CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS / 12TH DISTRICT RUNOFF : Consultant Puts Bernson on Offensive : Politics: Incumbent tries to turn spotlight on the ideology of his challenger, Korenstein. She stays with the issues that helped her in the primary.

Not long after he fell short of reelection in last month’s city primary election, Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson hired a new campaign consultant. Over breakfast, consultant Harvey Englander gave Bernson this advice for beating challenger Julie Korenstein in the June 4 runoff: Get scrappy.

“I told him he would have to be aggressive . . . stop being on the defensive and . . . tell the voters who Julie Korenstein really is,” said Englander, an Orange County-based consultant known for launching devastating attacks on his clients’ opponents.

As Bernson campaigns to hold onto his 12th District seat, in the northwestern San Fernando Valley, he has taken Englander’s advice to heart, shedding the political kid gloves he wore in the primary and vigorously attacking Korenstein--a Los Angeles Board of Education member and his strongest challenger since his 1979 election to office.

Bernson, 60, got a boost recently in the form of a strong endorsement from a longtime ally, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. In a letter distributed by Bernson’s campaign to voters, Gates said Bernson “has worked hard to keep San Fernando Valley neighborhoods safe” and disputed a Korenstein statement that crime has risen in Bernson’s district since 1979. Gates did not identify himself as the police chief in the endorsement, and a spokesman said Gates made the endorsement as a private citizen.

The endorsement was criticized by Korenstein’s campaign manager, Parke Skelton, who said it was inappropriate for Bernson to use a city department head’s endorsement to aid his reelection campaign in the conservative, well-to-do district.

For her part, Korenstein, 47, has sought to keep the campaign’s focus squarely on the issues that gave her most of her primary-election ammunition in the primary: development and traffic congestion in Bernson’s district.

During the primary she frequently criticized Bernson for his strong support of the mammoth Porter Ranch development north of Chatsworth. Korenstein argues that the project, which won’t be finished for 20 years, is an “environmental catastrophe” that will cause severe congestion and overload city services in the area.

In more recent weeks, she has attacked Bernson for his efforts to annex nearby Oat Mountain as part of Los Angeles, alleging that he is trying to help developers who contribute to his campaigns. Bernson has said he is only trying to protect the area, which is under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County, from the county’s less restrictive building policies and bar the county from putting landfills in two nearby canyons.

Meanwhile, Bernson has tried to make Korenstein the issue.

Although the race is officially nonpartisan, Bernson, a conservative Republican, has tried to inject party politics and ideology into it, questioning the association of Korenstein, a liberal Democrat, with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist who has twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination.

In a recent press release, Bernson said Korenstein “was a Jesse Jackson delegate” at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

According to state and Los Angeles County election records, Korenstein’s name appeared on the June, 1984, ballot as a candidate seeking election as a Jackson delegate from a Valley congressional district. But she failed to win election, records show.

In a recent interview, with The Times, Korenstein said she “can’t even remember” if she sought election as a Jackson delegate, but said that she attended the convention as an observer.

Bernson alleged she was trying to “hide her record now because it doesn’t help her politically.”

Bernson also has criticized Korenstein’s handling of school safety and budget issues and her call in March for the resignation of Gates, a popular figure in the 12th District.

Korenstein has countered by charging that crime has risen sharply since Bernson’s election and proposing that the city siphon money from the Community Redevelopment Agency to hire more police officers.

Korenstein also touted endorsements from the public-school police officers’ association and from three of the four other anti-Bernson candidates who were eliminated in the primary.

Although he led the primary election balloting, Bernson took only 34.7% of the vote, the lowest percentage of any council incumbent in 20 years. He swiftly hired Englander to wage a harder-edged runoff campaign against Korenstein.

Bernson’s consultant in the primary, Joe Cerrell, remains as a paid campaign adviser, said Bernson aide Greig Smith.

Englander, a veteran campaign consultant, has a reputation for hard-hitting tactics that often draw cries of outrage from their targets. For example, in a 1988 campaign mailer aimed at a Santa Ana city councilman, Englander reprinted an article from Oui magazine. The article said the politician was judging a bikini contest in an Orange restaurant when a woman took off her top while dancing. It said the councilman fled out the back door when police raided the show.

Political observers said that since hiring Englander, Bernson has made a political role reversal, acting more like a hungry challenger than a 12-year incumbent.

Besides aiming a barrage of direct-mail attacks at Korenstein, who received 29% of the votes in the primary, he challenged her earlier this month to a series of eight debates in the last weeks of the runoff--an unusual move since incumbents normally do everything they can to deny a public forum to their challengers.

Korenstein rejected the challenge, saying there wasn’t enough time and noting that she has agreed to appear with Bernson on two television and one radio interview programs in the campaign’s final days.

Skelton, Korenstein’s campaign manager, said Bernson has taken to the offensive “because he’s about to lose. . . . When an incumbent does poorly in a primary, the only hope they have of winning is to go negative.”

Englander said an important element of his strategy is to “revive Hal Bernson’s scrappiness” and in the process show voters Korenstein’s record.

“We have to remind traditional Hal Bernson voters of why they’ve always supported him and why they should continue to support him,” said Englander, adding that “too many” such voters sat out the primary.