Subject: California's Primary Offers Voters a Din Of Competing Voices Date: Published: 5/29/92 (282 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Campaign '92 -- Political Overload: California's Primary Offers Voters a Din Of Competing Voices --- Confusion Will Be Sorted Out Tuesday by an Electorate That's Tired of Upheaval --- Battles for Both Senate Seats ---- By David Shribman Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal SAN FRANCISCO -- There have been fires, floods, tremors, pestilence, drought, recession and, most recently, riots. Now there will be elections. A political earthquake is rumbling through California, and the backdrop of the last year and a half -- some of the classic biblical plagues plus a few modern, manmade ones -- make this year's political season here, starting with Tuesday's primary, one of the most portentous in decades. Voters here are weary of upheaval, and yet they are so resentful of politicians and political institutions that they're on the verge of promoting even more upheaval on their own. Their choices in Tuesday's voting will almost certainly change the nature of politics in the nation's biggest state, sending ripples far beyond its borders. This state is so big that it holds one in eight Americans, so powered by growth that the population of some communities leaps by 20% in one year's time, so fertile that it produces more than half the nation's supply of 52 different crops and livestock commodities, so entrepreneurial that a quarter of the nation's computer companies are located here. And like everything else here, the sheer mass of Tuesday's primary is almost beyond comprehension: At stake are four hotly contested nominations for two seats in the U. S. Senate, 52 seats in a House delegation that will be the largest that any state has ever sent to Congress, 100 seats in the state Legislature and countless other local contests. The candidates will be running in districts that are so new that many of them still don't know the boundaries. They're competing for attention with five candidates for president, two of whom -- President Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton -- are assured of their party nominations but are using the primary as a dress rehearsal for the struggle with Ross Perot over the biggest prize in the November election; California all by itself accounts for one-fifth of the electoral votes needed to win the White House. And in the background, along with the lingering anguish from last month's riots and perhaps the biggest cash crisis any state government has faced in half a century, is a bitter civil war in the California Republican Party, which has contributed a member of the GOP national ticket eight times in the last 40 years. "Here in the hugest state with the most diverse interests we may be holding the single most important state election in the country," says Austin Ranney, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's important not only because California is big, but because this is now a swing state in presidential elections and a lot of important issues are at stake." The California political scene is much like that in the rest of the country, but on a larger scale. There is a voters' rebellion here and, after the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, there is a women's rebellion. Unemployment runs above the national rate. There are angry Hispanics, angry Asians, angry blacks, angry gays and lesbians, angry white Anglo Saxon Protestant males. "If the voters are angry everywhere, they're more angry in California," says James Carville, a top adviser to Mr. Clinton, who amid the din of protest and politics is seeking to harness the anger and attract support in November's presidential election. "If they want change everywhere else, they want bigger change in California." But along with the anger this time there is immense confusion. California is a festival of democracy that suddenly is out of control. "Nobody knows who is running against whom, and for what," says Rep. Tom Campbell, who is seeking the Republican nomination for one of the two Senate seats up for grabs. But if there is a flood of candidates, there is a drought of information about them. Local newspapers and TV newscasts have been focusing on the Los Angeles riots, the related unrest in San Francisco and various intricacies of police politics, but not on the primaries. Network television affiliates, worried that they would have to air four different Senate debates -- one for each party for each seat -- have decided instead to air none. Many of the candidate brochures that might have helped voters sort out their preferences may never be distributed because they were to have been printed in parts of Los Angeles that have been burned out. This is all occurring just as media politics is reaching new levels as an art form here. "There are no events," says Democratic Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, a candidate for one of the Senate seats. "There aren't the usual rallies. There aren't the campaign stops. It's all television." One Senate candidate, Democratic Rep. Mel Levine, has spent most of the campaign on the telephone raising money for TV ads, seldom holding public events and not even venturing forth to vote on the House bill providing funds for the riot areas of Los Angeles. But with four presidential candidates, 10 Senate contenders with major TV buys and local candidates for the U. S. House and the San Diego mayoral contests all placing their ads on at the same time, there's also media clog. "This is classic overload," says James Fay, a political scientist at California State University at Hayward. "It's way beyond the capacity of the average citizen to figure out what is going on." The usual anchors of politics have disappeared in this state. California's remarkable growth -- it's as if the entire population of Massachusetts packed up and moved here in the last decade -- scrambled district boundaries for local races and added seven new House seats to the state's delegation. "People hardly knew the district lines before they changed, and now everyone's confused," says Jeff Marston, a former GOP state assemblyman who is trying to regain his seat in a substantially altered district near San Diego. Meanwhile, at all levels of politics, from the presidency down to the state assembly, Republicans are locked in a blood feud, a struggle -- as conservatives, at least, put it -- for the soul of the GOP and a precursor of the battle that soon may engulf the national Republican Party. "This," says Patrick Buchanan, the conservative commentator who is continuing his challenge to Mr. Bush here, "is the First and Second Manassas of the Civil War in the GOP. " There are numerous factions, but the fight comes down to a struggle between the moderates and self-proclaimed pragmatists, symbolized if not led by Gov. Pete Wilson, and the conservative heirs of Reagan Republicanism, who are challenging Mr. Wilson in the Legislature, in party counsels and in primary elections all over the state. The fight has taken on added urgency. If conservative commentator Bruce Herschensohn and Rep. William Dannemeyer, both battling from behind in separate Senate nomination fights, are defeated, the party leadership will be firmly in the hands of Mr. Wilson and his moderate allies, with this remarkable result: No Reaganite Republicans will hold high office in Ronald Reagan's home state. A Dukakis Party? Conservative Republicans, such as GOP state Assemblyman Tom McClintock, believe that Gov. Wilson, who with Democratic help put through an $8 billion tax increase a year ago, is on the verge of making the California GOP a "Michael Dukakis party." That's also Mr. Buchanan's rationale for continuing his campaign even though President Bush has long since sewn up the GOP nomination. (In truth, he's campaigning mostly in devoutly conservative Orange County and along border areas, where the immigration issue resonates.) The Bush-Buchanan fight has its analogue in the two Republican Senate primaries. In the battle to finish out the remainder of the term that Mr. Wilson relinquished when he became governor in January 1991, Mr. Dannemeyer is portraying himself as a conservative crusader against Mr. Wilson's appointed successor, the little-known John Seymour. "Seymour is a creation of Wilson, and Wilson has forfeited any claim of being a conservative," says Mr. Dannemeyer, who has attracted attention in Washington for his skepticism of federal assistance to fight AIDS and his harsh critique of homosexuality. Mr. Seymour, who supports abortion rights and backed the 1991 civil rights bill, answers Mr. Dannemeyer bluntly: "There's more to life than talking about homosexuality and abortion." Mr. Seymour, a former state senator and mayor of Anaheim, acknowledges that "a strange twist of fate and circumstance" made him Mr. Wilson's stunning choice as interim senator. A former Marine sergeant, he refers to members of Congress as "them" and says, "Congress is out of step with the people, out of control with its spending and out of sight with its arrogance." In the other Senate race, the conservative, Mr. Herschensohn, is the outsider, while the moderate Mr. Campbell, of the Silicon Valley area, is an avowed insider despite only two terms in Washington. Mr. Campbell laces his conversation with phrases like "George Bush and I" and "Dick Cheney and I," supports abortion rights and environmental restrictions and criticizes his opponent for representing "the far right, and I mean the far right." For his part, Mr. Herschensohn describes Mr. Campbell as "more liberal than most Democrats I've debated, a Republican in registration only." Mr. Herschensohn, a colorful conservative whose broadcast commentaries have been part of the Southern California political scene for 13 years and who came in second in a Republican senatorial primary six years ago, talks tough on gun rights and his opposition to racial "quotas." He supports a 19% flat tax rate and the abolition of taxes on capital gains, interest, dividends and inheritances. The GOP intra-party feud is evident even at the state assembly level in the suburbs and rice farms outside Sacramento, where B. T. Collins, a GOP disabled Vietnam veteran who served as chief of staff for former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, is being challenged by Barbara Alby, a grass-roots political organizer. "The whole dispute among Republicans -- the establishment headed by Wilson vs. a grass-roots right-wing activism -- is personified in this race," says Bill Bradley, a political analyst in Sacramento. "It's hard fought, and though you can't say it's ugly yet, the night is young." Ms. Alby accuses her opponent of ignoring the needs of common voters. "These politicians get elected and join the club, and they worry about what is best for the club," she says. "They are hostile to the voters." One issue Ms. Alby is trying to exploit: charges that her opponent is an atheist. "The Republican Party can be the party of responsible moderation or it can be a party of religious zealotry that cares only about abortion," says Mr. Collins, one incumbent who relishes his challenge. On the religion question he says simply, "It's nobody's business. Nobody asked me what my religion was when I was sent to Vietnam." The dispute has become great sport, both for the spectators and the combatants -- but it comes at a price. "Since no one is dealing with the state's problems, all the energy is going into the warfare," says Jeffrey Chapman, director of the Sacramento Center of the University of Southern California's School of Public Administration. "It's much more fun than trying to run the state -- you can talk about truth, freedom, dignity at an ethereal level -- and the decisions are easier." But as the Republicans continue their internecine battles, the state suffers. California now estimates that, unless remedial steps are taken, the state's revenue shortfall will approach $11 billion by June 1993. "In this environment, the disarray in the Republican Party is causing the state of California to teeter on the brink of catastrophe," says Democratic state treasurer Kathleen Brown, sister of Jerry. "What might be a politically amusing sideshow is cause for great alarm." Not that the Democrats are conducting a tranquil battle themselves, though the fault line is mainly gender. Former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein has held a lead in the polls over state Controller Gray Davis for the nomination for the two-year Senate seat. She has held nine lunches for women across the state, telling them, as she did in Sacramento the other day, "We women have had to fight for everything we've gotten in life." She and Rep. Barbara Boxer of Marin County, near San Francisco, are calculating that women's anger over the Thomas hearings will be a potent political force. Rep. Boxer is running for the other Senate seat, the one being vacated by retiring Democrat Alan Cranston, and most of her campaign money has come from women. Despite 143 overdrafts at the House Bank, Rep. Boxer, who has the most committed core of supporters, retains a good chance of winning her battle with Mr. McCarthy, who is well known after a decade as lieutenant governor and six years as assembly speaker, and Rep. Levine, who is by far the best financed candidate. Mr. Levine, who has raised $6 million, will have aired more ads in the three weeks before the vote than his two rivals combined. But he is being criticized in political circles for running a stealth campaign, staying in his West Los Angeles base and raising money -- "dialing for dollars," in the words of one California politician. "California is like a country, and I need to reach out to more than 30 million people," says Mr. Levine, whose most recent ad offensive, focusing on the Los Angeles riots, takes a strong law-and-order tack. "The only way to do it is by television, and that's expensive." All of this has shoved the Democratic presidential primary to the background. Former Gov. Jerry Brown is seeking to embarrass Mr. Clinton, whose attention is more on November, where the voting in California counts, rather than on June, where for him it is only symbolic. "Our presidential primary itself is a snoozer," says state assemblyman Richard Katz of the San Fernando Valley, a longtime supporter of moving the presidential primary earlier in the season so that the biggest state will have more of a voice in choosing party nominees. "We get treated like a 24-hour automatic teller machine: Candidates come in, take money out and spend it elsewhere." [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]