THE CAMPAIGN FOR GOVERNOR : Will Dianne Feinstein Play in Pacoima? : San Francisco’s Ex-Mayor Finally Ventures South--and Into the Down-and-Dirty World of Big-Time Politics

DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S Tudor house in the gated cul-de-sac of Presidio Terrace is right out of a European storybook with its rolled eaves and soaring gables, its tiny windows in odd places. Built in 1910 and purchased by Feinstein six years ago, it is paneled with finely grained oak, and from the formal parlors on the ground floor to the canopied beds and cheerful reading room above-stairs, every part of the house has her touch. Ancient Tibetan scrolls, some purchased during her treks in the Himalayas, adorn the walls. Upstairs, the Webster of London clock over the fireplace emits a measured, stately tick. Fresh tulips burst out of a crystal vase on a massive mahogany desk.

Housekeeper Shirley Gilbertson attends Feinstein as though she were her daughter. Cookies and pots of coffee and tea are trundled up and placed on lacquered trays. Lying around the reading room are lavishly illustrated tomes about the world, as well as the book Feinstein is currently reading, Antonia Fraser’s “The Warrior Queens.” There are photographs of Feinstein with Queen Elizabeth, Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Pope. And there are personal notes from such frequent house guests as Sir Edmund Hillary, the first Anglo to climb Mt. Everest.

This is Dianne Feinstein’s world, one so removed from the rest of California as not to be in the same state. But into this secure, sophisticated environment, the uncertain and often grubby business of big-time politics now intrudes. Feinstein, who dominated San Francisco’s life as mayor from 1978 to 1988, is running for governor of California, the first woman ever seriously to seek the job.

She is learning that this cannot be done from her refuge on a hill in San Francisco, that it means living for much of the time out of a rented condo in vast, rude Los Angeles, a city she has visited rarely during the past decade and has never liked. It means pressing the flesh at a thousand little get-togethers from San Diego to Fresno, a process she does like once she gets over the hurdle of shaking that first hand. And it means trying to convince campaign donors that she, not Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, would be a more formidable Democratic opponent in the fall for the presumptive Republican nominee, U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson. This last part is the hardest because Feinstein hates asking for money and especially hates doing so in Southern California, where Van de Kamp built a network of donors during all those years she was sticking close to her cozy City by the Bay.

“I probably misjudged one thing,” Feinstein says. “Southern California, among the political insiders, is a much more closed community than I thought it was. It is not as easy to break into as I thought it was. There is a certain liberal chic down here connected to Hollywood that is daunting. So it’s been a much more lonely situation than I had expected.”

For months she has badly trailed Van de Kamp and Wilson in the polls, but the most recent California Poll shows that she has pulled even with both, largely because of a strategic $600,000 TV buy. Although the race will continue to be volatile, Feinstein’s gain impressed political insiders, who point out that she squandered most of the past two years when she should have been laying the groundwork for the campaign. “We underestimated how hard this was going to be,” admits Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum, a wealthy investment banker.

Like the men she is up against, Feinstein hasn’t articulated a cohesive vision of the state’s future or been associated with any compelling political idea. Moreover, the professionals gossip privately that she is politically inept, that she doesn’t have a clue about how to run statewide and won’t buckle down and do the tough slogging that goes with campaigning.

Still, there is a quality about this pragmatic, efficient, experienced middle-of-the-road Democrat that keeps the pundits from writing her off. They all talk with a little awe about the special attraction of this 56-year-old woman: “You get her up there on that tube, and whoa, you’ve got something,” says Washington media consultant Ray Strother. “Most politicians come on and you hit the zapper. But Dianne talks, you watch.”

Simply stated, the television camera, that cold arbiter of modern political campaigns, likes Dianne Feinstein, to borrow the description used in Hollywood to explain star power. Van de Kamp and Wilson must battle the perception that they are two boring white guys trying to bury each other with policy papers; Feinstein, in contrast, has an arresting television presence not unlike that of Ronald Reagan or Gary Hart or Jesse Jackson. She uses it to the hilt and was the first candidate to broadcast commercials, boasting of her mayoralty and her toughness in backing the death penalty.

And there is something else that keeps Feinstein in the game, something more that keeps driving her out onto the hustings when she would rather hibernate with her books. Her years as mayor showed that she is an able administrator who brought together competing groups, improved city services and started tackling the city’s AIDS crisis. She has a passion for public policy, one that she got from the lively dinner-table discussions of her childhood in the elegant mansion across the street from where she now lives.

Feinstein is a self-confident, slightly shy woman who is almost 6 feet tall in high-heeled shoes--an arresting presence in expensive, boldly colored conservative suits. She is fairly good at small talk and has a quick, bawdy laugh. But this is sometimes undercut by an aloof--even regal--bearing that may have to do with the manners she was taught as a child. “Goody Two-Shoes,” some have called her. There is clearly an “executive” style about her : She once shared her rules for getting ahead with a business magazine (put in more time than anybody else; be a team player; thank those who help you; never cry). She clearly sees herself as more cut out to be queen than one of the courtiers. She likes to argue, to bore in and say things like, “Now why is that? Tell me. Help me understand it.” One is convinced she is giving you undivided attention.

She is public spirited, she is marketable, she is interesting, a swatch of red in the drab world of modern politics. Yet there are fundamental doubts among her friends and foes: Can Feinstein leave San Francisco behind her and make her pitch across the stupendously varied landscape of this state? Does she have the steel to go out, day after day, and really chase after the job of governor? She became mayor, after all, by a tragic fluke. But no one will inherit or have thrust upon them the top job in California.

FEINSTEIN’S POLITICAL career was reborn just as it was withering away. As a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, she had run for mayor twice, losing badly both times. Crushed by the second defeat, Feinstein announced that she would not run for mayor again. And by November, 1978, depressed over the death of her second husband from cancer, she wanted out of politics altogether.

But within hours of informally telling reporters she was getting out, everything was turned upside down by an assassin’s bullets. Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a leader in the city’s large gay community, were shot down in City Hall by a disgruntled former supervisor, Dan White. As board president, Feinstein automatically became acting mayor. She rose to the challenge with strength and grace.

“You have to understand what an awful time it was then to appreciate what Dianne did,” says Airport Commissioner Mo Bernstein, a longtime city power broker, who is often critical of Feinstein. “The gays were up in arms because of Harvey’s killing. We’d just had the Jonestown massacre (in which 900 members of the Rev. Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, most from the Bay Area, died in a mass suicide). The city was in shock. And I don’t think you’ll find many people who won’t agree that Dianne did a great job of pulling us together.”

Feinstein was a reassuring presence in the days after the assassinations. She spoke soothingly but firmly on television. She retained most of Moscone’s staff. She reassured gays by appointing another gay man to Milk’s seat. “Mrs. Feinstein provided a voice for the city’s sorrow and its aspirations. She was poised. She was eloquent. She was restrained. And she was reassuring and strong,” the Chronicle editorialized.

In the next 18 months, her leadership style became familiar to San Franciscans. She expressed her views with verve. She worked long days. Moscone had been a casual leader, but under Feinstein, the staff was told that coming to work in blue jeans was not acceptable. She immersed herself in the issues of the city, although questions since have been raised about her budgetary acumen. Although she had widespread support in the influential gay community, she avoided being tied too closely to interest groups. She was not averse to seeking compromise.

As her daughter, Katherine, 32, puts it: “My mother is very tough and at the same time very compassionate, very caring. What I admire about her most is that she thinks things through for herself.”

But others detected a shortage of political savvy. Some officials complained of a tendency she had to become ensnared in minutiae. “Dianne could never delegate,” Bernstein says. “She had to have her hands on everything in City Hall.”

And she was well aware that she was navigating in a man’s world. As she puts it: “I think being a woman politician is a special problem. You have to know what you are talking about because the press will always challenge what you say in a way they do not challenge a male politician. I drive my staff crazy, I want every fact checked, every fact sourced.”

Feinstein says that she had no plans to run for mayor in 1979 but did so “because, as a lame duck, I couldn’t hold the city together.” She needed help, though. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, the shrewdest politician in San Francisco, had to take over her campaign after she failed to escape a runoff. Their alliance went back to Feinstein’s strong support for the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and to the common ground they share as outsiders--a Jewish woman, a black man--in a world dominated by white men. To help Feinstein, Brown brought in political operatives who knew how to reach key people in the powerful neighborhood groups, and they put hundreds of volunteers on the street. It was classic machine politics, something Feinstein had no grasp of, according to Brown. The result was election to the mayor’s job at long last.

As Feinstein began developing her own agenda and revealing more of her executive style, it became clear that she was neither interested in nor skilled at backroom politics--or in the grass-roots work of electoral politics. It is a trait that goes to the heart of her slow-starting gubernatorial campaign. “Dianne,” Bernstein says, “doesn’t know any more about politics than a mouse running across this floor.”

Brown agrees, although he puts a positive spin on it; after all, he is supporting Feinstein this year, as he has supported her political career since it began. “Yeah, . . . Dianne is almost unsuited to politics,” he says. “She’s too candid, too direct, too incapable of game-playing. But I think that’s why she’d make a good governor.

“She genuinely cares about issues; she’s almost a social worker in that regard, a Florence Nightingale. I mean, she once got out of her car and gave some bum in the Tenderloin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” (Actually, it was an elderly man who had collapsed on the street.) “Ain’t no way that Willie Brown or most of these other politicians are going to do something like that,” he says. “No way.”

Feinstein moved cautiously through her first term, finding support among her friends on the Board of Supervisors for several significant accomplishments, including putting more police on the street and improving garbage pickup and public transportation. But almost without warning, a fringe group called the White Panthers, angry because Feinstein supported strict controls on handguns, forced a special recall election. Once again, Brown waded in to help her, and Feinstein also hired a crafty local consultant named Clint Reilly. She turned back the recall decisively, thus discouraging serious opposition in the regular election of 1983.

In her second term (by law she could not run for a third), she overhauled the city’s waste-treatment system and lobbied for federal money to help rebuild the fabled cable-car system after many residents had sadly concluded that the cars would be lost forever. And in perhaps the most contentious battle, she helped draw up the “Downtown Plan,” a growth compromise that gave high-rise developers some of what they wanted but restricted the proliferation of skyscrapers that had changed the once-quaint city. Some of the city’s most powerful people, such as the developer and Democratic Party financial angel Walter Shorenstein (who no longer speaks to her), wanted to build and build and build as the city made a halting bid to become a major financial center. The developers were opposed by the neighborhood groups that have surprising power in a city where land is so precious that the dead are buried elsewhere because there is no room for cemeteries.

Feinstein spent four years crafting the compromise, which limited the tallest new buildings to a four-block area and set other restrictions. But to get the plan past the supervisors, she had to allow some high-rise projects already on the drawing boards to go through. The neighborhood groups never forgave her and eventually got tougher restrictions through a ballot measure.

Feinstein also confronted the AIDS crisis, pushing city bureaucrats--unsuccessfully at first--to close the bathhouses where many experts thought the disease was being spread and lobbying for more federal aid to the city’s AIDS treatment programs.

Some gays think Feinstein is too “goody-goody,” according to James Haas, a prominent gay political activist in the city, who said, “I honestly think she couldn’t care less what we do in bed. It’s just that she wants everybody in bed by 11 p.m.” But many were furious with Feinstein on one major issue in the mid-1980s--when she vetoed a “domestic partners law,” which would have granted city benefits to live-in companions of city employees.

She is proud of her relationship with the gay community, saying: “I was the first major candidate in the city to go to a gay event. It was when I ran for supervisor in 1969; I think they were surprised I accepted. Later, I was the first supervisor to hire openly gay staff people. In 1970, I sponsored the first amendment to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance to provide that you shall not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.”

Feinstein was generally well regarded when she left office in 1988--shortly before she stepped down, 66% of the city’s voters said she had done a good or excellent job. But that was before her successor, Art Agnos, looked at the books and realized that the budget she’d left behind had a deficit of $180 million.

The city’s chief financial adviser, Sam Yockey, says Feinstein created the deficit by using a mid-1980s surplus for day-to-day expenses. Feinstein says the deficit was caused by factors beyond her control, among them shrinking federal aid, a new local law increasing benefits for some city employees and a repeal of a utility users’ tax. But Van de Kamp is expected to hammer Feinstein on the deficit.

“The other thing about Dianne,” Yockey says, “is that she gets these pet peeves. She’d come to budget hearings and intimidate the hell out of people. She’d focus on the micro stuff, like how much was being spent by various departments on training and travel. But there was no macro vision.”

Speaker Brown, too, mentions Feinstein’s tendency to drift, her lack of discipline. “Dianne’s talent is not rooted in creativity. You have to call her attention to the issue and make a case and even offer a solution. Once she focuses,” he says, pausing. “Once she focuses, the results are probably unmatched.”

Feinstein, who once said her long-range goal is to become “the first female chief executive of this country,” was seriously considered for the national Democratic ticket in 1984 and gained important national exposure. Her husband worked quietly to position his wife to be chosen for the job by presidential nominee Walter F. Mondale. Mondale publicly named several leading contenders he was considering, including Feinstein, who gained added attention as the host of the party’s convention. But the spot ultimately went to New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro, who was being pushed by party insiders such as then-Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil.

There are other explanations for Mondale’s decision. “Dick (Blum) asked me in late ’83 if I thought Fritz would win the nomination, and I assured him he would,” says Mickey Kantor, a well-connected L.A. lawyer who is supporting Van de Kamp. “Dick asked if I thought Fritz might consider picking Dianne as his running mate, and I said he might, but what she should do is endorse him right away and then let us put her on the campaign trail for us. She endorsed Fritz and I set up a speaking schedule for her,” Kantor continues, “but she never left San Francisco, never did anything for us down here or anywhere else.”

In Kantor’s mind, as in others’ before, Feinstein was either lazy or unwilling to venture beyond her secure world in San Francisco.

FEINSTEIN WAS reared in a comfortable, well-connected family, but her childhood also had its pain. Her Polish Jewish grandfather had immigrated to San Francisco early in this century. Her father, Leon Goldman, became a noted surgeon and a beloved professor at UC San Francisco Medical School. He married Betty Rosenburg, the daughter of Russian Christians who fled St. Petersburg in 1917, and settled in Eureka before moving south. Leon and Betty, who are now dead, had three daughters; Dianne is the eldest.

When Dianne was a young girl, her father’s brother Morrie came to live with the family, and it was from Leon’s and Morrie’s nightly arguments that Feinstein first got her taste for politics. Leon Goldman was a Republican, a believer in self-reliance, suspicious of unions. Uncle Morrie was more of an urban populist, a clothing manufacturer with little education but plenty of smarts. He walked all over the city--often with Dianne at his side--delighting in the swank hotels off Union Square no more than the scruffier establishments of the Tenderloin.

There is a bit of both men in Dianne Feinstein. She flies first class, likes such Republican concepts as “management by objective” and has no apologies for her wealth. Asked if it hinders her ability to connect with voters, she says : “I would like for everybody to have what I have. I know that’s impossible, but there is one thing government can provide and that is opportunity.”

On the other hand, she also likes to drink beer and watch pro football. And she has taken under her wing a black youth, Anthony Bell, who grew up far from her life of privilege. Anthony, whom she met when she began going to the city’s poor Hunter’s Point section, often visits her and calls seeking advice about schoolwork and jobs. His picture is on the mantel of her rented condo in Century City.

As a girl, Feinstein was horse crazy, getting up before dawn every day to go to the stables down in the San Francisco flats. It was one way to get her mind off a difficult relationship with her mother, who had a brain disorder that was not discovered until the CAT scanner was invented. According to Feinstein, Betty Goldman’s mood swings were terrifying. “My mother was difficult,” she says. “There were things I don’t want to go into--alcoholism, suicide attempts. We didn’t know that a part of her brain that governs reason just wasn’t operating.” Once, after a row, Betty locked her daughter out of the house for the night even though Dianne had to take her college boards the next day. Dianne spent the night in the family car.

Feinstein says that although her mother’s illness made things rough at times, she does not think she had an unhappy childhood. Her father and her uncle doted on the young tomboy. “It was not always easy with my mother, but she was still a good mother. She took good care of me and my sisters. I think I can say I was happy growing up.”

She was educated in public schools until she was ready for high school, when her mother insisted that she attend Convent of the Sacred Heart, a favorite of wealthy San Franciscans. Since even wealthy Jews in those days were rarely admitted to the top social circles in the city, Betty Goldman’s choice was an attempt to help her daughter crack those circles. To please her father, Feinstein also went to Jewish religious school.

“I was the first Jew at Sacred Heart,” she says. “And it turned out to be a pretty good recipe. In Judaism, you believe in a code of morality and ethics to live as the one God would have you live. In Catholicism, it is more a day-to-day code, and I eventually found a lot of solace in the Catholic Church.” (She does not attend services of either faith regularly but says she draws strength from both; when her second husband died, she went to church to light a candle.)

Feinstein says the nuns at Sacred Heart spotted a lack of discipline in her that they tried to cure, without much success. In college at Stanford, she played golf and partied too much. “I was not a distinguished student. I took a course called Western Civilization and I really applied myself in the first quarter and got an A-plus. So they put me in independent study, a big fat mistake,” she recalls. “I went and played, didn’t study at all.” She planned to study medicine but got a D in genetics and switched to history and political science. “I got an A-plus in American Political Thought and realized this was my aptitude.”

The good-looking young woman earned some extra money modeling, showing off furs on a local TV show her uncle started. She was elected student body vice president at college and thought about how to buck the unbroken tradition of male presidents. She claims that she conducted her own informal poll and found out that the men “would rather elect a duck or a pig than a woman.”

After graduating, she returned to San Francisco to take a Coro Fellowship, which allowed her to spend a year studying the district attorney’s office. There she met Jack Berman, a prosecutor 11 years her senior. Within months, they eloped--to Los Angeles, because no rabbi in San Francisco would dare marry Leon Goldman’s daughter in secret to an older man. The couple had a daughter, Katherine, who today is an attorney on leave to work in her mother’s campaign. She is Feinstein’s only child.

The marriage to Jack Berman, now a Superior Court judge, foundered when Katherine was a baby. “He was brilliant, worldly,” Feinstein says. “But he wanted to keep me barefoot and pregnant. I could not be that kind of wife.” They divorced in 1959.

On her own with a small child, Feinstein got an appointment in the early 1960s to a state board that handles prison terms and parole requests for women. One night at a party in San Francisco, a nice man stooped to shake little Katherine’s hand. He was Bertram Feinstein, a top neurosurgeon and a man 20 years older than Dianne. They began dating and soon were married--this time with her father’s blessing. Bert Feinstein put Dianne back into the kind of secure world in which she had grown up.

“Bert was like a father figure to Dianne,” says Henry Berman, a family friend who is now Feinstein’s campaign treasurer. “He was a doctor, and doctors are busy seven days a week. That was great because Dianne was never cut out to be a housewife.” She didn’t have to wait to cook dinner at an appointed hour. “She can’t even boil water. So she created a life for herself in politics.”

In 1969 she announced for the Board of Supervisors. A number of powerful men, including former Mayor Elmer Robinson, tried to discourage her because there was a woman on the board and they thought that one was enough. Feinstein not only ran but, relying heavily on television ads, received the most votes. As the top vote-getter, she automatically became president of the board, the first woman in that job. Duane Garrett, a San Francisco lawyer who is Feinstein’s campaign chairman, recalls that as a supervisor, “she was a League of Women Voters politician,” concerned about good government issues and obscure neighborhood disputes. But Feinstein was more ambitious than Garrett and others had expected. In 1971, she challenged one of the city’s most powerful men, Mayor Joseph Alioto. He trounced her.

Feinstein met Dick Blum while heading a board of economic advisers for the city. They began dating in 1978, after his divorce and after Bert Feinstein’s death. Blum and Feinstein were married in a City Hall service in January, 1980. Blum, 54, is a tall, aggressive man who led the first American climbing party to approach Mt. Everest from the Chinese side. His father once sold underwear in San Francisco, but today Dick Blum sells an investment banking service that has made him and some of his clients very rich.

He won’t say how rich, but last year Richard C. Blum & Associates participated in the leveraged buyout of Northwest Airlines by putting in $100 million, or 11% of the deal. The firm’s other clients include Firemen’s Fund Insurance and BankAmerica. The company’s annual return has averaged 37% in the past five years, of which he gets a fee of 1 1/2% of the money managed plus 15% of the profits. The couple is worth many millions--how many millions may become clearer when she releases their tax returns in the coming months.

Blum has been Feinstein’s closest adviser in her campaign for governor. It was he who persuaded her to hire Clint Reilly as campaign consultant even though she detested Reilly. And it was Blum who told her it was “good riddance” after Reilly quit in a noisy huff a year later.

CLINT REILLY, a political battler who sounds like Jack Nicholson, is one of the few consultants in America who ever fired a candidate; usually it’s the other way around. Last August, after months of bickering, Reilly left, charging that Feinstein lacked “the fire in the belly” to make the run for governor. Over dinner at Postrio, Reilly is still seething months later. He brings stacks of documents to show “that Dianne’s candidacy is a hoax.” Whenever Reilly says “Dianne,” the whole restaurant seems to lean his way as in the famous E. F. Hutton commercial.

Reilly offers a memo from Feinstein telling him he could not spend money on telephone calls while she was hospitalized for a hysterectomy last summer. “Dianne wanted me to do everything for free while she spent most of her time in her big house on the hill. She would never do the work you’ve got to do to raise money for a race like this. She’s lazy.”

Sometimes Feinstein also takes odd positions for a Democrat with statewide ambitions. For example, she sided with insurance companies during the 1988 battle-royal over auto insurance reform in California. She backed the industry’s proposition because it called for tort reform and spurned the grass-roots Proposition 103, which won, because it was supposed to lower rates in Los Angeles while raising them elsewhere. Van de Kamp’s campaign likes to point out that some of her husband’s top clients are insurance companies.

More recently, Feinstein told the San Mateo Chamber of Commerce that what California needs is an Office of Economic Development. But California already has one. It is called the Commission for Economic Development.

William Carrick, Reilly’s replacement, shrugs at the mistakes and Reilly’s charges. “Ah, 35 people in the state of California care about the inside baseball of politics,” says Carrick, a folksy South Carolinian who has been asked to turn the campaign around. “When the voters begin to pay attention to this thing, Dianne is going to be ready. She wants to learn, she got some bad advice in the past, she got kicked around (by Reilly) and she was told she didn’t know what she was doing.

“Listen, she is a natural leader; she is one of the best natural political talents I have ever been associated with,” says Carrick, who ran the presidential campaign of Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) in 1988. Carrick and partner Hank Morris spent $450,000 in Los Angeles alone airing Feinstein’s first TV ad.

The ad apparently had an impact: In the latest California Poll, taken earlier this month, Feinstein moved slightly ahead of Van de Kamp, by four points, after having trailed him last October by 18 points.

Still, Feinstein acknowledges that she misjudged the difficulty of raising money and getting becoming known in Southern California, but says it has nothing to do with laziness. “There is a big advantage, for one thing, in running for governor from another office, as John and Pete are doing. It’s having a platform, which is naturally covered by the press. The argument that I should have gotten down here and gotten going sooner is correct, but I couldn’t do it, largely for health reasons,” she says, referring to the operation she had last in August. (One of her top advisers privately disputes this explanation, saying she Feinstein did little politically even before then because she assumed that Republican Gov. George Deukmejian would run for a third term.) “I also think I have to maintain a Northern California base; the majority of my funds come from the north, and you can’t just leave it entirely.”

Her opponents foresee problems--and opportunities--in trying to knock her out of the race. Having to run against a woman candidate presents special problems, says Wilson campaign manager George Gorton. “The voters expect the male candidate to be a gentleman and the female to be a lady. But you have to point out the flaws in your opponent and we will do it. I think if we faced Feinstein, we’d go after the budget deficit she left the city of San Francisco.”

“For someone running in a Democratic primary, Feinstein is just wrong on too many issues,” Van de Kamp campaign manager Richie Ross argues. “She vetoed comparable worth when she was mayor, she supported the insurance industry in the prop battle in ‘88, she took a walk (by not actively campaigning for the anti-toxics) Proposition 65 four years ago. If I can keep the campaign on substance, we’ll be fine. I don’t want it to be all glitz and star-quality stuff because that is the way she has always tried to run.”

Feinstein’s people are concentrating on raising the funds they will need to take advantage of her mediagenic personality and in getting across her message, such as it is, that she is a tough leader in tune with the average voter and not beholden to special interests.

She formally announced her candidacy this month, promising an activist, accessible administration she said would contrast with the past seven years under Deukmejian. Her priorities would include a comprehensive mental health plan that would remove some of the homeless from the streets; guaranteed health insurance for all working Californians and early education for all 4-year-olds. Feinstein suggests that bonds might be one way to finance such programs without raising taxes.

In a tranquil setting over lunch in Beverly Hills, she explains, as all candidates must at some point, why she is seeking this job. “I’m a native Californian, I’ve lived here all my life and I see what is happening. The state is drifting. Growth is increasing, crime is increasing, the livability of the state for most people is decreasing,” she says. “I also believe that I think like most Californians, that I want what most Californians want.

“My vision for the state is very simple: It should be a state where your kids can get a good public education; you should be able to walk to your home or your car or your business and use your parks without living in fear. It should be a state where you can breathe clean air and drink pure water. It should be a state of opportunity.”

She gives an example of how she would approach being governor : Mindful of the Medfly furor building in vote-rich Los Angeles County, she cites Deukmejian’s relative quiet on the the current infestation. “What the governor ought to do is have a fireside chat with the California public in prime time and explain the realities. We cannot ignore the Medfly or our agriculture will be badly hurt. Obviously people are upset about the spraying, especially in parts of Los Angeles, and they should not be ignored. But it takes a special touch with people; you have to let them know you do care about what is upsetting them.”

Feinstein is strong in Northern California, but Carrick knows that the challenge is to duplicate that strength in Southern California, where a majority of the state’s voters live and where Van de Kamp, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles County, has a huge advantage.

That’s why the campaign spent nearly half a million dollars airing its first TV commercial in the Los Angeles media market. With crime being a major issue among voters in this market, Feinstein took a swipe at Van de Kamp by pointing out that she is for capital punishment while he is not. But if Feinstein is to win the Democratic nomination, political experts believe she’ll have to spend at least another $2 million airing ads in Southern California. Blum has loaned the Feinstein campaign $1.3 million, and another $1 million has been raised from other sources. “Dianne’s biggest fund-raising event was breakfast with her husband,” Ross says sarcastically.

Feinstein also has begun a direct-mail campaign that is pulling in more money than she had expected. One such mailing features the photos of Feinstein, Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood on the envelope. It is supposed to stress Feinstein’s toughness. “It would make my day,” Feinstein says in the letter, “to say a resounding ‘NO’ to those who would dictate to the rest of us on issues like birth control and abortion. . . . It’s about time we drew the line on offshore oil drilling and toxic waste . . . and also about time in this state to get back to the good old-fashioned American ideal that government works for us.”

Nowhere does she mention that she is a Democrat, an acknowledgment that she has always done almost as well with independents and Republicans as she has with Democrats. “Dianne is trying to go beyond the traditional constituency-based Democratic campaign,” Carrick says. The problem: Independents and Republicans can’t vote in the Democratic primary. But Feinstein can rightly claim that if the Democrats want to scare Wilson in November, she may be their best chance. Wilson aide Gorton frankly fears her: “Feinstein is more meteoric, more mediagenic, more able to break out of any box you try to put her in than Van de Kamp.”

Los Angeles political consultant Michael Berman, who is neutral in the race, says, “Dianne has the perfect profile for a Democrat. She is a conservative who looks like a liberal.” He explains that because she is a woman from San Francisco, Feinstein has a liberal image that should help her in the primary. But once in the general election she could move right by stressing her support for the death penalty, a reduction in crime in San Francisco while she was mayor and her studied lack of interest in the Democratic Party’s liberal interest groups.

Few people know California’s demographics like Berman, who drew up California’s election districts after the 1980 census. In his mind, a major “swing area” in the governor’s race will be the rapidly growing San Joaquin Valley. It is a more conservative area than San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Republican candidates usually thrive there in statewide races. Berman says Feinstein’s conservative side could be marketed in the Valley well enough to undercut Wilson. “No Democrat,” Berman says, “can win statewide without getting within 10 points of the Republican (candidate) in the Valley. I think Dianne could do it.”

In the meantime, as time grows shorter, she is honing her message. “The politics of the past is the interest groups: Are you pro business, are you pro labor, whatever? The politics of the future, which I represent, is the politics of the individual and of the family,” she says.

And her spirits appear to be good as she gets ready for more of the handshaking and money soliciting and repeated interrogations that are required of anyone who wants to govern California. One day recently, as she was waiting to tape a cable television show in Los Angeles, she chatted with a woman reporter, lightly poking at the men in the room. “Do I look OK?” she asks the reporter. “You know, men will never tell you your blouse is unbuttoned. But it’s funny about men, they always tell each other when their fly is unzipped.”

The doubts that she would even stay in the race have now disappeared. At last, she has assembled a top-flight campaign team. Perhaps most important, this former empress of San Francisco has finally found her way to Southern California. And now this woman whose whole life has been lived in and shaped by that glittering city will begin testing her strength and her wits on a far bigger turf. Oddly enough, she is confident about that, too. She believes voters will come to see that she’s not a conventional Bay Area liberal. She says, with some justification: “My thinking is more in sync with mainstream California than it is with mainstream San Francisco.”