CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Voters Say They Want More Vision, Less Venom : Members of San Fernando Valley group convened by The Times have grown weary of negative campaign tactics. They want candidates to offer clear, concise plans for improving California.

Mary Kranz, fed up with negative political advertising, says she yearns for a positive message from the candidates running for governor.

So Kranz, a college librarian, found a copy of Kathleen Brown’s 62-page economic plan as soon as it was published and stayed up late one night to glean its insights.

“It wasn’t that exciting,” Kranz said later. “More money was needed for every single thing she was talking about.”

Kranz’s tepid review of Brown’s booklet illustrates one problem the state treasurer faces as she struggles to overtake Republican Gov. Pete Wilson in the final weeks of a contest the Democrat once was expected to win:

Like Kranz, many California voters say they are tired of what they view as the infantile tone of the modern political campaign. But candidates who try to elevate the discussion risk having their proposals picked apart by their opponents, the press and a skeptical, if not cynical, electorate.

Kranz was among a group of San Fernando Valley voters who gathered in Chatsworth last week to discuss politics with a Los Angeles Times reporter and editor. It was the second in a series of three meetings for the group, which The Times convened to put a human face on the numbers spewed out by public opinion polls that sometimes dominate analysis of the campaigns.

While far from a statistically significant sample, the panel includes a mix of men and women, Republicans and Democrats, from a variety of backgrounds, and in many ways reflects the profile of the swing voters that candidates and initiative campaigns must reach to win in California.

Since they last met as a group two weeks ago, these voters have grown no less angry or frustrated with the political process. They still feel as if no one is listening to--or talking about--their concerns. More than ever, they want candidates to stop slinging mud and instead talk more about where they would lead the state if elected.

As a group, they are still leaning toward Wilson, although they remain open to Brown. Some members of the group were more receptive than before to Mike Huffington’s challenge to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. And they are increasingly wary of Proposition 187, the anti-immigration initiative.

But what rankles them most is that they have yet to hear anything they think approaches an intelligent discussion of the direction California needs to take for the next four years and beyond.

“It’s like watching 7-year-olds pointing at each other and saying, ‘He did it,’ ‘She did it,’ ‘They did it,’ ” says Marilynn Bierman of West Hills. “They haven’t said anything about anything.”

Joseph Jurick, an aerospace engineer with Hughes Aircraft, does not want to hear any more from the governor about how tough he’s been on criminals or how weak Brown might be.

“It repulses me,” Jurick says of Wilson’s tactic.

In a climate such as this, one might assume that a booklet spelling out a candidate’s proposals in positive terms would be a hit with voters. Indeed, almost everyone in the group had heard about Brown’s plan for California. But only a few had actually seen it and the reaction to it was decidedly mixed.

Michele Rothschild, recently laid off from her job as a real estate secretary, says she is impressed that Brown took the effort to publish a plan.

“I like it that Kathleen Brown said something, she said she has her plans, she would cut waste and apply the money saved to certain programs,” said the West Hills Democrat. “I don’t know that she will do it. But I want somebody to tell me what they want to do, and she did that.”

Others were more critical.

Alvin Green, a Northridge lawyer, had not seen the plan. But from what he had heard, he had misgivings.

“Is it going to increase our taxes?” Green asked. “Normally, the pattern for Democrats is they want to increase taxes.”

Marsha Frame, an accounting manager from Reseda, says she won’t read Brown’s plan because it is too long. The candidate, Frame says, should have been able to communicate her platform in a more concise form.

“It’s difficult enough reading the ballot,” she says.

For many in this group, Brown appears to have missed the mark. While correctly gauging the desire for a positive alternative to Wilson, Brown is dishing up details when it is vision that these voters want.

“I don’t care about the individual things,” says Kranz, the librarian. “In three months, the circumstances change and in four years we’ve forgotten what they’re arguing over now.”

She adds: “Someone has to come along with a value. . . . You want someone saying, this is where we’re going, this is our ideal. That’s the positive that no one is talking about.”

The same theme turned up when the panel discussed the one and only debate between Wilson and Brown. About half the group had watched the Oct. 14 debate. As viewers, the voters said, they were less interested in the claims and charges than they were in the way the candidates carried themselves.

“She looked well,” Rhoda Glassman, a Northridge businesswoman, said of Brown. “Her makeup, clothing, posture, everything about her was very, very healthy looking. Gov. Wilson kind of looked like Jimmy Carter at the end of his presidency. He looked like he had truly aged. He looked tired.”

Corinne Squire-Strompf, a medical transcriptionist from Northridge, thought Wilson showed disrespect by referring to Brown as “she” rather than calling the candidate by her name or using her title.

Wilson, Squire-Strompf said, “seemed almost intolerant of her views. Almost like, go away, you really don’t understand.”

But others thought Brown was too well prepared for her own good. As a group, they tended to mark her down because she seemed overly packaged, even insincere.

“She was polished, and that’s what I found to be negative,” said Toby Friedberg, a self-employed Winnetka Democrat. “I didn’t like her smug attitude. She seemed to have everything rehearsed. Something about the way she presented herself turned me off. Wilson just seemed down to earth--the way he always is.”

While Brown’s use of an anecdote about the date rape of her daughter touched a chord with a few of the voters in the group, several more were skeptical. They saw this deeply personal revelation as no more than a political tactic to combat Wilson’s advantage on the crime issue.

“When a candidate appeals to a certain group, it always turns me off,” said Takuro Nakae, a retired engineer from Winnetka who thought the comment about rape was intended to win over women voters. “I say, ‘What about me? I’m not in that group.’ The next time, she’s going to tell me something I like, but she’s going to turn someone else off.”

Marvin Hershman, a contracts manager for Litton Industries, said Brown’s use of the story reminded him of an old military term: firing for effect.

Brown, Hershman said, knew she could not overcome Wilson’s edge on crime but wanted to shake him up anyway.

“That’s exactly what I thought it was,” Hershman said. “I know I can’t hit you, but let’s see how close I can come.”

For all the criticism of Brown, though, she appeared to have made some headway with this group during October. Although all of the participants began the project undecided in the governor’s race, they went overwhelmingly for Wilson when pressed to make a choice at the first meeting. Two weeks later, the governor’s edge was only 3-2, with the rest either refusing to choose or saying they would vote for a minor party candidate.

Statewide, polls show that Wilson’s strong stand against illegal immigration and his support for Proposition 187 have been helping him against Brown. But in this group, which agrees that illegal immigration is a serious problem, the governor’s harsh rhetoric on the issue appears to be starting to backfire.

Michele Rothschild says she thought Wilson made sense when she heard him make a pitch for the initiative, which seeks to deny public services to illegal immigrants. But she felt she had been deceived when she explored the issue further.

“I was all for it until I actually read it,” she said. “Now I’m going to vote against it.”

Alvin Green, the lawyer, calls the measure “probably the dumbest proposition I’ve seen on the ballot in this state for a long time”--although there is a chance he still might vote for it to send a message. And as for Wilson:

“I’m disappointed. He is impressing me less and less every time he opens his mouth.”

Several of the panelists also are taking another look at the U.S. Senate race and are considering a vote for Huffington. While they still lean heavily toward Feinstein, some said they believed the wealthy Santa Barbara congressman was getting a bum rap in the media.

“I’m beginning to feel sorry for him,” said Squire-Strompf.

Huffington appears to be benefiting from his unprecedented onslaught of television commercials, even though most of them are the negative kind that so many panelist say they deplore.

These voters, for instance, know that Feinstein has voted with President Clinton more than 90% of the time, and they are aware that the incumbent senator voted to confirm a federal judge who had overturned the death penalty of a Florida killer. They learned these things from Huffington’s advertisements.

Similarly, they know that Brown opposes the death penalty, and some question her commitment to select tough judges--points Wilson has made in his ads. They even know that one of Brown’s economic advisers quit her campaign, and they believe he left out of disgust for her plan, which is what a Wilson ad implies, though it is not the case.

Even as they criticize the negativity, some of these voters acknowledge that it’s the bad news that sticks most with them.

“Nobody listen to or understands the positive,” said Hershman, the contracts manager. “So he who throws the stone the farthest gets elected.”

Another Visit With Select Group

To learn what voters are thinking, The Times, assisted by Davis Research of Calabasas, selected a group of San Fernando Valley residents who have voted in at least two of the past three elections and were undecided about the race for governor.

The group included a cross-section of voters but was far too small to represent a scientific sampling of the electorate.

The second in a series of discussions took place over dinner provided by The Times at its Chatsworth office. The Times intends to talk to the same voters one more time before the Nov. 8 election to learn what has made them decide how to vote.