CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Rogan, Schiff Paint Sharp Contrasts : Assembly: Portraits of incumbent emerge, as challenger tries to break GOP stronghold.

A hotly contested Glendale-Burbank legislative race has produced some graphic portraits of freshman Assemblyman James Rogan (R-Glendale), one drawn by the incumbent, the other by his Democratic foe, Adam Schiff. Not surprisingly, the pictures don’t always seem to be of the same man.

Rogan’s own self-portrait, painted in quasi-heroic dimensions for voters, shows a young boy from a broken home (welfare mother, alcoholic stepfather) who overcame the odds to become a successful prosecuting attorney and one of the state’s youngest Municipal Court judges. “Living the American dream” is the title Rogan’s campaign literature gives to the incumbent’s history.

Schiff, 34, paints an equally vivid picture of Rogan, but as a former liberal foot soldier in the Democratic Party who later underwent an “amazing transformation” to become a hard-boiled, right-wing Christian who would have creationism taught in public schools and abortion outlawed. “Stop the radical right!” shouts a Schiff mailer.

Which portrait will have the biggest impact on voters remains to be seen, as the region’s most spirited Assembly race draws to a close. The 43rd District includes Glendale and Burbank as well as Los Feliz and Silver Lake and parts of Hollywood.

In its final days, the two contenders combined have pumped more than $650,000 into a race where Democrats have launched their most ambitious challenge in decades to the longtime Republican hegemony in the Glendale-Burbank area.

Democrats were encouraged to believe the time was ripe for an upset after the 1992 elections showed President Clinton and U. S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer fared well in the 43rd District.

The legal agonies of former Assemblyman Pat Nolan also influenced Democratic calculations. Nolan pleaded guilty to one count of political corruption and was sent to prison in April, 1994, as part of a federal undercover probe of Sacramento lawmakers.

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In May, Rogan handily won a special election to pick a replacement for the last few months of Nolan’s term.

Now, as he seeks his first full, two-year term representing the 43rd District, Rogan has focused on a triad of issues: crime, taxes and illegal immigration. Rogan is endorsed by Glendale and Burbank police officer groups and the leadership of the tax revolt movement, and he supports Proposition 187. (Schiff opposes the immigration initiative.) But Rogan has been unable to intimidate Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who has caught the eye of state Democratic Party talent scouts and received financial aid from Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. As of last week, Schiff’s campaign had gotten at least $12,500 from Brown’s political organization.

Schiff’s receipt of Brown machine money, Rogan has claimed, assures that Schiff will be a typical Democratic loyalist in Sacramento, not the nonpartisan legislator he says he will be. Rogan has also accused Schiff of being an opportunistic job-shopper, citing the fact that his challenger ran in 1991 for a Hollywood-based Assembly seat.

Despite such accusations, Schiff has brought to the table a crime-fighting record as a former federal prosecutor that has helped immunize him from many of the usual GOP attacks in an election year fraught with high voter concern about crime.

Schiff has boasted that as prosecutor, he won a guilty verdict against FBI agent Richard Miller in 1990 in a highly publicized Soviet spying case, and that he scored a 100% jury trial conviction rate. He also notes that he supports a “three-strikes” law for persons convicted of a third violent felony and supports measures to ban assault weapons. Several law enforcement groups, including the Los Angeles Police Protective League and the Police Officers Research Assn. of California, are backing Schiff.

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But it has been Schiff’s portrayal of Rogan that has been most provocative. “You’ll see a great difference between the two of us,” Schiff has warned voters.

Rogan, Schiff maintains, is the captive of the GOP’s radical Christian right wing. Schiff has pointed to the fact that Rogan has received sizable contributions from Allied Business PAC, a political action committee run by several conservative Christian businessmen, including an heir to the Ahmanson savings and loan fortune.

Allied and its individual members have contributed nearly $35,000 to Rogan, while San Fernando Valley businessman Bert Boeckman has loaned Rogan’s campaign another $25,000. The owner of Galpin Motors, Boeckman has been affiliated with TV evangelist and ex-presidential candidate Pat Robertson.

Schiff has called such contributions a “frightening development.”

The blunt-spoken Rogan also gave Schiff further ammunition by acknowledging that he favored the idea of public school instructors teaching the theory of Biblical creationism (alongside evolutionary theory) as one explanation of the origins of mankind.

During a debate two weeks ago at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, Rogan--pressed by Schiff to explain his views--said he thought it would amount to “lying to school children” to teach them that it is a scientifically accepted fact that “we all came from monkeys.”

Schiff also has unveiled an obscure 14-year-old document to show how radically far Rogan has come in his personal and political pilgrimage.

The document was a mailer Rogan sent voters in 1980 when he was seeking to become a Democratic Party delegate supporting U. S. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s insurgent candidacy to deny President Jimmy Carter renomination.

“Whither Rogan next?” Schiff said in an interview later, in which he claimed such dramatic shifts call into question the stability of his opponent’s political beliefs.

Schiff also has sharply challenged Rogan’s decision to accept a $20,000-a-year pay hike that was recommended for all state legislators by a citizens panel.

Acceptance of the pay hike belied Rogan’s carefully cultivated image as a tax fighter, Schiff said, and revealed him as a hypocrite because he had attacked his GOP foe in last May’s special election, community college trustee Julia Wu, for similar behavior.

Rogan has not denied that he has traveled far politically, but calls his transformation the product of maturity that comes with a “receding hairline” and new family responsibilities, while denying his tough conservatism is the byproduct of his worship at Calvary Bible Church, a conservative denomination in Burbank.

At a recent candidate forum, Rogan said he thought it was not very remarkable that his political philosophy had changed since he was in law school (when he was supporting Edward Kennedy). Looking around the room, Rogan said he guessed others had also changed their views with time. “Maybe you’ll be one of us someday, Mr. Schiff,” Rogan added.

On the potentially damaging pay hike issue, Rogan has maintained that his acceptance of the pay hike and Wu’s acceptance of one are dissimilar--and thus it is unfair to knock him as a hypocrite. Wu voted to increase her own salary, Rogan noted, while all he did was accept a pay hike recommended by a citizens panel.

Rogan has also sought to turn his acceptance of the pay hike into an emblem of the fact that he’s a good family provider, while contrasting that image with that of bachelor Schiff. He took the pay, in part, because he has two children and a wife to support, Rogan angrily told an audience recently. “Before criticizing me for exercising my family responsibilities, perhaps you ought to get one,” he said.

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As the issue of family values has crept into the debate, Schiff has sought to blunt its effects on him by actively displaying his girlfriend, Eve Sanderson, at candidate forums and in his campaign literature. In one piece, it is even announced beneath a photo of the two holding hands that they will be married Feb. 19.

Meanwhile, Rogan has complained that Schiff’s tireless attacks on his ties to the Christian right amount to religious bigotry. In a handwritten letter to voters, Rogan’s wife, Christine, likened Schiff to those who believed “John F. Kennedy wasn’t qualified to be President because he was a Catholic.”

After one forum, Rogan said: “I keep wanting to talk about the issues, but all he wants to do is talk about religion.” But Schiff has retorted that Rogan’s ties to the Christian right are relevant because his allies want to use the machinery of government to impose their views on the rest of society.

Rogan denies that he is that kind of ideologue. “Creationism is not a legislative issue with me,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s only an issue in Adam Schiff’s mind. You could go up to Sacramento and ask anyone, even Willie Brown, if I’m up there talking about creationism, and the answer will be ‘no.’ Adam Schiff is just trying to distract the voters from the real issues.”

Rogan also tried to assure voters at a recent forum that he’s not inflexible. While saying he wished he had the power to stop all abortions, he told the group that as a legislator he has voted for a measure to have the government pay for abortions for the poor in the case of rape, incest or threat to the mother’s life.

When left to its own devices, however, the Rogan campaign tries to focus heavily on the incumbent’s life story.

“As a young boy, Jim never knew his real father,” says one mailer. “His stepfather was an alcoholic. His mother a convicted felon. He was raised by his grandparents.”

The mailer goes on to relate how his family collected welfare, and how he dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to get odd jobs to help support his mother and his three half-brothers and a half-sister. After relating how Rogan got a law degree at UCLA, became a prosecutor and finally was appointed to the bench (by GOP Gov. George Deukmejian), the mailer ends with the rousing summation: “Judge Rogan’s independence was forged in the crucible of hard work, grit and a belief that the American dream is open to anyone who is willing to stand on their own two feet.”

“Jim Rogan is a real Horatio Alger success story,” said Laura Birkmeyer, an assistant chief U. S. Attorney in San Diego who has known Rogan and his family for 15 years.