Debate Behind Them, Candidates Seek Edge

A day after recall candidates clashed in a hard-edged debate, the major contenders in the race for governor scrambled for advantage Thursday.

Gov. Gray Davis ramped up his attacks on Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger sought to project an image of Republican solidarity behind his candidacy, announcing endorsements by Bill Simon Jr., the party’s 2002 nominee for governor, and by a group of county GOP chairmen.

But the other major Republican hopeful, state Sen. Tom McClintock, refused to bow to pressure from the actor’s campaign to drop out of the race. Indeed, with 12 days left until the election, tensions mounted between the two GOP candidates after Schwarzenegger began airing a new television ad. It showed McClintock’s face popping up in a slot machine as the actor questioned the propriety of the senator’s campaign donations from Indian tribes.

One of those tribes, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, reported Thursday that it had purchased $850,200 in television time for ads backing McClintock, considerably more than McClintock himself has spent.

The jockeying among Republicans came after a debate Wednesday night that -- while filled with contentious exchanges -- appeared to deliver no clear winner or loser.

In television news reports, one exchange between Schwarzenegger and independent Arianna Huffington overshadowed all other coverage of the debate: When she suggested that his repeated interruptions reflected “the way you treat women,” he responded: “I have a perfect part for you in ‘Terminator 4.’ ”

At a Sacramento campaign stop Thursday, Huffington said women assumed he was referring to a “Terminator 3” scene in which he shoves a female robot’s face into a toilet bowl -- and to his remarks in the July issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine , which suggested he had enjoyed filming that scene. Huffington said Schwarzenegger’s remark in the debate, along with his suggestion that she drink “more decaf,” had been offensive to women.

“I’m not asking for an apology,” she said. “I’m asking for the people of California to open their eyes and recognize who Arnold Schwarzenegger is and make sure he is not elected governor.”

Schwarzenegger said he had no idea why Huffington had assumed his joke was a reference to the toilet scene.

“The fact of the matter is, it was a compliment, because in ‘Terminator’ we always had powerful women,” he said in an interview Thursday with talk-show host Sean Hannity at a town-hall forum aired by Fox News Channel.

“So it actually was a compliment,” he said. “If she takes it the wrong way, it’s not my fault.”

Davis, whose tenure as governor could be cut short in the Oct. 7 vote, described the debate as more of a “food fight” than a substantive forum. He, too, went on the attack against Schwarzenegger -- in harsher terms than ever before in the recall race.

The Democratic governor said Schwarzenegger -- who called California’s business climate under Davis the worst in the nation -- had painted an overly bleak picture of the state.

“I’m upset at Mr. Schwarzenegger for trying to put this great state down,” Davis said after speaking to members of the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Assn. in Monterey Park. “He is constantly mischaracterizing the facts about California.

“I’m going to set the record straight. I’m getting sick and tired of Mr. Schwarzenegger, and if he doesn’t set the record straight himself, I may just have to debate him. You would think someone who can memorize his lines can memorize the facts.”

Schwarzenegger spokesman Todd Harris accused Davis of resorting to “the desperate candidate’s handbook.”

“Gray Davis should probably focus his time debating the people of California, who are the ones who decided to recall him in the first place,” Harris said

Still, Schwarzenegger’s focus Thursday was less on Davis than on McClintock. The actor’s campaign started running a new ad accusing unnamed opponents in the recall race of “pandering” to casino-owning Indian tribes in return for campaign money.

Narrated by Schwarzenegger, it uses the same language as an ad he began airing earlier in the week. But the new version, unlike the old, shows the faces of McClintock, fellow recall candidate Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and Davis.

The ad comes after weeks of assertions by the actor that he would run a positive campaign.

McClintock responded to the ad by recalling that Schwarzenegger had accepted Indian donations for a ballot measure on after-school programs that he promoted last year.

“I think it’s a desperate move by Schwarzenegger, who accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the Indian tribes just last year in his initiative campaign,” McClintock said.

Schwarzenegger strategist Mike Murphy said the campaign had sent the new spot to television stations, but only as a “contingency.” It was put on the air because of a “clerical error,” he said.

The Schwarzenegger team’s effort to impugn McClintock ran the risk of alienating not just the Thousand Oaks lawmaker, but also the rank-and-file conservatives who have rallied behind McClintock’s candidacy. Both candidates are stressing a conservative fiscal agenda as the solution to California’s budget morass, but McClintock -- unlike Schwarzenegger -- has built a following among the party’s conservative activists over two decades, in part by staunchly opposing legal abortion, gun control and gay rights.

Schwarzenegger allies sought to make inroads in that base Thursday by engineering a 40-9 endorsement of the actor by the California County Republican Chairmen’s Assn.

“We decided that the best opportunity for a Republican victory is with Arnold Schwarzenegger,” said Ronald Nehring, chairman of the association.

In a statement, Schwarzenegger called the move a sign of support from “the heart and soul of our party.”

McClintock, however, cast the endorsement as an attempt by “the party elite to tell the voters who they may vote for.”

“Let’s just say that over the years I have found there is very little wisdom in the upper echelons of the Republican Party,” McClintock said in an interview. “The wisdom is with the grass-roots voters who joined the Republican Party not to get invited to a swell cocktail party, but rather because they believed in certain principles.”

Establishment Republicans rallying around Schwarzenegger had chosen popularity over ideology, he suggested.

On a radio talk show with conservative host Roger Hedgecock, McClintock bristled at being pushed to quit.

“What you’re saying is: ‘Conservatives, give up, renounce your principles and just give up any hope of election of a candidate who supports your views. Just give up and go home,’ ” McClintock said. “I’m not willing to.

“If you don’t stand by your principles, what is the purpose of winning?”

Today, Schwarzenegger is expected to announce the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, the San Diego County Republican who financed the petition drive that put the recall on the ballot.

That will undoubtedly keep the campaign focused on the friction between Schwarzenegger and McClintock. Issa told CNN this week that McClintock had promised him months ago that he would abort his candidacy if it looked as if he would be a spoiler for Republicans.

“That is flatly wrong,” McClintock said. “Winston Churchill would call it ‘terminological inexactitude,’ because the word ‘lie’ was disallowed in parliamentary debate.”

At Schwarzenegger’s forum in downtown Los Angeles, the actor was asked about the possibility of McClintock’s stepping aside.

The friendly tone of his response contrasted sharply with his new TV ad showing the senator’s face in a slot machine.

“Tom is a terrific guy, and he’s very smart, and we see eye-to-eye on a lot of the issues,” Schwarzenegger said. “This is a decision he has to make. I mean, I think that it is obviously much better, mathematically speaking, to win when you don’t split the vote, and I think that it is very important for him to think about that, but I am not going to be the one that pushes him.”

Bustamante, the only prominent Democrat in the replacement field, offered measured praise for McClintock’s performance in the debate and said he did not expect the conservative state senator to drop out of the race.

“Anybody who knows Mr. McClintock knows he is a very strong-willed and determined individual and has a very strong philosophy,” Bustamante said at a Los Angeles campaign stop.

Times staff writers Miguel Bustillo, Gregg Jones, Joe Mathews, Dan Morain, Peter Nicholas, Jeffrey L. Rabin and Joel Rubin contributed to this report.