PERSPECTIVE ON THE DEMOCRATIC SENATE RACES : Riots Inspire a Low-Road Detour : Will voters go for the Levine/Davis leap to law and order? Or will their use of TV footage be seen as opportunistic?

In the beginning, the Democratic candidates in California’s two U.S. Senate primary races all had one problem in common: how to distinguish themselves from their opponents when their positions on key domestic issues were pretty much the same. The Los Angeles riots changed all that. Now, two of the candidates are trying to turn Tuesday’s vote into a referendum on law and order.

In Southern California, the contest is dominated by Rep. Mel Levine’s omnipresent TV ad declaring that “a democratic society can’t tolerate mob rule.” His opponents, Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy and Rep. Barbara Boxer of Marin County, have been forced to respond to this narrow framing of the issues.

Levine’s theme is duplicated in the other race, where State Controller Gray Davis, who has the same campaign consultants as Levine, and who is 30 points behind Dianne Feinstein in the polls, is now running an inflammatory TV ad that shows the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny.

At the outset, Levine’s campaign faced one major obstacle: virtually no voter recognition outside his Westside district. But Levine had $6 million, more than any other candidate, to spend on overcoming that obstacle. His initial TV ads emphasized that he never wrote a bad check on the House bank (Boxer wrote 143) and that he was “the only Democrat running for U.S. Senate to vote for Operation Desert Storm.” (Boxer and McCarthy opposed the Gulf War.) These themes moved him from 7% in the polls to 21%--an improvement, but not nearly good enough to win.

Then came the riots. They made the Gulf War irrelevant as a political issue; and in the light of a city in flames, the House banking scandal looked pretty insignificant.

At that point, Levine and his advisers made a fateful decision: They would spend millions to redefine Mel Levine as the law-and-order Democrat, the one who dismisses the argument that social conditions contributed to the riots, the first to hit the hot button of fear with the phrase “mob rule.” This strategy is based on the advertising principle that voters can be won by a TV blitz featuring the incessant repetition of a simple message.

Levine used a debate among the candidates on KCRW-FM to reinforce his law-and-order message. Asked what caused the riots, he answered, “I believe the riots were criminal behavior, caused by rioters.” In the debate, McCarthy criticized Levine for demagoguery, and Boxer said, “We need to get beyond the politics of hate, fear and division.”

Levine doesn’t talk about rebuilding Los Angeles, and he didn’t endorse Charter Amendment F, the police reform measure, until polls showed it had an overwhelming lead. He didn’t return to Washington to vote for the emergency post-riot federal aid bill (Boxer did). Levine has thus located himself to the right of not just his Democratic opponents, but also of President Bush, who seeks to address underlying problems of inner-city poverty and despair with economic programs.

Boxer’s position on the riots is that of an activist liberal. “We finally saw the thousand points of light that George Bush has been talking about,” she said, “but unfortunately, they were the fires lit up by a decade of neglect.” She and McCarthy both support more social spending for urban areas, although McCarthy has focused his campaign on “economic relief” for the middle class.

In the other Senate race, Davis and former San Francisco mayor Feinstein are competing for the nomination for the two-year term left in the seat vacated by Pete Wilson when he became governor, now occupied by his appointee, Republican John Seymour. Although Davis has a stronger liberal image than Feinstein, even on women’s issues, he went with the riots as the focus of his Los Angeles TV campaign. Designed by the same campaign consultants working for Levine, the ad uses almost the same language as Levine’s. Davis’ says: “A democracy cannot tolerate mob violence--black or white.” The ad contains dramatic footage of black men beating the white truck driver at the outset of the riots. Why that horrifying image provides a reason to vote for Davis rather than Feinstein is a mystery.

Because Levine has so much money to spend on TV, his campaign provides an unusually clear test of the law-and-order strategy. According to the latest poll, it isn’t working. Two weeks after the riots, Levine remained in third place, with virtually no new supporters.

A Times Poll last week suggested why. Californians (not just Democrats) were asked an open-ended question about actions that would be “the most important to prevent violence like the Los Angeles riots from occurring again.” The respondents’ first choice was “an improved economy with more jobs” (19%), followed by better education (13%), and “more cooperation and understanding among various groups” (13%). Only then came “tougher law enforcement,” with less than 10%.

Levine and his advisers may have focused too much on the lessons of the 1960s, when a wave of inner-city riots created a law-and-order constituency that helped elect Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon as President two years later. But 1992 is different: The public recognizes that economic problems cripple the inner cities and is more likely to reject the argument that liberal social programs cause crime.

Looking ahead to November, one finds some intriguing possibilities. If Levine’s TV ads were to push him over the top at the last minute, and if Rep. Tom Campbell of Palo Alto won the GOP nomination, a law-and-order Democrat would face the most attractive liberal Republican in decades. Campbell, unlike Levine, voted in favor of emergency federal aid to rebuild Los Angeles; he could easily win the votes of many liberal Democrats. On the other hand, if Barbara Boxer faced Republican Bruce Herschensohn in the fall, the contest would provide a classic matchup: on the one side, a fighting liberal committed to aid to the inner city; on the other, a candidate from the Republican right wing who has said the underlying cause of the riots was that the perpetrators were “rotten.”

The primary will demonstrate how many voters found Levine’s “mob rule” ad opportunistic and cynical, and how much support Boxer won by sticking to the high road--by sticking to the social-policy issues that will matter in the rebuilding of L.A.