By Paul Valentine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 10, 1998; Page B1

As Republican conservative Ellen R. Sauerbrey reaches out to moderates in the hope that the GOP will capture the Maryland governorship for the first time in 30 years, she can point to her choice of running mate Richard D. Bennett as a strong signal of her openness toward the political center.

Bennett, the GOP candidate for lieutenant governor, has long disagreed with Sauerbrey's antiabortion position. He is more sympathetic to gun control than she is, and takes a more moderate stance on the environment.

Sauerbrey's decision to put Bennett on the ticket worries some Republican activists, who fear she may alienate her conservative base. But nonpartisan political analysts praise the move as smart politics, and no less an authority than Democratic state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (Prince George's) called it "very shrewd."

Bennett, 51, an Anne Arundel County native and former U.S. attorney in Baltimore, said he saw instantly the ticket's appeal when Sauerbrey operatives approached him in late May or early June about running. At the time, he was preparing to step down from a Capitol Hill job as chief counsel to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which was looking into the possible role of illegal foreign money in U.S. elections.

Sauerbrey "and I clearly knew that together we could appeal to a broad range of all registered Republicans, as well as Democrats," Bennett said.

That said, he loyally emphasized that his job is not to blunt Sauerbrey's image as a hard-line conservative. On the contrary, he said, that image is not accurate.

"People are hard-pressed to cast her as an ideologue when she is willing to have as her running mate for lieutenant governor someone who has not been in lock step with her on every position," Bennett said.

Not surprisingly, some Democrats see it differently. "Bennett is in an untenable position," said Peter Krauser, chairman of the Maryland Democratic State Central Committee. "He shares little or nothing in common with Ellen Sauerbrey. I expect to see them on the Jerry Springer show . . . with all those other people who don't agree on anything."

Miller suggested that Sauerbrey had nothing to lose by tapping Bennett because the lieutenant governor under Maryland law has no defined duties -- except to succeed to the top job if a vacancy occurs -- and does nothing except "hold the horses."

Sauerbrey is "trying to portray herself, with Dick Bennett's help, as a moderate. But she's not a moderate. . . . A leopard does not change its spots that readily," Miller said.

Regardless, Bennett is almost universally acknowledged by Republican and Democratic activists alike as an energetic campaigner, a fair-minded political fighter and a skillful fund-raiser with abundant statewide contacts.

Born in Severna Park, he grew up in a solidly Democratic family.

"My mother and father were both registered Democrats," he said. But by the time he began focusing on politics as a young man at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s, he was turning away from the party and knew especially "that I wasn't real keen on Lyndon Johnson."

He married and moved to suburban Baltimore, gradually allying himself with moderate elements of the Republican Party. He took what he called "balanced," rather than all-or-nothing, positions on such hot-button issues as gun control, abortion and the environment.

He also began to make a name for himself as a young, aggressive federal prosecutor. In one high-profile case in 1977, he and a colleague obtained drug conspiracy convictions against a half-dozen Pagan motorcycle gang leaders in Baltimore.

In his first try at electoral politics, in 1982, Bennett was trounced when he ran for state Senate in a largely Democratic district. But he later won positions in the local GOP apparatus. He further solidified his ties to the moderate GOP in 1990, when then-Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, the state's ranking elected Republican, recommended him to President George Bush as the next U.S. attorney for Maryland.

Bennett was easily approved and served in that position for two years, from 1991 to 1993. He produced few prosecutorial fireworks, but created a federal-local Law Enforcement Coordinating Committee to help smooth sometimes bumpy and competitive investigations by federal and county prosecutors and local police.

Throughout this period, Bennett maintained close ties to Bentley, but when Bentley ran against Sauerbrey in the 1994 Maryland governor's primary, Bennett side-stepped the contest and busied himself with his own race for state attorney general against incumbent Democrat J. Joseph Curran Jr.

"I never formally endorsed either" Bentley or Sauerbrey, he said.

Bennett's public neutrality may have contributed to Sauerbrey's decision to pick him as her running mate this year. Another factor was his help in balancing the ticket, for Bennett's political differences with Sauerbrey are well established.

In an interview, for example, Bennett noted that on the abortion issue, Sauerbrey believes that life begins at conception, while he believes that it does not start until the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. "I personally am opposed to abortion," Bennett said, "but I believe the woman has the right to make her own decision in the first trimester."

Similarly, Bennett over the years has been more supportive of gun control than Sauerbrey and many of her supporters. He advocated a ban on assault weapons and a waiting period to conduct background checks before a weapon can be purchased.

Herbert C. Smith, a Western Maryland College political scientist and longtime observer of local elections, doesn't think these differences are likely to drive hard-core conservatives from the Sauerbrey-Bennett ticket.

Smith said the recent Republican primary, in which Sauerbrey roundly defeated moderate Howard County Executive Charles I. Ecker, "speaks eloquently" about the overall orientation of Maryland's Republican Party. Bennett's presence on the Sauerbrey ticket created "minimal negative impact. If anything, there was a major net plus impact" by appealing to centrists, he said.

Conservative Republican observers are more circumspect. "There's some positives and there's some negatives," said Paul H. Rappaport, a former Howard County police chief who was Sauerbrey's running mate in her razor-thin loss to Parris N. Glendening (D) in the 1994 gubernatorial race. Rappaport is running for Maryland attorney general this year.

Regarded by political observers as considerably more conservative than Bennett, Rappaport was nosed out by Bennett for the lieutenant governor's spot on the Sauerbrey ticket. Bennett, Rappaport said, "is a super fellow, a professional. . . . But you can't please all the people all the time."

Gun activists also have mixed emotions. A Sauerbrey-Bennett ticket is a "two-edged sword," said James M. Purtilo, of Beltsville, editor of Tripwire, a 50,000-circulation guns rights newsletter. Some Sauerbrey advisers, he said, have been "a little over-zealous in portraying Bennett as pro-gun," a position Purtilo disputes.

On the other hand, he said, Bennett is a "strong candidate" who can help Sauerbrey win.

Bennett has shown himself to be an aggressive, even combative, campaigner. In his 1994 race for Maryland attorney general, he injected some spice into an otherwise low-key campaign when he accused Curran of misusing a state car and chauffeur for his wife's shopping sprees in the Washington area in 1988 and 1990. Curran lashed back, disclosing that Bennett was slapped with nearly $90,000 in liens for unpaid employee taxes at a now-defunct Baltimore law firm he shared with a partner.

Each acknowledged the claims by the other -- but with explanations. Curran said his wife occasionally accompanied him on business-related trips to Washington in his state-owned car, but he said he paid taxes on the mileage for any personal side trips she took. Bennett acknowledged the liens but said that they resulted from an Internal Revenue Service dispute and that the taxes were paid off.

Friends and other observers say Bennett also is an effective fund-raiser -- he has raised more than $300,000 since late June for his campaign with Sauerbrey -- and is a skilled mediator among political adversaries. Those skills, however, foundered in his work on the House committee probing Clinton-Gore campaign finance practices. He quit the job, he said, unable to straddle the politically charged role of both investigator of alleged wrongdoing and mediator between warring Republicans and Democrats on the committee.

In a sign of Bennett's appeal even to the opposition, Lanny Davis, former special counsel to the White House and a longtime Maryland Democratic activist, praised Bennett as "the ultimate professional" who conducted the investigation with no apparent political agenda.

"He hammered the White House" for failing to produce subpoenaed documents in a timely fashion, Davis said, "but he never crossed that line between professional criticism and personal attack."