LOCAL ELECTIONS / 69TH DISTRICT : Umberg Faces Foe Backed by Christian Right : Jo Ellen Allen won a hard-fought GOP primary in the Assembly race, receiving $22,000 from the religious conservative movement.

Nothing riles Orange County’s Republican elite quite like the fact that Tom Umberg is the assemblyman in the 69th District.

It’s little wonder. Umberg is the lone Democrat in Orange County to hold a state or national office and, as such, he’s a ready target for Republican ire.

Now comes the latest challenger. Jo Ellen Allen, a conservative former associate professor of political science, champion of “traditional family values” and darling of the county GOP, will vie with the freshman assemblyman in the Nov. 3 General Election for the central Orange County seat.

It promises to be a testy--and costly--fight. Allen’s camp said it has raised about $200,000 so far. With the Republicans fighting to wrest control of the state Legislature from the Democrats, even more money is expected to flood her campaign coffers from leaders of conservative causes. Umberg, meanwhile, has amassed $300,000.

What’s more, both candidates have already displayed a willingness to roll up their sleeves and bare their knuckles if necessary.

Allen, for instance, blasts Umberg for his vote in 1990 to retain Willie Brown as Speaker of the Assembly, a post the San Francisco Democrat has held for a dozen years to the ever-increasing irritation of frustrated Republican politicos.

“I’m running against Willie Brown and his ally who helped put him in the Speaker’s chair,” Allen says. “They’re one and the same. You can’t separate them.”

The Umberg campaign has a ready retort. “If she wants to run against Willie Brown, maybe she should move to San Francisco,” bristled George Urch, Umberg’s chief of staff.

Urch called Allen’s charges a tactic to win votes through “subtle racism,” noting that Brown is an African-American and the 69th District is only 2% black. Centered in Santa Ana with large chunks of Garden Grove and Anaheim, the district is 65% Latino.

Meanwhile, the incumbent’s campaign staff has been quietly making a fuss over Allen’s role for the past decade as president of the California chapter of Eagle Forum, a conservative group headed by Phyllis Schlafly, the right-wing national celebrity most prominent for her stand against the Equal Rights Amendment.

“Jo Ellen Allen is a conservative Christian who is out of touch with the district and its voters,” Urch said. “She’s way too far to the right, and her stances are all anti-women.”

Such partisan critiques aside, Allen has earned the respect of moderates and conservatives alike among Orange County’s GOP Establishment. She has the endorsement of Gov. Pete Wilson, a moderate, as well as the conservative Coordinating Republican Assembly, HUD Secretary Jack Kemp and most of Orange County’s members of Congress and the Legislature.

“She’s incredibly eloquent, very well-spoken on the issues,” said Greg Haskin, Orange County Republican executive director. “She is very fiscally conservative, very active with a lot of issues that over the years have been misconstrued. Eagle Forum is a common sense group, and Jo Ellen Allen is a common sense candidate.”

Dana Reed, a GOP moderate and a member of the Orange County Transportation Authority, said: “Jo Ellen is far more conservative than I am, but she’s not a pugnacious conservative. She’s easy to get along with. She will be one of the more conservative members of the Legislature, but she’s not going to antagonize the other legislators the way some zealots do, zealots on either the right or left.”

Allen first hit the headlines in 1989 during an unsuccessful try for the school board in Newport Beach. She and another candidate backed by the religious right ripped the district for its sex education program, saying it encouraged premarital sex and failed to promote abstinence.

Undeterred by that defeat at the polls, Allen set her sights this year on Umberg’s district, the only one in Orange County where Democrats actually outnumber Republicans (54% to 36%). An anti-abortion advocate, Allen rolled to a hard-fought victory in the Republican primary, fueled in part by about $22,000 from various factions of the conservative Christian movement, according to a report by California Common Cause, a nonprofit political watchdog group.

So far, Allen has steered clear of much talk about abortion or family values, saying she “strongly believes in separation of church and state.”

Instead, she has positioned herself as a solid advocate of free enterprise who will push for a better business climate to ease California’s sagging economy and fuel job growth. She also supports efforts to “bring financial responsibility back to the state” and change the state’s costly workers’ compensation and welfare systems.

Allen proposes that the state educational system be overhauled to give local districts more autonomy and ensure that funding goes into the classrooms and not administration. She also supports legislation that would allow parents to choose which schools their children attend and provide a voucher to pay for private schooling.

Despite a big voter registration advantage among Democrats in the district, Allen contends that the poor Republican numbers are a mirage of sorts. Republican voters hit the polls far more heavily than the district’s fickle Democrats, increasing the odds of a GOP victory, she maintains.

Allen describes Umberg as a typical tax-and-spend liberal Democrat. She also argues that the assemblyman waffles on key votes, siding with Willie Brown and the Democrats initially, then switching to the Republican side to appease his conservative constituents in Orange County once victory is assured for his party. An example cited by the Allen camp: Umberg changed his vote recently to support a Republican-backed “workfare” proposal after the Democrats got the votes to table the plan.

“He’s giving a whole new meaning to the word abstinence --he’s practicing safe voting,” Allen said.

Umberg scoffs at those sorts of charges, saying he has “the most independent voting record in Sacramento with respect to the Democratic leadership.” Any shifts in votes, he said, came because “there are occasions where I’ve looked at something and then changed my vote after further reflection about an issue.”

On the tax squabble, Umberg said he has voted for just one income-tax increase, and it affected only people with high incomes.

Umberg is banking on the support he’s earned after two years in the Assembly that have earned him plaudits even from some Republican lawmakers. His endorsement list reads like a who’s who of state and local law enforcement agencies, fire departments, labor organizations and education groups.

He captured the seat in a vitriolic, hard-fought 1990 battle with erstwhile Assemblyman Curt Pringle, who now carries the GOP banner in the race for the neighboring 68th Assembly District.

Umberg, a former federal prosecutor, wasted no time getting busy after he took office, blending political pragmatism with personal charm to score some noteworthy freshman victories.

Soon after he arrived at the capital, Umberg stymied a powerful senator’s attempt to block construction of two Orange County toll roads and dove head first into a decade-long dispute over the location of a new county jail. He’s also been a big backer of the Anaheim-to-Las Vegas bullet train project, lobbied to put a federal courthouse in Santa Ana, authored a tough hate-crimes bill and pushed through victims’ rights legislation.

Assembly Shootout

One of the season’s hottest races could come in the 69th Assembly District, where Democrat Tom Umberg may face a serious test from the GOP’s Jo Ellen Allen in the heavily Latino district, where almost two-thirds of the registered voters are in Santa Ana. Voter Registration Democratic: 54% Republican: 36% Nonpartisan: 7% Other: 3% Registration Distribution Santa Ana: 63% Anaheim: 21% Garden Grove: 15% Orange: 1% Note: Other cities combined are less than 1% of the total

District Ethnicity Latino: 65% White: 24% Asian: 9% Black: 2% Source: U.S. census; Orange County registrar of voters