CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : The Debates Done, Democrats Get Back to Throwing Punches

If you missed their one-hour live televised debate--and almost everyone did--Democratic candidates for governor John K. Van de Kamp and Dianne Feinstein served up a surly, daylong rerun Monday and intensified their quarreling over his leadership on crime and her’s on management.

The KCBS debate Sunday between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. was the choice of seven of 100 Los Angeles-area households where the TV was turned on--a better showing than reruns of the “A-Team” and “Hart to Hart,” but far behind the John Candy movie “Summer Rental.”

Overnight ratings in the Los Angeles-Orange County market showed 158,000 households tuned in for politics, while nearly 2 million watched something else, according to the station.

Still, the two Democratic candidates seemed satisfied, and probably relieved, with the tone and outcome of their second and last debate before the June 5 primary.

Both emerged standing on their feet, with no horrible mistakes to try to explain away in these last two weeks of the campaign, and ready to plunge back into the more familiar and controlled pace of daily speech-making, press conferences and television advertising. And the questions lingering from the debate served as the handy, if slightly worn, framework.

For Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, that meant keeping her attention on crime, judgment and Van de Kamp, the two-term attorney general.

In particular, she tried to fan the flames of doubt over the most explosive case ever to confront Van de Kamp--the 1981 sex murders of 10 young women in a case known as the Hillside Strangler. Van de Kamp, then district attorney of Los Angeles, said he doubted the strength of evidence against one of the killers, Angelo Buono, and decided to pursue sex crime charges rather than seek a murder conviction. A judge thought otherwise and refused to dismiss the murder charges. The office of then-Atty. Gen. George Deukmejian took over the case and obtained a murder conviction.

Van de Kamp has called his decision a “mistake” and has said, “It’s one I wish I could get back.”

“It’s not enough eight years after the fact to grudgingly confess a mistake and to declare the issue is over,” Feinstein concluded. “This issue transcends the attorney general’s effort at political damage control and speaks to his whole record . . . (to his) character and judgment as an individual.”

In particular, she ridiculed Van de Kamp for refusing to take oil company contributions as a matter of honor while he has taken money from Buono’s defense attorney, Santa Monica lawyer Gerald Chaleff.

“Why would John Van de Kamp accept fund-raising help of more than $10,000 from the Hillside Strangler’s lawyer in this very campaign?” she asked at a midday press conference held on the sidewalk in front of the attorney general’s Wilshire Boulevard office.

According to the Van de Kamp campaign, Chaleff has donated $130 to Van de Kamp directly in the last six years, and co-hosted two fund-raisers at which an additional $14,275 was raised.

In response, Van de Kamp said Feinstein was using the case to divert attention from her refusal to spell out just how she would balance a state budget that now is projected to be $3.6 billion in the red.

“That’s a complete duck,” he said. “She will not deal with the budget crisis . . . so she goes on this diversionary attack.”

At appearances in Santa Monica and San Francisco, Van de Kamp pressed Feinstein on the matter of the budget deficit, saying he had gone out of his way to be as specific “as any candidate for governor in recent history” with a list of tax hikes, including an income tax boost on the wealthy, along with cuts in some programs.

“Governors are elected to deal with budgets, to cut budgets where it’s required--not to cut ribbons,” he said. “It’s no secret the state budget is a mess. The only secret is what Dianne Feinstein would do about it.”

“Pie in the sky,” Feinstein responded. She noted that Van de Kamp would need bipartisan cooperation from the Legislature just to get his plan enacted--unlikely considering Republican opposition to tax increases.

“In summary, this isn’t a serious statement,” she said. “I don’t believe you can do it this way. You have to sit down with both sides of the aisle and negotiate.”

Times staff writers Cathleen Decker and George Skelton contributed to this report.