McCarthy Ad Aims at Wilson’s Environmental Record

The battle is joined. The long quiescent Senate race in California has fired up.

Attacking Sen. Pete Wilson’s record on the environment, Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy has fired his first television salvo of the fall campaign in an ad portraying Wilson as a friend of toxic polluters.

Spokesmen for McCarthy on Thursday released the script of a TV commercial they said will start today accusing Wilson of voting against “a crackdown on corporations releasing cancer-causing chemicals, against help for victims of toxic waste . . . and against a bill to remove asbestos from our schools.”

The ad builds on a campaign theme set forth earlier this week that McCarthy is “a senator for us” while “Wilson is a senator for them.” The 30-second commercial asks, “So, who’s paying for those ads claiming he (Wilson) is good on the environment?” and answers, “Some of the very people who pollute it. Their PACs (political action committees) have given over $145,000 to his campaign.”

The ad is designed, in part, to chip away at the reputation Wilson has cultivated as a “compassionate conservative” who has remained sympathetic to a number of environmental causes in California.

McCarthy’s commercial comes a little more than a week after the Wilson campaign warned in its first TV ad of the fall that the Democrat would be engaging in his own form of “McCarthyism”--a reference to smear tactics used by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) in his 1950s crusade against communists and their sympathizers.

“This is exactly the kind of character assassination we warned about in our ad,” said Wilson, who in a telephone interview sought to rebut the charges made in McCarthy’s commercial.

Wilson said he voted in 1984 for a federally funded $600-million school asbestos cleanup program. He said McCarthy’s ad refers to a 1983 vote in which he joined a majority of senators, including liberal Democrat Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, in postponing the asbestos cleanup until the Department of Education released a study on the extent of the problem. Wilson said the cleanup he voted for authorized “12 times” as much money as the one he voted against.

Wilson acknowledged voting against a $30-million assistance program for victims of toxic waste. “I was joined by Lloyd Bentsen and a majority of my Senate colleagues,” he said, referring to the Democratic candidate for vice president. Wilson said the assistance program was an amendment to a bill he said he supported authorizing $8.5 billion in federal Superfund money to clean up toxic waste sites.

Wilson said he believes that help for victims of toxic waste “was already provided for through product liability awards, private health insurance and workers compensation.”

Wilson responded angrily to the McCarthy ad’s claim that he voted against “a crackdown on corporations releasing cancer-causing chemicals.”

“Utter crap,” he said, arguing that the ad referred to an inconsequential amendment to the Clean Water Act of 1985. He said he voted against the amendment but for the act itself, even though it meant breaking with President Reagan.

Wilson said that the “crackdown” which he opposed would have allowed the federal government to preempt state enforcement over hazardous chemicals even when states were properly enforcing the Clean Water Act.