League May Not Stage Senate Contest Debate Due to Schedule Woes

The Senate campaign trail in California is becoming a lonely place.

The Democratic challenger, Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, is devoting his time to raising money for television ads, and the Republican incumbent, Sen. Pete Wilson, spends most of his time in Washington. Now the prospect of even one debate between the candidates has dimmed with the announcement by the League of Women Voters on Tuesday that it may withdraw as a sponsor because of the inability to agree on a date.

“We have had difficulty with both candidates in trying to arrange a date, and we have indicated that if our latest offer (either Oct. 11 or 13) was not acceptable, we would withdraw our sponsorship,” said Carol Federighi, president of the league in California.

Federighi said that Wilson, after agreeing to Oct. 13, has stated that the date is no longer acceptable.

Jean Askham, the league’s debate chairwoman, said the league will ask Wilson, whose aides say he must be in Washington on Oct. 13, to reconsider that date.

As the candidates become less visible, the battle for the Senate increasingly is being fought over the airwaves in a clash of campaign commercials, where even the images and voices of the candidates are not always in evidence, and where the messages are spun from the looms of professional word merchants.

In such an impersonal atmosphere, two politicians who are not particularly well known to begin with seek to win the public’s trust.

Trailing by 16 points in the latest California Poll, McCarthy, who must rally members of his own party as well as dissident Republicans, has scheduled only one public appearance this week. He has made eight since Labor Day, the traditional campaign kickoff day. It is not unusual for a candidate in an uphill battle to appear that many times in two days.

Meanwhile, Wilson, reassured by the polls, comes back to California only on weekends and says he will spend weekdays in Washington until the Senate recesses, which could be mid-October.

With less than two months until the Nov. 8 election, voters are confronted with two candidates who make very similar claims about their commitment to the environment, law and order, and care for children and elderly people, but who may never appear together on the same stage where those claims can be challenged or clarified.

The concentration on staged TV advertising has taken away from the unrehearsed give and take of live campaigning, and at least a few opportunities for lively exchanges have been lost.

For the past week, a debate in Congress over a bill to raise the minimum wage offered McCarthy an issue dear to the heart of his largest group of supporters--organized labor.

Although Wilson has refused to say whether he supports a higher wage, leaving himself open to partisan bashing, McCarthy has said nothing on the issue.

Reticence by both candidates is not new.

During the summer, Wilson avoided committing himself on several politically sensitive questions. But McCarthy, who was preoccupied raising money for television, did not always press Wilson when opportunities arose.

An avowed environmentalist, Wilson would not say what it would take for him to support Sen. Alan Cranston’s desert protection bill. Partly because of Wilson’s refusal to co-sponsor the bill, it was consigned to legislative limbo for at least a year.

After Vice President George Bush was quoted recently on his skepticism about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Wilson, one of the Senate’s most passionate defenders of SDI, would say only that he thought Bush had been misquoted.

Wilson’s caution has been particularly frustrating to Democrats who recall McCarthy’s reputation as a political bulldog and don’t understand why he has not been out there counterpunching more often.

“Issues float up like big, fat whiffle balls, and Leo doesn’t take his cuts,” said one party strategist who asked not to be named.

Spokesmen for both candidates say they regret that the campaign is not more of a human drama.

“I am a big believer in a public campaign,” said Darry Sragow, McCarthy’s campaign manager. “But there is a hard and fast law of nature in California that you have to raise money for television advertising, and if that means meeting with contributors and staying on the phone all day, so be it. Other things get relegated to a secondary stature. It’s unfortunate but true.”

Wilson’s campaign manager said Wilson is spending most of his time in Washington in order to be present for votes on pending legislation, including this year’s defense spending bill, which includes money for SDI, and an omnibus crime bill that would beef up the war on drugs.

Both sides are blaming the other for the deterioration in debate negotiations with the league.

“My sense is that they just want to get out of it (the debate) altogether,” said McCarthy aide Kam Kuwata.

But league President Federighi pointed a finger at both candidates.

“Lt. Gov. McCarthy’s staff at first said ‘any time, any place.’ But when we came up with a proposal, they didn’t like it,” Federighi said. “With Wilson there would be a big problem with a date, then it would be possible, and then it would be impossible again.”