ELECTIONS / 38TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT : Contest Between Braude, Horn a Study in Contrasts : Republican: Tireless and demanding, Horn sees himself as a reformer who stands for change. Yet he knows the ins and outs of Washington politics.

A friend of Steve Horn’s once put together a list of the Cal State Long Beach professor’s personality traits.

Although the details are now forgotten, Horn acknowledges that “arrogant, impatient, overbearing and demanding” as well as “generous, tireless, brilliant and open-minded” were noted side-by-side on that piece of paper.

He still disagrees strongly with some of those judgments but said: “There is no question I do affect people in both ways . . . no question that I’ve probably appeared that way to some people at some time.”

It is not surprising then, that Horn is perhaps best known as the Cal State Long Beach professor who was named in a national study as one of the country’s most effective college presidents in 1986, only to be forced to resign a year later for deficient management skills.

Now Horn has resurfaced, this time as the Republican nominee in the 38th Congressional District. Championing himself as the “Republican for Reform,” the 60-year-old political science professor upset a field of seven in the primary, including the GOP pick, former Assemblyman Dennis Brown.

He faces an equally daunting task--defeating Democrat Evan Anderson Braude in a district dominated by Democrats and for a seat long held by Braude’s stepfather, Rep. Glenn M. Anderson. Also running in the race are Libertarian Blake Ashley and Peace and Freedom candidate Paul Burton.

“I have only had challenging assignments, and I have never let the pressure get to me,” Horn said.

From the start, Horn has run a maverick campaign. Although he now has professional campaign help, during the primary he relied only on his son, Steve Horn Jr., daughter, Marcia, and wife, Nini Horn, to organize his campaign. Instead of glib, vague campaign mail, Horn distributed large fold-out campaign brochures crammed with exhaustive detail on his background and platform.

Horn has refused to take money from political action committees or special interest groups. With the exception of help from the Republican Party, all of his contributions have come from individuals, most of whom live in the district. Among his largest contributors were Edgar and Betty Hamer, a Los Alamitos dermatologist and his wife, who gave $6,330. The Republican Party gave him $3,500. Horn has loaned $42,583 to his campaign.

Every chance he gets, he criticizes Braude’s decision to accept PAC funds.

“He simply represents politics as usual. I represent reform and change,” Horn said with characteristic bluntness. “He’s for raising taxes. I’m not. . . . He’s against term limits. I support them. He’s against the death penalty. I support it. He hasn’t taken a pledge to cut the deficit. I have pledged to vote to cut the deficit $75-to-$100 billion a year, and if I haven’t kept the pledge at the end of the fifth year, then I retire.”

Horn is wooing Democrats by stressing his support for abortion rights, his disapproval of the military’s ban on gays and his support for public schools.

A tall man with a confident bearing and no-nonsense manner, Horn has spent so much time studying Congress that one supporter enthusiastically suggests, “He knows more about it than the Speaker of the House.” Horn’s conversations are peppered with mind-numbing references to government officials with whom he has worked and the panels on which he has served.

He earned a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in political science from Stanford, which led to his first book on the Cabinet and Congress, published when he was 29.

He moved to Washington in 1958 where he worked as a legislative aide to the Senate’s deputy Republican leader and briefly as an assistant to the Secretary of Labor. He wrote a book on the role of the Senate Appropriations Committee and co-authored one on congressional ethics.

He became a dean at American University in Washington and was appointed by President Richard Nixon as vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--a part-time post he held for 13 years. He also served on numerous boards, was host on a television series on the three branches of government and later a radio show on presidential campaign reform. Through the years, he has amassed a personal collection of 7,000 books on Congress.

In 1969, when Horn was 38, California State University officials were impressed with his achievements at American University and offered him a choice of being president at three of their campuses: San Diego, San Jose and Long Beach.

Steve Horn Jr. said his father chose Long Beach because he thought it had the most potential as a university and as a city.

Praised as a tireless “ideas man” who transformed the university into a respected academic institution, Horn pioneered a number of programs, including one that allowed senior citizens to attend classes for $3.

But his blunt, hands-on style, demanding and argumentative demeanor gradually alienated many faculty members who painted him as an arrogant, vindictive figure. He was censured twice by the Faculty Senate, and by the mid-1980s, several professors were seeking his ouster.

Horn’s demise was hastened in 1986 when a deficit of more than $1 million was discovered, forcing the campus to borrow money from the chancellor’s office to pay its bills. Horn did not improve the situation by threatening to cut the football program (which was dropped in a recent budget crunch).

In the end, the trustees brought in an outside management review team, which found that Horn’s relations with the faculty were poor, his management skills were deficient and his relations with community leaders had deteriorated. In November, 1987, he was given the choice of resigning as president and taking a teaching job at the university, or being fired. He chose to teach.

Horn’s record at Cal State Long Beach has become fuel for the Democratic campaign. “If he cannot balance the budget at Cal State Long Beach, how do you expect him to balance the budget in Congress,” is a Braude refrain.

Horn cites a February, 1991, memo from the Cal State Long Beach controller Ray Soliman, which flatly states “there was no deficit” in 1986. But, Lou Messner, Cal State vice chancellor for business affairs, explained last week that in 1986 the university overcommitted itself. It had to borrow about $1 million from the chancellor’s office or it would have gone into a deficit, he said.

The 1986 budget crisis is one reason Braude questions Horn’s abilities. Another, Braude contends, is that Horn is a man who belongs to another era.

“I didn’t work for Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford,” Braude said at a recent debate. “I don’t sit back in an ivory tower. . . . I’m not a theorist. I don’t sit around making decisions based on what I’ve read in books. He’s been in education for the last 17, 18, 20 years. I’ve been out there with the people.”

For his part, Horn makes no apologies for what happened at Cal State Long Beach. He characterizes himself as a reformer who challenged the old guard and paid for it, and he snorts at Braude’s contention that he is out of touch.

“I’m 30 years ahead of my time,” he said indignantly. “I suggested term limits in 1973 and campaign reform in 1963. I was on the debriefing team for the attorney general’s office on the Watts riots. I was founding member of the National Institute of Corrections and I served on the Housing and Urban Development Board . . . I spent 13 years holding hearings all over America on urban problems. There isn’t an urban problem Evan Anderson Braude can dream up that I haven’t spent time on with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.”

Horn is a careful and exacting man. At debates and forums, he appears relaxed and somewhat amused by his opponent, but he keeps copious notes and his son videotapes the event. He carries a personal calendar jammed with notes and appointments, only sleeps four to five hours a night, and when he wants to relax, he works on a new project, an annotated bibliography of every book written about Congress.

But Horn vehemently disagrees with those who portray him as a closed-minded autocrat. The son of a writer and a geologist, Horn said he respects other’s ideas, enjoys a good argument--something he learned growing up in a family “where one was expected to have an opinion on politics at age 5.”

“Yes, I’m demanding,” he said. “I don’t ask anything of anybody that I am not willing to do. (My attitude is) if you have to work all night to get it done, you are going to work all night. No one who ever worked for me thought it was a nine-to-five job.”

Horn calls himself a “different kind of Republican” and says one of his strengths lies in his ability to work with both liberals and conservatives.

“I’ve never done anything just to save my own skin--that’s what annoys me about politicians,” he said. “I don’t give a hoot about my reelection. I’m going to work, regardless of who is President, to get the job done. I don’t care for the gourmet life (of Washington) and I’ve already seen the sights.”