CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS / 50th DISTRICT : Valencia, Faced With Democratic Majority, Turns the Heat on Filner

A seemingly minor editing change in candidate Tony Valencia’s campaign brochure speaks volumes about the nature of the 50th Congressional District race.

Earlier in the campaign, a photo of Valencia appeared on the cover of the brochure, accompanied by text saying: “Republican candidate, 50th Congressional District, State of California.”

The new brochure, however, drops the words Republican candidate --and with good reason. Few candidates would want to go out of their way to be identified as the Republican nominee in a district where the Democrats hold a 50%-35% registration edge.

That two-word change in Valencia’s brochure helps explain his hewing to a negative line that has transformed the 50th District race, once expected to be little more than a formality, into one of San Diego County’s most acrimonious campaigns.

With Democratic San Diego City Councilman Bob Filner enjoying significant name recognition, financial and demographic advantages, Valencia has relentlessly attacked Filner in an attempt to make his character the issue.

“People are not asking about jobs and public safety,” said Valencia, the 58-year-old founder of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation, which promotes trans-border commerce, helps minority youths develop careers and assists small and minority businesses.

“They’re asking, ‘What are you going to do to ensure Bob Filner doesn’t represent us in Congress?’

Filner, a 50-year-old former San Diego city school board member who was overwhelmingly reelected to a second council term last fall, dismisses Valencia’s attacks.

“He discusses issues in only the vaguest terms and somehow finds a way to turn everything back into a personal attack on me,” said Filner, who won a contentious six-candidate Democratic primary in June.

When pressed, Valencia addresses issues, albeit in generalities. He has largely treated them as distractions from what he sees as the race’s central equation--the personal contrasts between him and Filner.

Among other things, Valencia has faulted Filner for breaking a council campaign pledge to learn Spanish to facilitate communication with constituents, for missing many council votes this year during the campaign and for breaking faith with the voters who last year reelected him to a four-year council term by “abandoning them” to run for Congress.

Filner, who served on the San Diego city school board before being elected to the council in 1987, has a response to each of those criticisms, which he also faced and overcame in his June primary victory.

He has begun studying Spanish, Filner says, though he concedes that he his knowledge of it is still rudimentary. Although Valencia contends that being bilingual “should practically be a requirement” in a border district, Filner argues that his council performance demonstrates his ability to represent the district, which stretches from East San Diego to the Mexican border.

Filner says most of the missed council votes dealt with routine procedural matters. He also points out that he missed several council meetings to travel to Washington to lobby for funding for local programs.

And, though Filner’s 1991 council reelection campaign was widely viewed as a tune-up for a congressional race, he relied on semantics last year to sidestep questions about whether he would serve his full four-year term at City Hall, usually by saying he had “no definite plans” to seek higher office.

“Everyone knew he planned to run--Filner’s little games fooled no one,” Valencia said. “That’s typical of the disrespect he has for the public.”

Although Valencia’s rhetorical salvos have occasionally put Filner on the defensive, more often they have produced a backlash or simply come across as mean-spirited. Such was the case at one forum where Valencia facetiously congratulated Filner for “making the cover” of Time magazine, and then held up a recent issue whose cover story was headlined “Lying--Everybody’s Doin’ It (Honest).”

Valencia also was roundly criticized for injecting ethnicity into one forum by calling Filner a “white liberal” and pointing out that Filner, like imprisoned junk bond king Michael Milken, is Jewish. In an interview minutes after the forum, Valencia expanded on his remarks, saying that Jewish people tend to “turn on each other,” and adding: “The process is cyclical . . . like Judas and Jesus Christ.”

Although Valencia insisted that he intended no ethnic slight, Filner described his remarks as “racism and extremism of the worst kind.”

Responding to Valencia’s attacks, Filner has increasingly directed voters’ attention in the closing weeks of the race to unflattering details in his opponent’s background.

Filner pointed out, for example, that court records and other documents show that Valencia has frequently made delinquent income tax payments and that the U.S.-Mexico Foundation has been sued successfully for non-payment of bills.

Campaign records also show that Valencia has spent money raised in his race in ways that, while legal, could be politically embarrassing. During six weeks last spring, Valencia spent more than $4 out of every $10 that he raised on clothing for himself and to pay his wife for working on his campaign.

The increasing enmity in the campaign has obscured major policy differences between the two major candidates. Filner, for example, advocates unfettered abortion rights, while Valencia opposes public funding for abortions and favors parental notification in the case of minors. In addition, Valencia supports the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement as a vehicle for “unlimited export opportunities.” Filner opposes it, warning that it could harm American jobs and the environment.

His council record, contrasted with Valencia’s “refusal to even seriously discuss the issues,” also marks one of the defining differences, Filner argues.

Jailed in the 1960s as one of the original “Freedom Riders” challenging racial segregation laws in Mississippi, Filner has blended a liberal stance on social issues such as jobs, housing and the environment with a consistent push for tougher anti-crime programs and increases in police staffing during his council tenure.

As highlights of his five-year record, he points to his leadership in creating “drug-free zones” near schools that bring stricter penalties for drug convictions, launching an aggressive anti-graffiti campaign, pushing for low-income housing, establishing job development programs and helping to resolve the problem of Tijuana sewage spills fouling San Diego beaches.

Two minor-party candidates--Libertarian Barbara Hutchinson and Peace and Freedom Party member Roger Batchelder--round out the ballot in the southern San Diego County district.

Hutchinson, a well-known local tax protester who was imprisoned “36 months, two hours, 22 minutes and 11 seconds” on mail fraud charges in the 1980s, hopes that voters will view her record as proof that she is “willing to stand up for what I believe in.”

A losing candidate for City Council in 1965 and for county assessor in 1978, the 65-year-old Hutchinson jokes that her only successful race has been for inmate president at the Pleasanton prison where she served her sentence.

Batchelder, a 43-year-old rental car transporter who lists himself on the ballot as a “peon,” is counting on the public’s growing disenchantment with politics to boost his candidacy.

Batchelder has suggested that the national debt could be cut by making an altruistic appeal to Americans to voluntarily contribute money beyond their taxes for that purpose.

“We could say, ‘If you love America, put up some money to retire the debt,’ ” Batchelder said.

If enough Americans did not respond favorably, he added, more drastic steps--such as retroactively cutting interest rates paid on government bonds--could be taken.