Senate Race--a Focus on Image : Cranston Stressing Accomplishments, Experience on Hill

He is The Senator.

For 18 years he has lugged a huge black satchel full of work between Washington and California. He has spent thousands of hours on the Senate floor, in the committee rooms and in his offices, East and West. He has held community forums from Eureka to San Diego. So it is no surprise that experience and consistency will be the heart of Sen. Alan Cranston’s message to voters in the final week of his battle with GOP Senate nominee Ed Zschau.

As campaign issues go, these are hardly dazzling. But Cranston believes that they will put him over the top in the toughest reelection fight he has ever faced. He will focus on them in speeches, television ads and press conferences.

In a recent Los Angeles Times Poll, half of the senator’s supporters said that experience was the single most important quality that helped them make up their minds in the race.

And when the respondents were asked which candidate “has the clearest focus on his own personal objectives and doesn’t flip-flop on the issues,” Cranston had the edge by 4 to 3.

Cranston sees this as the campaign’s touchstone issue.

“I think the two most important factors for the voters will be experience and certainty versus inexperience and uncertainty, a record of accomplishment against a record of non-accomplishment in the Congress.”

Lately Cranston has charged that Zschau is so inexperienced and unqualified that he does not even understand the role of the Senate.

The senator points to the fact that Zschau has criticized him for opposing capital punishment even though polls show that 70% of Californians approve of it.

“I am not elected to be a Gallup Poll,” Cranston said in addressing that issue recently. “I’m elected to exercise my judgment. Zschau does not understand the nature of the Senate. He’s in the House, where they (have to run for reelection) every two years and so are more susceptible to the whims of public opinion.

“The Senate was deliberately created with six-year terms to insulate its members from the passions of the moment. I respect that role of a senator, which my opponent does not understand.”

Cranston used the experience issue last Friday in Palo Alto, when he announced his list of supporters in the Silicon Valley, where Zschau, a former Stanford business professor, founded a computer-related company. Zschau has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from his business base and has made the “entrepreneurial spirit” a central theme of his campaign.

Thomas Peters, author of the best-selling business book “In Search of Excellence,” noted that Cranston’s clout in the Senate was instrumental in getting the capital gains tax rate lowered in 1978 and in getting a federally guaranteed loan for Lockheed in the early 1970s that saved it from going under.

‘2 Most Important Events’

“The two most important events in California business in the past quarter-century were the lowering of the capital gains taxes and the saving of Lockheed, and Alan Cranston was the man who did both,” Peters said.

On the consistency issue, the Cranston campaign has focused all along on the two-term congressman’s tendency to change his votes on major issues. Cranston charges that this reveals “the lack of a guiding set of principles.”

Cranston’s latest effort to reinforce the perception of Zschau as a “flip-flopper” is a 60-second television and radio ad that is a take-off on a late-night TV commercial offering dozens of greatest music hits. One of the “hits” attributed to Zschau is “How Many Times Can a Man Change His Mind.”

As recently as last week, Zschau was providing Cranston with more ammunition. After telling a San Francisco audience that, if elected, he would seek to amend the recently passed tax reform act, Zschau later changed his mind and said a two-year moratorium should be placed on any changes.

‘That’s Good Advice’

Zschau also once endorsed Proposition 63, which would make English the official language of California, but then last week announced that he had reservations and is now neutral on the initiative.

Asked if he should not have studied the initiative more carefully before announcing his stand, Zschau responded: “That’s good advice.”

Although there have been times over the years when it was hard to figure out where Cranston stood on some issues as he sought compromises and changes behind the scenes in the Senate, he has never been accused of the kind of “flip-flops” that Zschau has made.

“You may not always agree with me,” Cranston says on the stump, “but you know where I stand.”

It is a line that gets a lot of positive response wherever he goes.

Cranston believes that it is a theme that helps account for his improvement in his most recent private poll. Those findings were mirrored Sunday in the latest survey done by KABC-TV’s pollster Steven Teichner, who reported that in recent weeks the gap between Zschau and Cranston has widened from 7 percentage points to 11.