Campaign Poll Raises Hope in Feinstein Camp

Two days before the long wrangle for the governorship goes to voters, it was left to the Rev. Frank Pinkard on Sunday to offer a final exhortation.

“If any of you all vote for Pete Wilson, let that be the last thing in the world you confess to me,” he said, his voice filling the tabernacle of Evergreen Baptist Church here.

“I’ll forgive you for going to Reno or Tahoe and playing the slot machines with the church money. I may even forgive you for drinking a little Jim Beam now and then. But the one thing I have problems forgiving you for is voting for Pete Wilson,” he thundered.

Behind him, as hundreds of churchgoers burst into applause, Dianne Feinstein beamed. Two days out from Election Day, every weapon--including fear of divine retribution--was being summoned by the Democratic candidate in her battle against Republican Pete Wilson.

In Feinstein’s camp, hope for victory arose Sunday with her campaign’s overnight polls that showed her beating Wilson by a point. Such polls have broad margins of error. But the results were nonetheless enough to lift the spirits of a campaign that has been behind in its own surveys since July.

Campaign Manager Bill Carrick said that Saturday night polling showed blue-collar Democrats and senior citizens shifting to Feinstein, largely on the strength of her recent strongly populist attack against Wilson.

Wilson himself, after a few days of lowered rhetoric, went back on the attack against Feinstein, a move that further heartened the Democrats because of their assumption that it meant his voter surveys were also reflecting a Feinstein move.

Feinstein, however, was not overly optimistic in her public remarks.

“I think it comes down to voter turnout,” she said when asked to call the election.

The former San Francisco mayor continued to press her overtly class-oriented theme throughout the day Sunday as she traveled from San Francisco to Oakland to Richmond with the message that she alone could brighten a tarnished California.

Her rhetoric, as it has in recent days, mixed appeals to low- and middle-class voters with calls for women to respond to her campaign to be the state’s first woman governor.

Lamenting that children cannot play in the front yard “without being shot in the head by a drive-by shooting,” she laid the blame for California’s crime problems on Republicans George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson.

She charged that they had overseen a decline in California’s peace of mind because they would not apply sufficient dollars to a battle against crime and drugs.

“You’ve heard a lot of macho tough talk,” she said. “This is why I say sometimes you’ve got to try a skirt instead of a suit. . . . This skirt says, let’s stop talking tough and let’s be tough.”

Feinstein sharpened her words against Republicans and Wilson for what she said was an abandonment of those who are not rich and powerful.

“Under Republican leadership, we’ve seen the mentally ill treated under freeway ramps and homeless on our streets,” she told several hundred people gathered at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland.

“Is that what we want for our great state of California?”

Later, she harked back to the days when California was what she called a “can-do state.”

“We built the best university system in the world, built a huge California water project, built a fine health care system,” she said. “And what’s happened in the last 10 years? In the last 10 years we’ve seen it get dismantled.”

Churches served as Feinstein’s backdrop, but her words were unfailingly political.

Before an applauding priest in a Catholic Church, Feinstein called for abortion rights, a position staunchly opposed by the church hierarchy.

“They (Republicans) want to regulate a woman’s body,” she said. “We want to regulate the savings and loan industry.”

Throughout the day, Feinstein and her campaign surrogates, who included Democratic National Committee Chairman Ron Brown, worked to downplay assumptions among political analysts that Wilson has the edge.

“The big interests have had their say,” she said in Oakland. “The polls and the pundits have had their opportunity. Now it’s time for the people to speak.”

Feinstein campaigned through the last weekend of her candidacy with a verve rarely seen since the days before the June primary.

On Saturday, she boarded a custom railroad car in Bakersfield and--in a four-car train--hit seven whistle-stop rallies in the Central Valley. She concluded in Sacramento, where on a chill autumn night, about 1,000 people cheered.

On Sunday, her voice turning hoarse, Feinstein spoke in four churches by midday, held a satellite press conference with television news anchors and closed the day with a rally at Glide Memorial Baptist Church in San Francisco.

On Monday, the 57-year-old candidate will finish her 20-month quest for the governorship with a final plane trip across the state. She plans to vote in San Francisco on Tuesday morning and wait out the election results with supporters there.