CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS / 49TH DISTRICT : New District Lures Swarm of Candidates : 5 Democrats Buck Slim GOP Voter Registration Edge

If Byron Georgiou had any doubts whether the new 49th Congressional District was winnable for a Democrat despite having a slim Republican registration edge, they were quickly erased when he watched three GOP congressmen flee the district rather than try to defend the seat.

“They not only ran away, but two of them moved to another district to run against each other ,” Georgiou said of Reps. Duncan Hunter, Bill Lowery and Randall (Duke) Cunningham. “When that happens in a district where their party leads in registration, that’s pretty telling.”

In contrast to San Diego County’s four other congressional districts, each of which has a double-digit registration gap between the major parties, the Republicans hold a relatively narrow 45%-39% advantage in the 49th District.

Combined with the district’s moderate to liberal leanings on issues such as abortion and the environment, that relative political balance has set the stage for a campaign that is a race in more than name only.

Five Democrats appear on the June 2 ballot, led by two one-time aides to former governor and current presidential candidate Edmund G. Brown Jr.: lawyers Georgiou and San Diego Unified Port Commissioner Lynn Schenk.

Bill Winston, who describes himself as a “true progressive Green Democrat,” has been trying to use his strong environmental message to elbow his way into contention, but still is widely viewed as the third man in a two-candidate race. The Democratic field is rounded out by lawyer Troy Kelley and legislative analyst Carol Lucke, who has withdrawn from the race but whose name will remain on the ballot.

With few major philosophical differences dividing them, Georgiou and Schenk have battled largely over their respective attempts to lay claim to women’s issues--and, more importantly, women’s votes.

In her public appearances, Schenk portrays her bid to become the first woman elected to Congress from San Diego as being inherently linked to her central theme of “bringing back the governed and those who govern to a common agenda.”

“We need change in our political system, and electing more women to Congress is part of that change,” said Schenk, who contends she was in the forefront of the fight for women’s rights “long before it was politically correct or chic to get involved.”

Bolstering that claim, Schenk points out she helped establish the Lawyer’s Club in San Diego to provide free legal services to poor women, sued and pushed for a law change that allowed women to register to vote as “Ms.”, and “took on” private clubs that excluded women.

Georgiou, however, argues he has been a more aggressive advocate for women’s causes, one who “fought in the streets, not in some bank boardroom or corporate suite, for the rights of ordinary women to make choices . . . in their lives.” That remark is a thinly veiled reference to Schenk’s service on the board of a Los Angeles savings and loan.

“I do not concede one inch to Lynn Schenk on women’s rights,” said Georgiou, whose law firm won a restraining order preventing anti-abortion protesters from harassing clients of the Womancare clinic near Balboa Park.

Schenk, however, has one card that Georgiou cannot match--gender--and does not hesitate to consistently play it. She emphasizes, for example, that she was the only woman to be California secretary for business, transportation and housing--the position she held in Brown’s cabinet--and currently is the only woman, and second ever, on the Port Commission.

“No matter how sympathetic some men might be to feminist concerns, there’s nothing quite like living it,” Schenk said. “I bring a woman’s life experience to these issues.”

While Georgiou trumpets the fact the California National Organization for Women recommended that its national counterpart jointly endorse both him and Schenk in the primary, many other major women’s groups have sided with Schenk.

Of nearly 200 women running in U.S. House and Senate races nationwide, Schenk was one of only 30 selected for inclusion on EMILY’s List, a group that funnels financial aid to female candidates it carefully screens for electability. EMILY is an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast--”It makes the dough rise.”

That skirmishing aside, both Schenk and Georgiou articulate similar overviews of the campaign, using similar phraseology to urge voters to judge their candidacies by their respective personal and professional lives.

“The best evidence of what I’m likely to do in Congress is what I did with my life before I decided to run,” the 43-year-old Georgiou told a Mission Valley forum last week.

“You have to look at what people have done in their careers, how they spent their time in the community,” says Schenk, 47. “I’m a firm believer in the past being the prologue.”

Georgiou’s public service has ranged from membership on the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board and Del Mar Fair Board to serving as Brown’s legal affairs secretary in the early 1980s. In those various positions, Georgiou says he fought for migrant workers’ rights and helped achieve several major environmental victories, including special protection for three scenic Northern California rivers and blocking the Reagan Administration’s offshore oil-drilling plans.

Trying to neutralize Georgiou’s claims, Schenk also takes credit for environmental successes on the Board of Port Commissioners, including preventing a Seaport Village parking garage from blocking bayfront views and pushing for a multimillion-dollar San Diego Bay protection plan.

In addition, she helped restore 100 janitorial jobs at Lindbergh Field initially eliminated in a labor dispute and sought to limit the expenditure of port funds on America’s Cup activities.

One distinction with Schenk that Georgiou has sought to highlight involves her legal work on behalf of Southern California Edison in its controversial, unsuccessful attempt to merge with the San Diego Gas & Electric Co., which he opposed.

“This was one of the few issues in San Diego over the past 15 years that united people of all political persuasions, yet Lynn was on the other side,” Georgiou said. “It would have cost San Diego one of its last remaining headquarter companies, befouled the air, raised rates and eliminated at least 1,000 jobs.”

Dismissing the topic as “a tired old issue,” Schenk responds by saying that, as a lawyer himself, Georgiou realizes lawyers “win some and lose some, and then go forward.”

“To be fixated on this is a perfect example of misdirected priorities,” Schenk said. “To quote quite a few people, Byron just doesn’t get it.”

The increasing shrillness in the campaign conjures up memories of the scars that both Georgiou and Schenk received in past races.

Schenk lost a contentious 1984 county supervisorial race to Susan Golding that resulted in her filing a libel suit, settled in her favor but in a way that allowed both women to claim victory.

Georgiou, meanwhile, lost a 1990 primary race against then-Rep. Jim Bates--a challenge that some Democratic leaders felt weakened Bates and contributed to his November loss to Cunningham. Though Winston has tried to revive that controversy before partisan crowds, Georgiou’s own polls showed that Democrats would be more likely to vote for him, not less, because of his race against Bates.

In his bid to attain equal footing with the two Democratic front-runners, Winston has billed himself as the “alternative to the Democrats of the past”--a pitch aimed primarily at the thousands of new voters that his campaign has registered.

“Lynn and Byron are products of the failed politics of the past,” said Winston, the 36-year-old owner of an Ocean Beach nightclub and coffee house. “They can’t attract those who feel the Democratic Party has deserted them--the young, the disaffected, the apathetic.”

If elected, Winston pledges to push for an Environmental Bill of Rights protecting people’s “right to clean air, clean water, safe food and . . . natural resources that will sustain life for future generations.”

Although that message sounds as if it could have been lifted from a Green Party brochure, Winston said he chose to run as a Democrat rather than on the Green slate “because I’m not into protest votes.”

Kelley, a 27-year-old lawyer who, like Winston, is in his first political race, has made campaign reform his major theme.

A former staffer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he audited companies, Kelley said he favors elimination of political action committees or sharp reductions in their contribution limits, caps on candidates’ own money and congressional term limitations.

“If you’re going to change the system, you have to start by changing its rules,” Kelley said.

Two minor-party candidates--Libertarian John Wallner and Peace and Freedom Party member Milton Zaslow--also are on the ballot, but are unopposed in their respective primaries.