CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Feinstein Pushes to Get Edge While Wilson’s Away

With the governor’s race a statistical dead heat, Dianne Feinstein on Saturday was feeling the cold fear that sneaks into a candidate’s mind as Election Day comes ever closer: Will enough people turn out to vote?

As Republican Pete Wilson spent another day in Washington, where federal budget negotiations continued, Feinstein was shoring up her support with appeals meant to ensure a high voter turnout Nov. 6.

Before several hundred black ministers in the Crenshaw district, before a dozen Neighborhood Watch members in Canoga Park and scores more at a well-heeled fund-raiser in Encino, Feinstein lobbied for voter activism.

“The polls show the race is equal,” she told donors at her last stop. “I need your help. . . . I need you to go out and talk to 10, 15, 20, 50 of your friends and get them to the polls.”

Turnout has been a particular problem for Democrats in the past--and Feinstein can be expected to beat the drums on that issue ever more loudly in the 16 days remaining before the election.

“The Republicans tend to be higher-propensity voters,” said Dee Dee Myers, Feinstein’s spokeswoman. “Democrats always have to turn out the faithful, so we’re obviously putting some premium on that in the closing weeks.”

For good measure, Feinstein was also giving her voters reason to stick with her by issuing blistering attacks on Wilson’s Senate voting record.

In her speech to ministers at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, Feinstein targeted for criticism both Wilson and President Bush, who has refused to sign the Civil Rights Restoration Act unless changes are made.

Wilson and Bush contend the bill as passed by Congress is unfair to businesses and would force them into hiring quotas to avoid costly lawsuits. Wilson voted against the legislation in the Senate last week, but it passed nonetheless.

Feinstein said Bush would “break the back” of civil rights laws with a veto.

“And who is his accomplice in the denial of basic fairness to working men and women? None other than my Republican opponent, Pete Wilson,” she said.

The Democrat dismissed Wilson’s concerns that the civil rights bill would set up de facto hiring quotas. The issue of quotas has been a recurrent one in the campaign for governor, with Wilson contending that Feinstein herself proposed quotas when she said she would appoint women and minorities to her administration in direct proportion to their numbers in California.

“The legislation sets no quotas,” she said. “I’ve always opposed quotas, for mathematics will never replace common decency as the arbiter of human conduct. . . . The legislation simply makes clear what we know in our hearts--no person should be denied work because of color or sex.”

Later in Encino, Feinstein expanded her anti-Wilson remarks by deploring his Senate votes against federal funding for abortions.

“You can’t be pro-choice if you vote against the ability of poor women to be able to have reproductive rights counseling and abortion if necessary,” she said. “. . . As governor, I would veto any infringement of a woman’s right to choose.” Wilson has said he would support federal payments for abortions only if there were no other source of funding for poor women.

While Feinstein was campaigning in Southern California, Wilson was in Washington working in his office, an aide said. The Senate was working on appropriations bills, but no votes were cast.

Until debate on the federal budget forced him to stay in Washington, Wilson had planned to barnstorm across Southern and Central California on Saturday.

The senator’s decision to go back to Washington last Monday may have cooled the heat of Feinstein’s accusations that he was “missing in action,” but it has frustrated his attempts to campaign.

Wilson has been present in a manner of speaking--he began running a campaign commercial Friday night that accuses Feinstein of raising taxes and attempts to knock down her criticism of his Senate absence. The Democratic candidate Saturday called the ad “not accurate” because it misrepresents both her record on taxes and his record on absences.

To bolster his visibility, the senator also plans to deliver by satellite Monday an address to the California League of Cities. Earlier, he had planned to speak in person.

A televised debate between the two candidates has been scheduled for Thursday in San Francisco. But on Saturday, it was far from certain whether it would occur. Feinstein said she did not believe the debate was in jeopardy.

“Hopefully, the nation will be behind its (budget) crisis by that time,” she said. “But as I’ve said, we’ll find another day if we have to.”

Wilson’s spokesman, Bill Livingstone, said the debate hinged on the speed with which Congress tackles its final spending bills. “We still don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.

While Wilson is tied up in Washington, Feinstein plans to campaign whole-heartedly, in defiance of an earlier pledge to take a break during his absence. The dangers of a less than full-throttle attempt to catch voters’ interest were powerfully evident Saturday at the Crenshaw church by virtue of the presence of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. In 1982, he lost the governorship to George Deukmejian by less than 53,000 votes out of the 7.5 million cast. That year, turnout was surprisingly low in the black community--a lesson not forgotten by the Feinstein backers who gathered Saturday.

“We lost the election because we didn’t go to the polls when Tom Bradley was running for governor,” Bishop E. Lynn Brown said.