advertising business grew his involvement as a political-media expert. In his first campaign - in 1963, shortly after he went into business for himself - Stern helped attorney Irving Clark Jr. in an unsuccessful run for mayor.

A few years later came his mother's first successful County Council campaign for which Stern penned the slogan "We need a woman on the nine-man County Council."

But the slogan alone didn't win it. Stern discovered that his mother's Republican opponent, Robert Ashley, had been a member of the liberal Metropolitan Democratic Club. Stern asked voters if they wouldn't rather "vote for a Democrat who's a Democrat or a Democrat who says he's a Republican."

As for his own views these days, Stern describes himself as an independent. (Races for city offices are officially nonpartisan.)

Certainly, he has no trouble mouthing the formula currently fashionable with lapsed Democrats, though he asserts that his views have been with him for a lifetime: "I'm a fiscal conservative, which I got from my father, and a social liberal, which I also got from my father."

Over the years, however, Stern's political work increasingly involved Republican candidates.

In 1972, when he helped then-state Attorney General Slade Gorton stave off a challenge by attorney Fred Dore (now retired from the state Supreme Court), Stern began a friendship with Gorton that's endured two decades.

In 1980, he helped Gorton unseat Sen. Warren Magnuson, a demigod in Washington politics and a power in Washington, D.C., by convincing voters that Magnuson, then 75, was too old. By contrast, Stern's television ads showed a fit-looking Gorton jogging.

Now, for the second time with a run for mayor, Stern is trying to be a player as well as coach. Why?

During 1988, the last year he was in business before a long-planned retirement, two murders of family friends shocked him.

In one case, Laura Boynton was killed in the laundry room of her Capitol Hill apartment. The other wasas the killing of Diane Ballasiotes.

Ballasiotes' abducon and murder by a work-release inmate residing only a few blocks from her Pioneer Square office provoked an intense debate on the problems of the neighborhood and promises by then-mayor Charles Royer to keep any more such facilities out of the area - if not out of the city.

For Stern, the murders became symbols of the city's decline, proof that Seattle was no longer the safe, pleasant city he grew up in.

Angered by the changes, he resolved to run for mayor. In the primary, however, he finished near the bottom in a field of 13 dominated by a debate on school busing between the two candidates who would end up in the general-election runoff: Norm Rice and City Attorney Doug Jewett.

In the mayor's race four years ago, crime and urban decay didn't get much attention. Now, the issue that's simmered in Stern's consciousness has boiled over into the public's.

And crime is the issue that has brought Stern together with others who oppose Rice.

Four years ago, while candidate Stern was out late at night surveying Seattle's problems from the Police Department's point of view, he met Mike Siegel, the radio talk-show host doing the same thing. The two men have been friends ever since, joined in their belief that Rice and Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons have failed to control drug trafficking and drug-related crime on Seattle's streets.

Also in the group is former police sergeant Chuck Pillon, fired by Fitzsimons for going beyond the rules in his pursuit of drug dealers, and Frank LaChance, head of the South End group Neighbors Against Drugs who thinks Fitzsimons was too slow to respond to the problem of crack cocaine houses. All blame Rice, ultimately, for not replacing Fitzsimons with someone who, they think, would have been tougher on crime.

Siegel, particularly, has been invaluable to Stern, giving the candidate ample airtime on his show on KVI Radio, including the primary election day and the day before.

Last Sunday night the four men were together again, along with a couple of photographers and a reporter, as Stern toured Broadway, Belltown, a part of Pioneer Square and the High Point housing project in West Seattle for a look at homelessness and crime in Seattle.

As Stern talked to homeless men and women, Siegel recorded it for his show the next day.

For Stern, seeing the street people begging from doorways and entering a downtown alley piled with garbage and reeking with urine where drug deals are done validates his cause at every step.

For Stern, these insults to his sensibilities about Seattle, the city, are proof that Rice has not done his job.

It's a job Stern wants and - since the primary - believes he can have. Is all he needs now a catchy slogan, a campaign gimmick, to get him there?