CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Boxer Gets an Apology From Herschensohn

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn apologized Wednesday to Democratic foe Barbara Boxer for any disruption his boisterous supporters may have caused at a Boxer campaign event in Newport Beach on Tuesday and said he hopes it never happens again.

Boxer said the incident should be allowed to die. But others worked Wednesday to keep it very much alive.

Herschensohn, the conservative commentator from Los Angeles, brought up the incident during a talk to manufacturers gathered for a political action breakfast at a machine tool plant in San Fernando. He said the incident was not sanctioned by his campaign and he vowed: “I’ll do everything in my power to see that never happens again.”

Still, Herschensohn said he was not so sure--from the accounts he had read and heard--that the protest was all that disruptive. Herschensohn added that he would not keep his partisans from attending Boxer campaign events, just as Boxer backers often appear at his.

Boxer would comment only briefly on the incident during a campaign appearance in Sacramento that was similar to Tuesday’s in Newport Beach--called to introduce Republicans who were endorsing her candidacy for the six-year Senate seat now held by Democrat Alan Cranston.

“I believe the best thing to do is let it rest,” said Boxer, the five-term congresswoman from Marin County, after she was asked by reporters to comment.

Away from the candidates themselves, there was considerable finger-pointing over the confrontation.

Orange County Democratic Chairman Howard Adler described the Herschensohn supporters as “shouting young bullies” and called on his GOP counterpart to put a stop to what Adler said seemed to be a “deliberately planned campaign of harassment and intimidation against other Republicans who disagree with them.”

GOP Chairman Tom Fuentes responded that the protests were “purely spontaneous” and that his political party “has had no role in promoting such activity.” Not to be one-upped, Fuentes took note of “the irreverent and disrespectful Democrat rowdies” at President Bush’s Orange County rally Sunday.

Boxer aides disputed Herschensohn’s interpretation of the fracas and volunteered to send reporters Watergate-era White House memos involving Herschensohn campaign manager Ken Khachigian. According to those documents, one of Khachigian’s White House assignments was to develop “an attack strategy” against Democrats in the 1972 campaign.

In Orange County, some of the Herschensohn supporters--who pushed their way into the ranks with the GOP women--said the confrontation had been blown out of proportion by the media.

“There was no pushing, no shoving, there was no intimidation,” said Matthew Cunningham, who went to the rally on a lunch break from his job as press secretary for state Sen. John Lewis (R-Orange). “If anything, it was the Boxer people who were yelling epithets at us. They said we were acting like Gestapo, like a bunch of Nazis.”

Cunningham said he and others went to demonstrate that “real Republicans are not supporting Boxer.”

In San Fernando, Herschensohn had said, “From what I read and from what I understand, they weren’t preventing her from speaking or doing anything disruptive. . . . As I understand it, she didn’t even get out of the car.”

But Boxer aides said it would have been impossible for Boxer to have proceeded with the event as planned. Aides at the scene said some of the 20 to 25 Herschensohn supporters, most of them college-age men, “physically pushed and shoved” some of the 20 Republicans, mostly women, who were there to announce their endorsement of Boxer.

“They were rude and violent people,” Boxer aide Karen Olick said. “It was impossible for her (Boxer) to do the event in that climate.”

Instead, the Boxer campaign hastily moved the press conference to another Orange County site 10 miles inland and delayed it by two hours. Some of the women who turned out to endorse Boxer said the Herschensohn backers called them “femi-Nazis” and “lesbians.”

Some of the protesters were identified as members of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, a group that tarred and feathered an effigy of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson during the 1991 Republican State Convention in Orange County.

Vince Puccio, a UC Irvine student and Orange County chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, said he had seen “enough of turncoat Republicans at the (Republican National) Convention and I didn’t want to see them hanging out on the street corner too.”

“Saying there’s a Republican group that supports Barbara Boxer is like saying there’s a Jewish group that supports Adolf Hitler, it’s that out of touch,” Puccio said. “I don’t know where any of these people came from.”

Tuesday’s confrontation was the latest of several tense standoffs in the Republican bastion of Orange County.

Last month, a group led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) disrupted a Republicans-for-Bill Clinton rally. Then, pro-Clinton Republicans clashed with Bush supporters during an event featuring First Lady Barbara Bush. Tempers flared again Sunday when Clinton Republicans showed up at a rally for President Bush in Orange County.

Stall reported from San Fernando and Bailey from Orange County. Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Doug Shuit in Sacramento.