Doctors, Lawyers Raise Funds for Feinstein

A group of Ventura County doctors and lawyers raised about $20,000 Monday at a reception to help Dianne Feinstein’s campaign for governor, moving the Democratic nominee a small step closer to the $10-million campaign she says she needs to win.

The fund-raiser, one of about a dozen Feinstein will attend this week, is part of the price of running for governor of the most populous state in the nation.

Although Feinstein raised $5.8 million through June 30, a tough battle for the party’s nomination in the June primary left her with only $645,344 in cash. The Republican nominee, Sen. Pete Wilson, who had no significant primary challenger, had nearly $4 million in the bank as of the end of June.

Monday’s fund-raising reception was wedged into a quick, one-day campaign swing that began in Santa Barbara with a policy statement on Feinstein’s opposition to offshore oil drilling and ended at the Ventura Harbor with a stump speech to union leaders.

“It’s a big race,” Feinstein said, urging more of the crowd of about 100 lawyers and doctors to join her “cabinet” of $1,000 donors. “We don’t just want your money, we want your knowledge, too.”

Most of those attending Monday’s $100-a-person fund-raiser at the Tower Club in Oxnard were attorneys who handle workers’ compensation claims or physicians who treat injured workers in Ventura County. The race is important to this group because the governor appoints administrators of the state workers’ compensation program.

“It’s a big fight against insurance companies and self-insured companies,” said Louis Vigorita, a Ventura lawyer who joined Feinstein’s 2,000-member group of big donors. He said Gov. George Deukmejian has disappointed doctors and lawyers in the field by not looking out for the interests of injured workers.

“Pete Wilson would just be a rubber stamp of Deukmejian’s policies,” Vigorita said. “Dianne is our future. We are hoping as a new governor she will help us.”

In a speech Monday night to labor leaders at the Harbortown Marina Resort in Ventura, Feinstein criticized Wilson, as a U.S. senator, for receiving “more contributions from the scandal-ridden savings and loan industry than anyone else in the entire Congress.”

“Frankly, I don’t believe California can afford to have a governor who is beholden to the savings and loan industry,” Feinstein told members of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Wilson has said it was unfair for Common Cause, a self-styled citizens lobby, to single him out as the top recipient of savings and loan political donations because he had to raise money for two elections during a period that most of his colleagues only ran for office once.

Furthermore, Wilson said he refused to intervene on behalf of savings and loan officials and he has opposed legislation to bail out the savings and loan industry.

At a policy speech in Santa Barbara, Feinstein said she opposed offshore oil drilling and outlined several steps she would take as governor to protect the state’s coast from the dangers of an oil spill.

She said she would seek to extend state control over coastal waters from today’s three-mile limit to 12 miles out to sea. In addition, she said, she supports establishing a $500-million fund from oil transport fees that could be used for immediate cleanup of any spill and restore areas contaminated by oil.