CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS: GOVERNOR : Feinstein Ad Accuses Wilson of S&L; Lie

Seeking to blunt Republican Pete Wilson’s effort to tighten the savings and loan noose around her neck, Dianne Feinstein will take to the airwaves today with a commercial that directly accuses Wilson of lying.

The third in a back-and-forth series of television advertisements meant to sway voters on the potentially volatile issue of the nation’s most expensive financial crisis, the Feinstein spot features the Democratic gubernatorial nominee speaking directly into the camera--and thus to voters.

“Pete Wilson thinks he can win this campaign by attacking me personally, so he’s lying about me,” Feinstein tells the audience.

“He falsely claims that I own a savings and loan. The truth is, I don’t,” she adds.

Wilson, in an advertisement still running statewide, says that Feinstein and her husband, investment banker Richard C. Blum, “own” an Oregon savings and loan that received a “sweetheart,” multimillion-dollar bailout from the federal government.

According to Feinstein and her husband, Blum’s financial services firm bought an interest in Jackson County Savings & Loan of Medford, Ore., after Blum was asked to step in and prevent the institution’s collapse.

Feinstein, in the new commercial, says that Blum’s interest in the firm amounts to one-quarter of 1%. The federal moneys that Wilson has termed a “sweetheart” deal were usual loan guarantees for the institution’s investors and those who have money in the S&L;, Feinstein and federal regulators say.

Despite the Wilson commercial’s insinuation that the deal cost the government money, a federal regulator dealing with Jackson has said that Blum’s infusion saved money that the government would have spent to pay off investors had Jackson gone under.

Wilson’s press secretary, Bill Livingstone, said the Republican “stands by our ad.” He said Blum holds through his companies a “controlling interest”in the Oregon savings and loan which Wilson has defined as ownership.

Feinstein’s press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, said the 30-second advertisement will begin airing across the state today and will replace an advertisement launched Aug. 9 that attemptedto blame Wilson for the S&L; crisis.

The new advertisement comes two days after a Los Angeles Times Poll found the two candidates running dead even as the race heads into the traditional Labor Day kickoff.

The poll, however, illuminated broad changes in the electorate’s views of the candidates. Feinstein, the poll said, has lost her once-substantial edge among women, and Wilson has lost his among men. Voters appear to be relating to the candidates less by gender and more by party affiliation.

There was some bad news for Feinstein in the results. For almost three weeks, she has been airing the commercial that accuses Wilson of acting on behalf of the savings and loan industry because he received more than $243,000 in campaign contributions from industry members in the last nine years.

But, asked whether “any candidate running for office in California this year has received large contributions from the savings and loan industry,” three-quarters of poll respondents said they did not know. At least in the minds of the majority of voters, Feinstein appears not to have linked Wilson with large campaign contributions from the scandal-plagued industry.

Interestingly, Feinstein does not press that connection in her newest commercial, maintaining instead her personal distance from the financial mess and, by extension, Wilson’s closeness.

“The savings and loan crisis happened because politicians in Washington and Sacramento didn’t protect people and Pete Wilson knows it,” she says at the commercial’s close.

In tone, Feinstein’s effort is in the mold of an ad she ran earlier this year during her primary contest with Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp. There, she also spoke directly to voters, drawing a comparison between Van de Kamp’s negative ads against her and Richard Nixon’s negative attacks against his former competitor for a U.S. Senate seat, Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Feinstein asked then that the campaign return to the so-called high road, ground that her contest with Wilson has only rarely occupied.

Both have run ads sharply critical of the other, and their campaign rhetoric has grown increasingly biting and personal--all this in the summer, a season which is traditionally known not for political firefights but for the respite it provides voters before things get really hot.