CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / ATTORNEY GENERAL : Democrats’ Debate Shows Differences Aren’t Great

Primary election campaigns can be like this. Edgy voices, an undercurrent of anger--lots of emotion.

But when the candidates sit down together for breakfast, in this case Democratic contenders for attorney general Arlo Smith and Ira Reiner, what emerges is squabbling brothers at the kitchen table--two people who see the world much the same, whose goals are quite similar, and whose rivalry is all the keener for it.

Reiner and Smith, district attorneys of Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, debated Tuesday in front of reporters at an unusual forum in which television was excluded--and some of the theatrics went out of their hotly contested race. The two were calmer and perhaps a little more compelling than when the lights grow hot and cameras roll.

For those who follow this give-and-take closely, each candidate succeeded in advancing a case against the other for the June 5 primary:

Reiner in charging that Smith had not aggressively pursued worker death cases, a charge that Smith had trouble answering. And Smith saying Reiner is out of line in calling him weak in prosecuting oil companies because there are no oil facilities, except headquarters offices, in San Francisco.

By his count, Reiner said that in five years he has prosecuted 35 cases of employer negligence in worker deaths, with 30 more cases pending. By contrast, he said, Smith “in 11 years has not filed a single case involving the death of a worker.”

Smith began, “We have worked closely with the (labor) unions on a number of actions.”

Please name one, a questioner interjected.

“Of course, the base we have is entirely different in San Francisco in terms of the industry. Of course we’ve investigated a number of actions involving worker safety with federal OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and the unions up there are perfectly satisfied with the job we do. The fact of the matter is. . . .”

Are crane operators satisfied? Smith was asked. “Oh, yes, absolutely,” he replied.

A crane accident last November killed five in the city, and is still under investigation.

If this exchange worked to Reiner’s advantage, the Los Angeles district attorney seemed taken aback when one of his standard charges against Smith appeared to reach a dead-end.

The two frequently squabble over who is the better environmentalist. To wit, Reiner makes the claim that he has achieved 30 successful prosecutions of oil companies in five years; Smith none in 11 years.

“Ridiculous . . . apples and oranges,” Smith countered. Unlike Los Angeles, there are no oil fields in San Francisco, no oil storage facilities, no refineries, no off-loading, no offshore oil rigs. “To make that kind of comparison is a distortion,” Smith said.

The debate was sponsored by The Friday Group, a 17-year-old organization of Southern California politically oriented journalists.

There was even less dispute between the two men on other matters. Both said they would increase the attorney general’s emphasis on investigating the ethics of public officials, both said they wanted to guard against political judgments in corruption cases, and both said they would give a higher priority to enforcement of environmental laws.

As they have before, they agreed to disagree on the role of the attorney general in defending state agencies. Reiner said he viewed the job as owing its loyalty directly to the public, so he would not represent agencies and policies with which he disagreed. Smith said he thought the job of the attorney general was to represent the government except in those instances where he felt the government sought to act unconstitutionally.

In the end, though, it was obvious: There are limits to the differences that anyone can expect when district attorneys, Democrats, career law-and-order men, seek the job as California’s top law enforcement official.

Only when they were asked about the November general election with GOP nominee-apparent Dan Lungren, a conservative former congressman from Long Beach, did Reiner and Smith offer voters something meaty to sink their teeth into.

Smith listed the three main issues he sees in the general election: Support of abortion rights (Lungren is anti-abortion), an emphasis on experience (Lungren has not managed a large bureaucracy), and tough talk on the environment (Lungren supports offshore oil drilling for energy independence). Reiner agreed, except in sequence. He listed his three: abortion, environment and experience.