ELECTIONS / U.S. CONGRESS : Last-Minute Charges--and Cash--Fly in 36th District : Harman’s war chest totals $1.3 million. Flores gathers $700,000 in hotly contested campaign. Both candidates use funds to attack each other in a mailers.

Charges and countercharges were flying in the coastal 36th Congressional District last week, fueled by a last-minute infusion of campaign cash.

Democrat Jane Harman loaned her campaign $460,000 in October, hiking her personal commitment to the race to nearly $700,000 and providing capital for an unusual series of network television advertisements to boost her visibility.

Counting outside contributions her campaign has received--including numerous donations from abortion rights activists, lawyers, labor unions and Democratic Party luminaries--Harman now has gathered $1.3 million to spend on her first-ever race for office.

Los Angles City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, the Republican contender, has raised about $700,000 this year--roughly $40,000 of it just last week--largely from Los Angeles-area developers and businesses and from some of City Hall’s most powerful lobbyists.

Much of the money on both sides has financed a flurry of last-minute attack mailers to sway voters in the ideologically diverse district, which stretches from San Pedro and the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Venice and includes portions of Torrance, Lomita and Lawndale.

In one mailer sent out by Harman last week, the Democrat criticized Flores for voting in the mid-1980s to approve Occidental Oil Co.’s plan to drill for oil in Pacific Palisades.

She also sent out a mailer consisting of stick figures and text written in a childlike scrawl criticizing Flores for, among other things, supporting increases in salaries for members of the Los Angeles City Council.

“Anytime Joan Milke Flores needs more money, she just votes herself a raise!” reads one portion of the mailer. “Pretty neat, huh?”

Flores rejects such criticism. She says her vote in favor of the oil drilling plan merely supported a commitment already made by the council before she was elected. On pay raises, she says she supported the largest of the salary increases because it was part of a ballot measure that also included a crucial ethics reform package.

And Flores has been sending out attack mail of her own.

On Wednesday, mailboxes began to fill with brochures in which her campaign accuses Harman of lobbying Congress three years ago on behalf of a German company allegedly tied to the development of a Libyan poison gas plant.

Harman, a former Carter White House official, angrily denied that she ever represented the company, Preussag A.G., although the Washington law firm for which she works did include her name in a proposal soliciting the Preussag account.

To back her contention, Harman has released a letter from a chief partner in her law firm denying that Harman had any ties to the lobbying done for Preussag.

Harman staffers also were angered last week by a Flores mailer printed on the back of an earlier Harman flyer outlining her weekend campaign bicycling route.

The Flores mailer, sporting a drawing of a witch riding a bicycle, urged Flores supporters to gather at the Harman campaign’s San Pedro starting point and at her Redondo Beach stopping point on Saturday “to heckel (sic) and call the bluff of the scariest Witch in the West!” “Scare the Witch Off The Hill!” urges the mailer, which lists the events as College Republican and Young Republican rallies.

“This really is a call to violence and you know . . . they’re going to start screaming and kicking the bikes and they’re going to try to get in people’s way,” Harman spokesman Roy Behr warned. “All it takes is one misunderstanding and there’s going to be violence. Anything that happens (on Saturday) is going to be Joan’s responsibility.”

No confrontation developed during the bicycle ride Saturday, however.

Flores campaign officials said the mailer, which they acknowledge was sent out in the Flores campaign’s envelopes and with a notation that the campaign paid for it, was organized by Young Republican members “who are a little too exuberant in their support of us,” Flores campaign manager Dora Kingsley said.

“I don’t see a problem here,” Kingsley said. “We have been out there taking hits from Jane Harman day in and day out with lie after lie after lie . . . (But) our campaign did not condone (the flyer), nor do we condone the rhetoric.”

Even the minor-party candidates were being drawn into the fray.

Harman’s campaign mailed a letter from local environmental organizations urging Green Party voters to cast their ballots for Harman, not their own party’s candidate.

“Remember, voting for the Green candidate will only help elect Republican Joan Milke Flores,” the letter said.

Green Party candidate Richard Greene said he was disappointed that the organizations had abandoned a party created and designed by them.

“Their endorsement of someone other than a Green candidate is based 100% on fear and politics as usual,” he said. “If we are going to make any significant change in this country, we have to begin voting for what we truly believe in, not censoring ourselves to support politics as usual.”

Also running in the 36th District are Libertarian Marc F. Denny and Peace and Freedom candidate Owen Staley.