CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / 69TH ASSEMBLY DISTRICT : Umberg, Allen Wage War With Hit Mail : The two candidates have spent most of their combined campaign funds of $1 million on political pieces assailing each other.

Orange County’s 69th Assembly District has always produced some of the region’s most bruising political campaigns, and this season’s high-priced slugfest has held true to form.

Democratic Assemblyman Tom Umberg, 37, and Republican challenger Jo Ellen Allen, 46, have spent nearly $1 million combined, and they have used most of the campaign cash to batter each other with political mail as indelicate as an uppercut.

Umberg, in particular, has been a raging bull, filling the mailboxes of voters in the central Orange County district with campaign pieces packing a wallop.

One pictures Allen’s large rented home in Santa Ana and is headlined: “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous.” Another attacks Allen for a variety of lawsuits that have hit her husband’s businesses. Several recount how the family was sued for $14,000 in back rent for their former Corona del Mar home. Others have pummeled Allen for her conservative Christian beliefs and work with Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly’s national anti-feminist group.

Unbowed by the blows, Allen has thrown some of her own. One of her pieces compared Umberg to Pinocchio, complete with a cartoon character whose nose steadily grows as he debates the issues. Another shows a wide-eyed Umberg beside powerful Assembly leader Willie Brown and suggests that the two are political cronies.

In recent days, Allen has softened her approach a tad at the mailbox. At one point she dispatched a letter to voters imploring them to ignore looming “hit pieces” coming from the Umberg camp.

But even the most benign mailer still contained a few zingers. A letter to district voters from Allen’s husband, Eddie, rails against “Umberg’s disgusting hit pieces,” calls the assemblyman a “slick lawyer who knows how to skate around the edges of laws” and concludes that “Mr. Umberg and some of his campaign friends know of only one way to beat and harass an opponent--LIE, LIE and LIE more.”

No wonder it’s called the Fighting 69th.

It was in the 69th, after all, that Umberg waged a vicious battle to unseat former Republican Assemblyman Curt Pringle in 1990. Today, Pringle is seeking the newly reapportioned 68th Assembly seat, but he’s hardly oblivious to the latest rounds unfolding in his old district.

“It is disgusting, it’s despicable,” Pringle said. “What Tom Umberg is doing is an insult to the process, an insult to all of us. Even in my race against him, as bad as it was, he didn’t ever come after my family. I think he’s crossed the line.”

Orange County Republican Chairman Tom Fuentes went further, suggesting that Allen “is going to have some substantial grounds for lawsuits when this is all over.”

“I have never seen such malicious and dirty politics in a mailbox than what has been put out by Umberg,” Fuentes said. “I don’t think the voters will tolerate this sort of shameless, gutter politics that Umberg and his friends have resorted to.”

Democratic Party officials, however, say Umberg’s tactics are grounded in sound reasoning. As the only Orange County Democrat in a state or federal office, Umberg is a ready target for Republican ire, and must defend his territory with zeal, they contend.

“He should run scared, and I think that’s what he’s doing,” County Democratic Chairman Howard Adler said. “I think there’s every reason to believe he’s in a tough race and has to pull out all the stops. My own sense is he can’t take anything for granted. Not in this county.”

George Urch, Umberg’s chief of staff now on leave to manage his campaign, said the assemblyman resorted to the tough tactics only because Allen threw the first punch.

“I’m not trying to say we’re not hitting hard. Both sides here are blasting,” Urch said. “But Jo Ellen is trying to make it look as if she’s being picked on, that she’s talking about the issues and Umberg is the one who started it. That’s not true. She’s the one who went negative early in the campaign by putting out pieces lying about Umberg’s voting record.”

That sort of chicken-and-egg argument becomes a moot point as the opposing camps lash out at each other in what has quickly become one of Orange County’s ugliest races in years.

Amid the vitriol, Umberg’s camp has taken pains to make it appear that he is above the fray. But it’s a case of Jekyll and Hyde. Under his own name, Umberg has sent out potholders and pictures of his children and wife. The hit mailers, meanwhile, have been sponsored by Hyde-like political surrogates--in most cases the California Democratic Party, but also local police, firefighter and teacher organizations that support the former federal criminal prosecutor.

In that spirit, the Democratic Party sent a letter to Jewish supporters saying Allen’s Eagle Forum in 1988 opposed federal funding for a school program on the Holocaust because it “did not contain the views of the Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan.” (Allen acknowledges that Eagle Forum opposed the program, but steadfastly denies that anyone associated with the group mentioned the Nazi Party and KKK or suggested the views of anti-Semitic organizations were appropriate.)

The creme de la creme of the hit mail came little more than a week ago, when a Democrat Party campaign brochure landed in district mailboxes trumpeting that “a dozen legal suits haunt politician Jo Ellen Allen.” The piece gave snapshots of five cases filed against Allen’s husband, said the candidate’s “family business” had been suspended for failure to pay taxes and that another of Eddie Allen’s firms faced five different federal and state tax liens.

Jo Ellen Allen bristled at the assault, and launched a counterattack of her own, holding a press conference with her husband to assail Umberg’s charges.

The challenger contends that she has absolutely nothing to do with her husband’s businesses, noting that none of the lawsuits were filed against her. Moreover, most of the lawsuits were the result of financial problems stemming from a dispute with a Honolulu savings and loan that owed him a large sum of money, Eddie Allen said. A recent settlement of that lawsuit has permitted the Allens to pay most of their debts, he said.

In addition, Eddie Allen said any tax problems cited by the Umberg camp were the result of government mistakes. Allen said he resigned from one company months before it was suspended for failing to pay taxes. He also said that state authorities erroneously hit his old financial consulting firm with tax liens after he had suspended operation of the business.

Jo Ellen Allen, meanwhile, charged that Umberg’s campaign staff has engaged in “dirty tricks” to undermine her candidacy. One of Umberg’s mailers was based on a campaign document that could only have been obtained through a spy in the Allen camp or by breaking into her office or rummaging through her trash, the Republican candidate said. In another case, she said, Umberg’s chief of staff showed up at a debate along with her husband’s disgruntled ex-wife, a ploy the challenger suggests was an unsuccessful attempt to rattle her.

“This has gone way beyond mudslinging and misrepresentation and the normal political hype,” she declared.

The Umberg camp, meanwhile, has gripes of its own. They contend that Allen has distorted the assemblyman’s record, in particular by attempting to link him to Assembly Speaker Brown.

A recent Halloween-themed Allen brochure declares in melting orange letters that the Democratic challenger’s campaign tactics are “ugly,” but then launches into ugliness of its own, accusing the Army Reserve officer of “trying to fool the voters into believing he was part of Operation Desert Storm” and declaring he is “owned lock, stock and barrel” by Brown.

“Tom has opposed the Speaker on more issues than anyone else in the Democratic caucus,” Urch said.

Urch also took exception with Allen’s attacks on Umberg’s military record. Last month, a handful of military officers gathered in front of Umberg’s office to complain that he was trying to fool voters with a mailer featuring postcards written to his children during Operation Desert Shield. One read: “I’m in the desert with the Army.”

“We would have to be pretty stupid to put out mail that misrepresents that Tom was in the Persian Gulf when everyone knows he wasn’t,” Urch said. “It was an innocent postcard he wrote to his kids. And he was in the desert with the Army. Ft. Irwin is in the desert.”