S.D. Delegation Waits Under a Backlash Cloud

Hoping to avoid becoming victims of voters’ growing political disenchantment, San Diego County congressmen waited Tuesday night to learn whether they had survived the challenge to return to a Congress that they, like the public, want to radically reform.

With thousands of votes still uncounted and likely to remain so until later this week, Republican Reps. Duncan Hunter, Ron Packard and Randall (Duke) Cunningham realized they might not learn until at least Thursday whether they have survived Primary ’92 or become one of its statistics.

Candidates in two newly drawn congressional districts without an incumbent face a similarly long, agonizing wait to find out whether they, too, have crossed the first hurdle toward becoming part of the Washington establishment they criticized so unrelentingly in their campaigns.

If Tuesday’s eventual victors follow through on their campaign pledges, Congress would become a vastly different--and, they hope, more effective--legislative body. Like their challengers, most of the incumbents on Tuesday’s ballot favor term limits, sweeping changes in the seniority system, stringent limits or outright abolition of certain campaign contributions and elimination of most current congressional perks.

After redistricting and the House check-writing scandal chipped away at incumbents’ political security, this spring’s congressional primaries became the most competitive in San Diego in a decade.

What had been expected to be San Diego’s premier congressional contest lost much of its luster in April when six-term Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego), severely damaged by his involvement in the House banking controversy, withdrew from his 51st District primary showdown with freshman Cunningham.

But, because Lowery’s name remained on the GOP ballot in the North County district, some backers, motivated as much by disdain for Cunningham as their dogged support for Lowery, launched a quixotic telephone and letter-writing campaign on his behalf.

Lowery’s withdrawal transformed Cunningham into the favorite, leaving him less concerned about his three other GOP opponents than about preparing for the fall campaign by quelling Lowery supporters’ anger and carpetbagging charges stemming from his move into the 51st District from his southern San Diego district.

Despite the district’s overwhelming Republican edge among registered voters, seven Democrats and three minor-party candidates also competed for their respective nominations.

San Diego’s most cluttered, confusing congressional race unfolded in the 49th District, where the tempting prospect of an open U.S. House seat in a new district with no incumbent and relative political parity lured 17 candidates onto the ballot.

The five-candidate Democratic field was led by two one-time aides to former California Gov. and current presidential candidate Edmund G. Brown Jr.: San Diego Unified Port Commissioner Lynn Schenk and lawyer Byron Georgiou.

Philosophically compatible on most issues, Georgiou and Schenk battled largely to lay claim to being the champion of women’s issues, and, even there, differed more in sex than ideology.

Colleagues and political allies before the race, Georgiou and Schenk ended their primary amid increasing acrimony that culminated in Georgiou suing Schenk for libel and slander over what he called “deliberate” inaccuracies in her ads.

In the 10-candidate Republican primary in the northern San Diego district, the potential for a badly splintered vote made it all but impossible to dismiss anyone’s chances.

Businessmen Alan Uke and Ray Saatjian, financial planner Skip Cox and oral surgeon Ron Hecker each compiled six-figure campaign treasuries, which made other candidates hope that their non-monetary appeals to voters might be equally persuasive.

Former San Diego City Councilman Bill Mitchell, for example, stressed that he was the only candidate with elective office experience, while nurse Judy Jarvis was encouraged over being the only woman in the GOP contest. Real-estate agent Dave Pierce, the lone abortion opponent among the Republicans, used that politically volatile issue to try to carve out a conservative niche for himself, hoping that the other candidates would split the moderate votes.

In San Diego’s other open congressional race in the heavily Democratic 50th District, victory in the six-candidate Democratic primary will be tantamount to election. Three Republicans and two minor-party candidates also ran in the southern San Diego district.

Three fixtures of local Democratic politics--former Rep. Jim Bates, state Sen. Wadie Deddeh and San Diego City Councilman Bob Filner--headlined the field, and spent much of the campaign trying to keep each other on the defensive.

Bates, who began the race dogged by his 1989 rebuke by the House Ethics Committee on sexual-harassment charges, felt his political baggage grow heavier when it was revealed that he was one of the worst offenders in the congressional check-writing scandal.

Deddeh drew sharp criticism for, among other things, accepting more than $800,000 in special-interest campaign contributions over the past seven years and for being the only abortion opponent among the Democratic front-runners. Filner, attacked for his negative campaign style, also was accused of breaking faith with his current constituents by seeking higher office only six months into his second four-year council term.

The 52nd District Republican primary, meanwhile, was viewed within political circles as a referendum on voters’ reaction to the congressional check-writing scandal.

In that race, the issue was Hunter’s 407 overdrafts totaling $129,225 at the now-defunct House bank. Hunter faced three relatively unknown GOP opponents--lawyer Robert Krysak, construction contractor Eric Epifano and write-in candidate Delecia Holt. Two Democrats, one a write-in candidate, and two minor-party members also competed in the 52nd District.

Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), alone among San Diego County’s four incumbent congressmen, faced relatively untroubled reelection prospects in the 48th District. Even his opponents conceded that only a particularly powerful anti-incumbent surge at the polls would deny him a sixth term.