CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Come Home, Feinstein Asks Reagan Democrats

Dianne Feinstein sharpened and focused her rhetoric on traditional party issues of equal rights and economic fairness Saturday with an invitation to Reagan Democrats to “come home” to the Democratic Party.

As she battled to break ahead of Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson in their fight for California’s governorship, Feinstein sought to persuade working men and women that they had been betrayed by the “trickle-down” promise of Ronald Reagan’s economics. In fact, she said, the wealthy had benefited by the “trickle-up” of tax cuts and reforms.

And she lashed Wilson and the Bush Administration for thwarting passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, saying the President’s veto, barely upheld by the Senate with Wilson’s vote, was “particularly insulting” to women. This, she said, was because the proposed law would have given women the right to sue for actual damages to redress alleged discrimination on the job.

Such a vote does not reflect the diversity of California in which 42% of the people belong to some minority group and 51% are women, Feinstein said. In speeches in Sacramento on Saturday and in Santa Rosa on Friday night, Feinstein said a major difference between herself and Wilson is that “the Republican Party is the party that has favored the rich with respect to taxation.”

The key dispute in the struggle over the federal budget, she said, was whether to redress some of the inequities of the 1980s by forcing the wealthy to pay a surtax on income.

Then, addressing the Sacramento convention of the Black American Political Assn. of California, a group founded by Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown Jr. (D-San Francisco), she promised, “That’s not going to be the tax policy of a Feinstein Administration.”

If she is elected, Feinstein said she first would try to solve the state’s budget problems by cutting spending. If new taxes are needed, she would try to restore the top income tax bracket of 11%. Currently, the highest rate is 9.3%.

Feinstein also challenged Wilson to say whom he might appoint to his Senate vacancy if he is elected governor one week from Tuesday.

Californians voting for Wilson on Nov. 6 in effect will be voting for two offices, she said: Wilson for governor and then his own personal choice to succeed him in the Senate.

“Is that successor going to be an Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a John Danforth (R-Mo.), a John Heinz (R-Pa.), who worked with Sen. (Edward M). Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the 1990 Civil Rights Act or will that successor be the Jesse Helms, the Strom Thurmond who voted against the 1990 Civil Rights Act?”she asked. “Will he be pro-civil rights or will he be anti-civil rights?”

Sens. Helms and Thurmond are conservative Republicans from North and South Carolina.

Wilson has refused to say whom he might appoint, other than that the new senator would have to share his political views. Specifically, Wilson said his replacement would have to be in favor of abortion rights and not be an extremely conservative Republican.

In appealing to Reagan Democrats to return to the fold, Feinstein is seeking the votes of those who abandoned the party to support Reagan for governor in 1966 and 1970 and in subsequent elections for President. Generally, Reagan Democrats are considered to be conservatives and old-line Democrats of various ethnic groups who fled the cities for the suburbs and who were lured by Reagan’s economic policies and his opposition to Great Society programs.

But Feinstein said that, in retrospect, Reaganomics did not deliver what it promised.

Quoting Kevin Phillips, author of “The Politics of the Rich and the Poor,” Feinstein said the ratio of salaries of executives to manufacturing workers went from 29-to-1 in 1980 to 90-to-1 today.

“Well, in California, we’re saying enough of that,” she said. “So I say Reagan Democrats, come home, because the party of opportunity and the party of equal opportunity still is the Democratic Party in California.

The Feinstein emphasis on party values seems geared to encouraging traditional Democrats--liberals and minorities--to get out to vote as well as to appealing to the Reagan Democrats. Although most polls show she and Wilson running about even, within their margins of error, there are indications that Wilson is slowly building a lead despite his two-week absence from the state.

In a close race, most political analysts give Wilson the edge because GOP voters are more loyal voters and Republicans have mounted a well-financed campaign to get them to cast absentee ballots. To offset that edge, Feinstein has to motivate her supporters to go to the polls.

Her campaign hopes the economics argument will work with blue-collar workers who have been part of the Reagan-Democrat corps and that the use of the civil rights issue will increase turnout in black precincts.