ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Four Don’t Even Take Time for a Breather

California’s four U.S. Senate nominees may have enough frequent-flier miles to go around the world, and they may be bone-tired from the long primary campaign, but none was leafing through travel brochures Thursday or headed for private hideaways.

The primary campaign shifted into the general election campaign with barely a pause for celebrating victories in Tuesday’s balloting by Democratic nominees Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Republicans John Seymour and Bruce Herschensohn.

Their campaign managers were conscious of the hazards of hiding out from telephones and fax machines even for a few days after the primary. Candidates have discovered that the benefits of the rest can easily be erased by problems created by a lack of visibility or activity.

Two nominees still have jobs to do in Washington. Seymour, running for the last two years of Gov. Pete Wilson’s Senate term, was back in Washington on Thursday to vote with 84 other senators to lift a government ban on the use of aborted fetuses in disease research.

An aide said Seymour probably will remain in Washington until next week.

At the other end of the Capitol, Rep. Barbara Boxer of Marin County, the Democratic nominee for the six-year seat, was on the House floor for votes on defense appropriations.

Boxer was up at 4 a.m. Wednesday to participate in a flying victory tour of California with Feinstein, winding up in Sacramento in late afternoon. That evening she was on a red-eye flight back to Washington for Thursday’s House sessions.

Feinstein was on the telephone Thursday thanking supporters and seeking funds for the fall. She will address a testimonial dinner in the Los Angeles area tonight for state AFL-CIO chief John F. Henning. On Saturday, Feinstein and Boxer will attend a meeting of Democrats in San Francisco.

Boxer campaign manager Rose Kapolczynski said Boxer then will “take the rest of the weekend off. . . . Well, what’s left of the weekend.”

“There’s no vacation this time,” said Kam Kuwata, campaign manager for Feinstein, the former San Francisco mayor and Democratic nominee for the two-year Senate seat held by Seymour.

After Feinstein’s dramatic victory over John K. Van de Kamp for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1990, Feinstein was broke and was forced from sight while she tried to collect as much money as possible before the June 30 fund-raising cycle ended. Then she went to her Stinson Beach summer house in Marin County for two weeks.

Aides said she was doing more fund-raising at the beach and could be reached if needed, but many of Feinstein’s backers “felt she was squandering her lead rather than riding the crest of the media wave for as long as possible,” according to an election post-mortem written by John Jacobs for the UC-Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

On Thursday, Ken Khachigian, manager of the campaign of conservative commentator Herschensohn, put the vacation ban in historic context: “We’re not going to Hawaii.”

That was a reference to the 1978 election for governor when GOP nominee Evelle J. Younger vacationed in Hawaii after the primary, allowing Democratic incumbent Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. to dominate the news in the tumultuous aftermath of the passage of Proposition 13, the property tax-limit initiative.

The absence was devastating and Younger’s campaign never recovered.

Khachigian said that Herschensohn, who left his KABC television commentator’s job to campaign for the Senate, was making telephone calls. They also would be plotting strategy, making preliminary decisions on campaign issues for the fall and handling “a lot of nuts-and-bolts things,” Khachigian said.

“Obviously, we’re starting to explore Boxer’s record very, very carefully,” he added.

Boxer and Herschensohn plan to campaign more vigorously among voters than they did this spring, their managers said.

Kuwata said Feinstein will accelerate her campaigning to pick up support in the fastest-growing areas of Southern California including Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and San Diego counties.

Feinstein and Boxer were receiving many requests for media interviews and campaign appearances, their managers said.

In contrast to 1990, Feinstein has about $400,000 on hand. Each candidate will get more than $2 million in help from their national party Senate campaign committees.

“We’re ready,” Kuwata said.

There were rumors earlier in the week that Seymour might air an anti-Feinstein television ad immediately after the primary, much as Alan Cranston did against Republican Ed Zschau the day after Zschau won the nomination in June, 1986.

As of Friday, there were no signs of any such effort.