CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : Herschensohn Finds Common Ground

City slicker Bruce Herschensohn fidgeted in his lawn chair and leaned anxiously toward the stone-faced Farm Bureau fellows gathered at Paul Sanguinetti’s 1,500-acre place out on California 4 to hear about his U.S. Senate campaign.

Herschensohn may be more at ease speaking to hundreds of thousands of viewers on Los Angeles television than chatting with eight farmers in blue jeans sitting in a semicircle on the patio behind the modest brick Sanguinetti home. The Republican Senate nominee is more conversant with MX warhead throw-weights than crop yields.

But Herschensohn and the farmers found common ground when Sanguinetti began to rail about environmental “fanatics.”

“Things weren’t put on this Earth to be saved forever,” said Sanguinetti, president of the San Joaquin County Farm Bureau. “We don’t have dinosaurs anymore. We didn’t have anything to do with that (their extinction).”

Herschensohn’s craggy, brooding face lighted up in a smile and he eagerly seconded the thought: “We would (have dinosaurs), if the environmentalist leaders were around then.”

Later, Sanguinetti said federal tax law makes it more profitable for him to fix his old tractors than to buy new ones, although buying would pump new jobs into the depressed economy. “That’s a great example!” Herschensohn said. “I’ll remember that. I’ll plagiarize that, if it’s OK with you. . . . I wish this whole thing was on TV, (even) without me. People in some of the urban areas just don’t get it.”

Herschensohn is a familiar figure in Southern California from his 13 years as a conservative political commentator for KABC in Los Angeles. But he is little known in vast stretches of California north of the Tehachapi Mountains. The San Joaquin Valley is the sort of voting region in which Herschensohn needs to carry strongly if he hopes to defeat liberal Democratic Rep. Barbara Boxer on Nov. 3 for the six-year seat held by Democrat Alan Cranston.

The 60-year-old Herschensohn went to Stockton on the last Friday in September after coming almost directly from New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he was toasted and endorsed by one of his heroes, former President Richard M. Nixon, at a $1,000-per-head cocktail party. Before another week was out, he had returned to California’s farming heartland again for a daylong tour with another hero, Iran-Contra figure Oliver L. North.

If Herschensohn was at all nervous at Sanguinetti’s farm, he was at ease that evening in the familiar surroundings of a television studio. Herschensohn had moved on to Fresno to be interviewed by three journalists on the half-hour “Valley Press” public broadcasting program.

Herschensohn offhandedly remarked that under the U.S. Constitution any American should be able to carry any firearm anywhere.

“If I want an Uzi, I can have one?” asked a reporter about the weapon that is banned from sale in California.

“Yeah, you do,” Herschensohn replied. “Read the Constitution.”

“You do?” the reporter asked again, just to make sure.

“Yeah,” Herschensohn said. “It isn’t up to me. It’s up to the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution.”

Herschensohn later said he is opposed to women in military combat because of differences between the sexes that would distract a fighting man from his only objective in wartime: to defeat the enemy.

“I know, just as a man, that you have a little different feeling if you’re with a woman than if you’re with a man,” he said. “I’m sorry, that’s not sexism. That’s the way it is.”

And if women are allowed to fight, it is only a matter of time before they are drafted into the service, he said, adding:

“I don’t want that. And--boy, I know how this is going to sound--but I’m telling you that’s the end, the end of anything that could be classified as chivalry.”

Chivalry? In the “Year of the Woman” in politics? Herschensohn is angered by the very idea of a “Year of the Woman,” calling it a sexist notion.

Herschensohn’s temper also flares when he believes he is being misquoted or quoted out of context or his positions are being distorted so that they sound far-out. His ideas would be accepted, Herschensohn said, “if people understood precisely what I mean and precisely where I stand.”

At the Fresno TV studio, Herschensohn expounded on his proposal to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, returning control of the schools to the local level and saving enough in Washington bureaucratic waste that California schools would have all the money they need.

“Obviously when someone says he wants to do away with the Department of Education, people say: ‘Oh my gosh, this guy isn’t for education!’ If I have the ability to explain it, the time, the forum as I just did, to explain it, I think people then understand it.”

Yet Herschensohn is capable of using facts with something less than precision.

In Stockton, Herschensohn told the farmers: “There are a thousand different endangered species. There are more than a thousand. The Atlantic magazine in January--I don’t know if this is accurate or not--but it said there’s approximately 100,000 on the waiting list to be classified either endangered or threatened. One percent of them have names.”

In fact, the article quotes a Harvard University entomologist as saying that 100 million species may exist on Earth, of which only 1.4 million have been named. It also cites U.S. Department of the Interior statistics that there are 768 species classified as threatened or endangered, 500 that merit protection but are not yet officially listed, and 3,000 that might deserve listing but have not been investigated.

The Farm Bureau group seemed puzzled over Herschensohn’s constitutional idealism, illustrated by his proposal to eliminate federal regulatory agencies and empower citizens as much as possible in local government.

“The person can then talk to the authority and if the authority and the person can see each other’s difficulty, they can work out their own balance or their own format,” he said.

Although some of Herschensohn’s ideas might have sounded unclear or impractical to the farmers, there is little chance that they will vote for Boxer, Sanguinetti said, largely because of her support for strict environmental controls, some of which would affect farmers’ irrigation supplies.