CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Huffington Campaigns in Crucial Southland : Trailing Feinstein in recent polls, the GOP candidate focuses on moderates and conservatives. He visits Pasadena, El Monte, Covina and Claremont.

After so many months of campaigning and so many millions spent on television ads, U.S. Senate candidate Mike Huffington faced the one impromptu question Wednesday that strikes terror in any political underdog:

“What’s your name?”

But the GOP congressman took this one in stride. After all, it came from a 3-year-old.

The question, posed at the Bundy Scott Child Care Center in Pasadena, opened the second day of Huffington’s five-day campaign swing through voter-rich Southern California--an area that with the rural Central Valley looms as crucial in his Nov. 8 race against Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Focusing on the moderate and conservative voters who must turn out if he is to win, Huffington’s bus tour pulled out from the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena before stops at a Chamber of Commerce Expo in El Monte, Covina High School and GOP headquarters in Claremont. By the time his tour ends Saturday, he will have visited GOP strongholds in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“I want to round up votes in Southern California,” Huffington said as his burgundy-colored bus rolled through El Monte and other areas that since the 1980s have been known as Reagan Democrat Country.

With recent polls showing Feinstein with an edge--KCBS-TV reported Wednesday that Feinstein leads Huffington 44% to 35% with the large group of remaining voters undecided--Huffington knows that his only hope of beating Feinstein rests on getting the legions of moderates and Republicans to the polls. Toward that end he has made three extended trips through the Central Valley and plans one more. The current bus tour is his first locally and the longest of his campaign.

His day was carefully constructed around the central themes of his campaign--less government, lower taxes, getting government out of people’s lives.

After his visit to the child care center, Huffington was asked whether he would join the stand against Proposition 187 taken by former GOP Cabinet members Jack F. Kemp and William J. Bennett, the latter a sort of political guru for Huffington.

In a statement released Wednesday, Bennett and Kemp attacked Proposition 187, the California initiative that seeks to bar illegal immigrants from receiving public services, as an extreme and racially divisive reaction to illegal immigration.

Huffington said he would take a position on Proposition 187 and other ballot measures before Election Day. Asked about his reaction to Bennett’s denunciation of Proposition 187, Huffington said, “I think everyone should make up their own mind.”

Questions about Proposition 187 popped up several times during the day. Before addressing civic and business leaders in El Monte, Huffington was pressed again and his response, like Feinstein’s refusal to take a stand on Proposition 187, clearly frustrated South El Monte’s Mayor Vera Valdiviez.

“On this particular issue, (a position) needs to be stated,” she told reporters. “They are not taking a position that’s important to the nation. Absolutely, they are ducking it.’

Later, addressing more than 100 government students at Covina High School, Huffington again declined to take a position on the measure when asked about it by Genise Eckles, a 17-year-old senior.

“Our country was built by immigrants,” he told the students. “But I know this, our country cannot afford to let everybody come in who wants to come in.”

Throughout his day, Huffington seemed relaxed and smoothly shifted gears--and his message--for each audience. Before the civic and business leaders, he spoke about tax cuts and lifting government regulations; to the government students, about the importance of education and registering to vote; and when he addressed the Covina Colts football team, the rail-thin swimmer and runner extolled the virtues of athletics.

The only glitch in his schedule came during his visit to the day-care center.

Before the event, Huffington’s campaign announced that he would read stories to the preschoolers from William Bennett’s best-selling “Book of Virtues.”

Instead, he picked “Who Lost a Shoe?” and “The Tiny Seed.”

“It (Bennett’s book) was there,” Huffington said later, “but they told us the kids were too young.”