CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : Candidates Set Eyes on ’92 and a Run at Cranston

Driven to distraction by incessant campaign commercials? Wallet emptied by pleas from persistent candidates? Don’t expect a rest.

Those exhausted by the primary campaign just past and bleary at the prospects of political combat this fall can see another behemoth looming out there--the 1992 campaign season. No matter that the 1990 campaign is but half over. Candidates already are jumping into the fray for 1992.

U.S. Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Sacramento) collected $50,000 at a Los Angeles fund-raiser a few weeks back. A West Los Angeles colleague, Democratic Rep. Mel Levine, pocketed $75,000 for his campaign at a recent Washington bash.

And Barbara Boxer, the Democratic representative from Marin, could earn as much as $85,000 from a party last Thursday at the posh Brentwood home of activist Stanley Sheinbaum.

These members of Congress do not need the money to beat back opponents in their 1990 reelection races--each has previously swamped competitors and each has a deep bank account. Rather, their eyes are set on bids for the U.S. Senate in 1992--and with the multimillion-dollar costs associated with that campaign, it is never too early to pluck checks from the hands of willing donors.

Last week in Los Angeles, it was Boxer’s turn in her first Southern California fund-raiser since 1981.

“I’ve left you alone down here in Los Angeles for nine years and now I’m going to bother you a lot,” she joked to supporters who milled around Sheinbaum’s art-filled home. The money she collected was “important to my reelection effort--and important to my future,” she added pointedly.

Boxer has yet to declare her candidacy for the Senate, though she edges enticingly close. Others take it as a matter of fact that she will run. As he conceded defeat to Dianne Feinstein last week, gubernatorial candidate John K. Van de Kamp turned to Boxer, his most vocal supporter among elected officials, and wished her well.

“If Dianne Feinstein can do it, you can do it,” he said.

Asked at a meeting of Los Angeles women lawyers last week about her plans, she said she would make a formal announcement after November, when she is expected to have won her fifth term in Congress.

By November, the now-uncertain complexion of the 1992 campaign will be set. At this point, Boxer, Matsui and Levine--among others--all are looking to challenge veteran incumbent Alan Cranston, whose six-year term expires then and whose popularity has plummeted as a result of the long-running Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal. Cranston is among a group of five senators accused of having pressured federal regulators to back off in an investigation of Lincoln and its director, Charles Keating, who was a financial supporter of Cranston’s.

But Cranston’s may not be the only Senate seat up in 1992. If Republican Sen. Pete Wilson wins the governorship, his appointed successor would be running in a special election in 1992, and again in 1994 when the seat is scheduled to come up for election.

While it likely would be against someone lesser-known than Cranston, the race for the Wilson seat is seen as particularly tough because of the fund-raising pressures of back-to-back elections.

“Who wants to raise $20 million in 1992 and go back and do it again in 1994?” an aide to one of the Democrats said.

Of the potential combatants, Matsui has gone the furthest in committing to a Senate race--he told friends months ago of his plans to challenge Cranston, and has hired San Francisco-based campaign consultant Clint Reilly to help frame his effort. Levine publicly has said only that he is anticipating reelection to the Congress, but a colleague says he is “taking a very hard look” at the Senate.

For Boxer, money is paramount to the success of her effort, given the flush bank accounts and known fund-raising prowess of Matsui and Levine. Playing catch-up to them, she is pressing two issues she has long championed--a ban on offshore oil drilling and the battle for abortion rights.

Last week in Los Angeles, before the movie industry-based Show Coalition, her financial supporters and the women lawyers, she reiterated her support of a permanent ban on offshore oil drilling and federal funding for abortions. She also pressed forward a notion that is gaining in popularity among Democrats nationally--the use of the so-called “peace dividend,” derived from the savings from the cutback of military programs, on social needs.

She rarely mentioned Cranston; the villain in her speeches was President Bush, with whom she differs on the issues of oil drilling and abortion.

“We have a golden moment in history,” she said in pushing for more spending on education and health care. “It’s time for a new kind of patriotism.”

Boxer’s sales pitch is general at this point--at the West Hollywood meeting of the Show Coalition, she brushed off a query about how realistic a peace dividend is, given the immense drain on the budget by the deficit and the spiraling cost of the savings and loan bailout.

But she is traveling the state making connections--San Francisco last week for a fund-raiser headlined by former presidential candidate and current congressional majority leader Richard Gephardt, Eureka on the weekend, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Modesto. . . .

And she is mining yet another vein of appeal. Boxer, if she runs, will be following only one campaign season behind Feinstein’s history-making run for the governorship. And whichever way the Feinstein-Wilson race goes, Boxer clearly hopes that 1992 will bring forth California’s first woman senator.

“History has taught me that every time a woman succeeds, it makes it easier for the next woman to succeed,” she said.