Democrats Clash on Farming and American Indian Affairs : Debate: Ex-Irvine mayor Agran is showstopper in the South Dakota candidates forum. He assails Brown.

The five major Democratic presidential candidates clashed on issues that have been lost in the fray this year--agriculture and American Indian affairs--in a televised Sunday night debate that they hoped would shift the electorate their way in Tuesday’s primary.

But the showstopper of the evening was not one of the big names but a feisty newcomer to the public stage, former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran. Making the most of his rare presence in the spotlight, Agran took on his competitors and closed out the debate by aping former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and asking voters to call his 800 number.

Agran--known for his calm demeanor as mayor of Irvine--took such an aggressive approach to the debate that on two occasions, the moderator had to step in to cool off tempers.

Agran, still hugely unknown nationally, spread around his disdain but saved his most cantankerous shots for Brown, at one point accusing him of hypocrisy for running a campaign whose focus is an angry diatribe against corrupt politics.

“When I hear Jerry Brown, the grand champion of raising special interest money through the ‘70s and ‘80s, giving lectures to the rest of us about special interest domination, I’m up to here with it,” he said, motioning across his face. “I’m up to here with it.”

When a surprised Brown retorted by asking why Agran had not joined him in limiting campaign donations to $100 or less, Agran snapped: “You have raised tens of millions of dollars in California and elsewhere. Jerry, you come late to campaign financing.”

Agran has been excluded from most prior debates by Democratic officials, who have sought to keep the focus on nationally known contenders.

Apart from the Brown-Agran disputes, the debate was foremost an effort by the candidates to lather up South Dakotans. Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin repeatedly declared that their geographic bases gave them insight into farmers’ problems.

But former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas disputed their joint suggestion that he is an East Coast urbanite uninterested in agricultural pursuits.

“I acknowledge that Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin know a lot more about agriculture than I do,” he said. “But I know how to listen. I know how to learn. I don’t come here and say you ought to plant this or you ought to plant that.”

The latter reference was meant to reassure South Dakota voters that the Massachusetts native was not a carbon copy of the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee from that state, Michael S. Dukakis, who became a laughingstock among farmers when he suggested they grow Belgian endive in place of more conventional crops.

The 90-minute debate, aired live in South Dakota over public television and radio, was unrelievedly Midwestern in tone, down to the bottom-of-the-screen scroll alerting viewers that the usual occupant of the time slot, “The Lawrence Welk Show,” would return next week.

As the Democrats entered the debate, held in the conference room of a Howard Johnson’s motel, Kerrey was holding a convincing lead in the polls, although more than a quarter of the electorate was undecided. The primary is especially important for Kerrey and Harkin, either of whom could be mortally wounded by a poor finish so close to their home-state power base.

Although their vision had clearly shifted to accommodate the area’s agricultural base, the candidates did tread on some familiar ground. Maintaining his campaign pledge to champion the middle class, Clinton assailed Tsongas for suggesting that federal gasoline taxes be increased by up to five cents a year for 10 years.

“There are other ways to do it without burdening the middle class,” he said. “Sen. Tsongas wants to do more of it, but it’s wrong.”

Tsongas defended the tax as a way to wean Americans of dependence on foreign oil, which he blamed for the Persian Gulf War.

Much of this debate centered on the concerns of American Indians, including the Lakota Sioux, whose land in South Dakota’s Black Hills was taken over by white settlers in defiance of native claims. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled a decade ago that 7.5 million acres of land was wrongly reclaimed from the Lakota tribe, and since then lawmakers have disputed how to redress the theft.

The presidential candidates, too, differed over how modern-day Americans could compensate the South Dakota tribe. Agran favored the return of all the land; Brown some portion of it.

“The original peoples who inhabited this land thousands of years before the Europeans were thought to have suffered a horrible genocide, there’s no question about that, and we have to own up to it,” Brown said.

But Kerrey, Clinton, Harkin and Tsongas, although vowing to increase services to tribal members, said they could not endorse a bill that would return 1.3 million acres of the land to present-day American Indians.

“Not every injustice that was created 100 years ago and beyond can be corrected today,” Harkin said. “We do have to do certain things to try to heal wounds, of course we do . . . (but) you can’t just throw people off their land now.”

The candidates differed on the 1990 farm bill, which set farm-support prices for a five-year period.

Clinton said he opposes renewed congressional negotiations on the supports, suggesting that Republicans and “city folks” from the Democratic Party would use the opportunity to lower those benefits.

But Kerrey insisted that the payments were so low that the farm bill should be reconsidered.

Discussions of the environment led to another clash between Brown and Agran, after the former mayor chided the other candidates for failing to detail where they would get the money for environmental programs.

Agran has said he would take $20 billion from defense spending--part of $150 billion in total that he would cut from defense--to finance recycling, waste and preservation programs.

“Larry, I’ve been talking about cutting the military budget in half for a long time now,” said Brown.

“Yeah, Jerry, you’re the one who was for the B-1 bomber in the early ‘80s,” Agran snapped angrily. “It cost us $50 billion for a damn plane that doesn’t fly.”

It took moderator Ken Bode to break up the contretemps. “Californians seem to want to take their gloves off on each other tonight,” Bode remarked.

Agran has come to South Dakota with his best shot so far at proving the credibility of his campaign. In addition to appearing in Sunday’s debate, Agran has been endorsed by a South Dakota newspaper for American Indians and he is backed by many supporters of his former ally, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern.

Agran gained a minuscule 332 votes in New Hampshire, and his campaign has said it must do well in South Dakota--scoring as much as 10% of the vote--to justify its claim as a credible organization.

In his closing statement Sunday, Agran stole a trick first performed by Brown as he held up a sign displaying an 800 telephone number for his campaign. Agran went on to criticize the Democratic Party and the other candidates for not allowing him access to the previous four debates held in the campaign, even though he said he is on the ballot in 35 states.

“We have a problem with democracy in this country,” he said. “We have a problem with democracy in this party. I think I have the right to be heard.”