Feinstein Makes Differences With Rival Clear

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein laid out her views Wednesday on Iraq troop withdrawals, abortion rights and greenhouse gas reductions, offering a sharp contrast with Republican challenger Richard Mountjoy as he launches his campaign to oust her in November.

The Democratic incumbent did not mention Mountjoy in her speech at a “women’s power luncheon” in Century City. But she staked ground on a range of topics that made clear she and her San Gabriel Valley rival hold fundamentally different visions of how to represent California in the Senate.

On the war, Feinstein renewed her call to pull 80,000 U.S. troops out of Iraq this year and remove the rest by the end of 2007.

“I believe we should transition the American position there from one of permanence to a secondary role,” she said.

The former San Francisco mayor also urged President Bush, once again, to replace Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, despite Bush’s rejection of that suggestion Tuesday.

Feinstein voted in 2003 to authorize the use of force in Iraq but said Wednesday that she would not have done so had she known everything she learned later about flaws in pre-war intelligence.

In a telephone interview, Mountjoy defended Rumsfeld.

“I haven’t been aware where he’s really messed things up,” he said. “Do they expect every encounter to go flawless?”

Mountjoy, a former Monrovia state senator and Navy veteran who fought in the Korean War, said Feinstein and “her left-wing friends” see a U.S. defeat in Iraq as a political win for Democrats.

“Come on, let’s be honest about it,” he said, calling Feinstein “part of the cut-and-run group.”

He praised Bush for having “the guts” to let the military determine U.S. troop levels in Iraq.

Mountjoy is the only Republican who met the deadline this month to run for the party’s nomination to challenge Feinstein, the only well-known Democrat in the race. He is certain to face a difficult race. Feinstein is relatively popular, and she will have millions of dollars more than Mountjoy to spend on the campaign. Also, polls suggest that most Californians are not as conservative as Mountjoy.

In her speech, Feinstein expressed concern that Bush’s new appointees to the Supreme Court would roll back abortion rights. It is “deeply troubling,” she said, that South Dakota has passed a law that bans nearly all abortions, including those performed in cases of rape and incest. The law permits abortion only when a woman’s life is in danger.

“The time has come for women across America to stand up and fight for what we believe in,” said Feinstein, a senator since 1992.

By contrast, Mountjoy said he supported South Dakota’s new abortion law.

“As a matter of fact, I probably would have been the author,” he said, adding: “I’m not in favor of giving the death penalty to a child just because the parents decide, and I’m not in favor of making the mother God.”

Turning to the environment, Feinstein said she would soon introduce a bill to combat global warming by requiring a 7.25% cut in carbon dioxide emissions. She described it as the equivalent of taking 111 million passenger cars off the road.

“This would be a major step in the right direction,” said Feinstein, who bemoaned the rapid melting of ice in Antarctica and Greenland and warned of “irreparable harm” to the Earth.

Mountjoy dismissed Feinstein’s proposal as politics and questioned the science on global warming trends. He said studies show “man is creating hardly any of the changes in the atmosphere.”

“A volcanic eruption -- all of those things -- are many, many times the pollution created since the machine age,” he said.