CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Beilenson, Sybert Fight to Finish : Congress: Battle for the 24th District has embittered the Democratic incumbent and Republican challenger. Both sides issue last-minute attack mailers in the hope of scoring victory.

Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) is often described as being professorial, and his GOP challenger Richard Sybert was once Gov. Pete Wilson’s top policy wonk.

But their $1-million battle for the 24th Congressional District hasn’t wound up on Mt. Olympus. Instead, their election finale--played out in a national spotlight--has often looked more like mud wrestling.

The nine-term incumbent, a double Harvard graduate and a senior member of one of the House of Representatives’ most powerful committees, attacked Sybert for moonlighting in the governor’s office without, however, offering any proof of wrongdoing. In the meantime, Sybert, a diploma-laden conservative thinker, took liberties with facts to produce a sometimes distorted picture of Beilenson’s record on matters ranging from illegal immigration to the death penalty.

That the last act in such a political drama would find the players mud-spattered and almost unrecognizable is not new. “Unfortunately, it’s the rare competitive race that’s won pretty,” political consultant Richard Lichtenstein observed recently. “These are races where the rules are to take no prisoners, win at any cost.”

In fact, as of Thursday, each camp, embittered and sullied by last-minute drive-by mailers, was threatening to sue the other for libel.

Not that the race has been conducted without any policy discussion. During the campaign, voters learned, for example, that the two foes are split over the merits of Proposition 187 and value of several Clinton Administration initiatives.

Still, when it got down to short strokes, much of the debate was over which candidate had the most credibility and integrity and who was not a typical politician.

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How the voters in the 24th District will react to the final flood of mailers and charges remains to be seen Tuesday night, after the ballots are counted.

Of paramount interest to the Beilenson camp, according to one prominent politician (who asked for anonymity), will be the reaction of GOP environmentalists and Jewish Republicans, two sizable blocs of potential swing voters who live throughout the district’s affluent hillside communities such as Sherman Oaks and Encino. Beilenson is Jewish, and he is widely hailed as a founder of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Ross Perot partisans are also believed to be a key swing-vote factor in the 24th District, which includes the southwestern San Fernando Valley, the Conejo Valley and Malibu. Nearly a quarter of the vote cast in the district during the 1992 presidential race went to Perot, the Texas multimillionaire with his populist, throw-the-bums-out rhetoric.

Sybert has been assiduously courting the Perot movement, gathered under the banner of United We Stand, America clubs, trying to convince them that he’s ready to shake up Congress with reforms such as term limits.

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Through the haze of their lengthy battle--which began with Sybert spending about $300,000 of his own money to win the nomination in a crowded GOP primary--some enduring themes could be found.

Among them is that Beilenson, now seeking his 10th term in office, is a foe of Proposition 187, the state measure to deny government benefits to illegal immigrants, and a stout defender of several top Clinton Administration agenda items, including its health care plan.

Proposition 187 is a “naive attempt” to deal with illegal immigration, the 62-year-old Beilenson said, even as he pointed out his own record of authoring legislation to secure first-time federal aid to reimburse the state of California for its cost of incarcerating illegals and of supporting a measure to double the size of the Border Patrol.

In 1992, the incumbent surprised his longtime liberal allies by endorsing the idea of denying automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents. That highly controversial approach, Beilenson has admitted, however, has not gone anywhere in Washington.

At several candidate forums, Beilenson also has derided the media, saying they have failed to recognize that Clinton and the Democrat-controlled Congress have broken 12 years of Reagan-Bush gridlock to make progress on several national priorities.

Beilenson praised the Clinton budget deficit plan for trimming mountains of red ink built up under Republican presidencies, the Brady gun control bill and the crime bill, a measure that included funding to hire 100,000 more police and a ban on certain military-style assault weapons.

After ticking off these initiatives as accomplishments, Beilenson told a senior citizens group that he hoped his report of good tidings would “make you feel like we should continue the change we’ve started in Washington.”

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Given the conventional wisdom that identifying with the Clinton Administration could be a political kiss of death, Beilenson’s solid embrace was surprising.

Less so another campaign gambit by the incumbent.

As he had done to Tom McClintock, his GOP adversary in the 1992 election, Beilenson has painted Sybert as a captive of special interests, the specific charge being Sybert’s receipt of at least $60,000 in political action committee (PAC) contributions. By taking such money, Sybert revealed himself to be nothing more than “just another typical politician” ready to be influenced by “dirty money,” several Beilenson mailers complained.

While excoriating Sybert as “PAC-Man,” Beilenson has reminded voters of his own longstanding pledge not to take PAC money. In fact, Beilenson has not reported receiving any PAC money on his campaign statements (a special category is set aside on the statements for PAC contributions).

Beilenson also has portrayed Sybert as a partisan creature of the national GOP machinery--not an authentic product of the 24th District. Sybert has, in fact, benefited from a steady stream of GOP luminaries, including conservatives Jack Kemp, Edward Bennett, U. S. Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) and Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who have periodically stopped in Los Angeles to raise money for the challenger.

The incumbent’s camp has gleefully noted that Sybert originally had considered running this year in the GOP primary against a fellow Republican, Rep. Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale), who represents Pasadena, where Sybert lived for several years and has owned a home, and that the challenger only moved into the 24th District in October, 1993. He now rents a home in Calabasas with the option to buy.

Sybert’s history is that of the ultimate opportunistic politician, Beilenson campaign consultant Craig Miller has charged. “Rich Sybert has no inherent support in the community; he is not from the community,” Miller said. “He is totally dependent on Republican powerbrokers and PACs for his support.”

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Meanwhile, Sybert has said he would not have voted for the Clinton crime bill or deficit reduction plan, supports Proposition 187 and opposes the Administration’s health care plan.

The crime bill is flawed, Sybert has said, because it contains too much “pork barrel” social spending for midnight basketball and knitting classes to keep young people off the streets. These are “tired, old Great Society” nostrums that long ago proved to be costly and ineffective, Sybert has maintained.

As for the Clinton deficit plan, it is nothing more than a huge tax hike plan that hit the 24th District’s heavily affluent residents particularly hard, Sybert has charged. He has pointed to a conservative think tank’s estimate that the 24th District was one of the districts hardest hit by the plan’s tax provisions.

Sybert supports Proposition 187, claiming passage of the controversial measure is needed to challenge wrongheaded policies and court decisions that require, for example, states to educate illegal immigrant children. Sybert has also opposed “bilingual anything” and urged using the nation’s military to patrol the borders.

Nor has Sybert been silent on the issue of who’s the biggest politician. “I have never run for office before in my life, and my opponent has done nothing else,” Sybert has routinely said in his opening remarks at candidate debates.

To end politics as usual, Sybert has pledged to fight for a series of reform measures, including term limits (which Beilenson opposes), a freeze on congressional salaries and the curtailment of congressional franking privileges.

Sybert has tried a two-pronged defense to shield himself from the incumbent’s efforts to paint him as a captive of special interest money.

Beilenson himself, Sybert has argued on one hand, has himself taken special-interest money on the sly. Thus, he is a hypocrite, Sybert says. He cites as proof a 1992 Los Angeles Times inquiry that found Beilenson campaign aides had solicited a contribution from an abortion activist PAC and received indirect aid from the Sierra Club and United Teachers-Los Angeles.

(After The Times published its findings, Beilenson--while denying any prior knowledge of them--demanded that the abortion rights group cease activities on his behalf. But he maintained that he could not prevent the two other groups from helping as long as they did so independently of his campaign.)

Sybert has argued that his own receipt of PAC money from business groups, including banks and oil companies, is a good sign, indicative of the fact that he has the support of major job producers.

Sybert also has tried to paint an ugly picture of Beilenson as a politician who votes pay hikes for himself and is part of a Beltway crowd that has become indifferent, after years of incumbency, to their constituents.

Here, the Sybert campaign has reveled in a 1989 Beilenson gaffe in which the sometimes prickly and imperious congressman told a Times reporter, who had asked him to assess California’s problems, that “to be honest with you, I don’t think about California’s problems very much.” (Later, the congressman told the reporter that he deeply regretted his remark. “It was a stupid, arrogant thing to say, and I apologize,” he said.)

Sybert has sometimes engaged in questionable rhetoric as well. During one candidate forum, for example, Sybert criticized the nation’s legal immigration policies for permitting too many unskilled workers into the country. He then turned to his wife, Greta, a native of Brazil who was in the audience, and said: “That’s the kind of immigration policy we need, where we skim off all the pretty women from these countries.”

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In the candidates’ zeal to dig up dirt, some of these attacks have gone haywire.

For example, Sybert’s campaign mail tried to establish that Beilenson has come to favor Washington, D.C., over California by quoting a 1989 Times article that the congressman “prefers spending his time at his home in Maryland.”

What The Times article actually said--in the context of describing the congressman’s humdrum social life in the nation’s capital--was that Beilenson “prefers spending his time gardening (emphasis added) at his home in Maryland.”

Additionally, recent Sybert mailers have flatly accused Beilenson of opposing penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants, of voting against a federal “three strikes and you’re out” plan for violent felons and of opposing the death penalty for drug kingpins.

But records show that Beilenson, in fact, voted for the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli law that punishes persons who hire illegals, and that the 1994 Clinton crime bill--which Beilenson supported--contained a “three strikes” provision and authorized the death penalty for drug kingpins.

“I’ve never seen so much dishonesty,” Miller, Beilenson’s campaign consultant, has said. Meanwhile, a recent Beilenson mailer accused the GOP challenger of “ripping off” the state of California by moonlighting as a private attorney while working as a top aide to Wilson for a $98,000-a-year salary. In one of the years in question, the mailer breathlessly noted, Sybert earned $140,000 in legal fees.

But the mailer was not content to question whether Sybert’s employer, the state of California, really could have required his undivided attention. The mailer went on to strongly term his conduct a “conflict of interest” and “unethical.” What was not told was that Sybert apparently fulfilled all his legal obligations by publicly disclosing his outside income and getting prior clearance from the state’s top ethics officials for his outside work.

Although both campaigns have shown little restraint in their attacks, at least one person has demurred: Greta Sybert.

When her husband wanted to challenge Beilenson to join him in holding an open house for voters at their respective homes--a stunt designed to demonstrate that the Syberts lived in a “real” house in the district while the Beilensons only rented a small condo--Greta Sybert balked.

Enough with the campaigning, her house was her private life, she reportedly said.