43RD DISTRICT : Candidates ‘Confident’ as Judgment Day Nears : Assembly race that included clash over teaching of creationism in schools winds down. Family values emphasized in Sunday’s final push.

And on the seventh day, Adam and Eve worked the phones.

In a union hall in Burbank, challenger Adam Schiff and his fiancee, Eve Sanderson, spent Sunday dialing up Democratic voters in the Burbank-Glendale legislative race that has evolved into the region’s most spirited contest for Assembly, the 43rd District.

In the beginning was the campaign, and it was fought over such issues as the teaching of creationism in the public schools. On Sunday, as it drew to an end, both Schiff and the conservative Republican incumbent, James Rogan, saw that it was good.

“I am feeling very confident,” Schiff said.

“I am feeling very confident and I feel comfortable, and that’s almost more important than confident,” Rogan said Sunday afternoon while walking precincts in Glendale.

Combined, the two contenders have pumped more than $650,000 into the race as Democrats, sensing opportunity, launched an ambitious challenge in what has long been considered a Republican stronghold. The 43rd District includes not only Burbank and Glendale but Los Feliz, Silverlake and Hollywood.

Rogan and campaign staffers said Sunday that a poll taken about 10 days ago shows him winning handily. Countered Schiff: “If you believe a candidate’s poll, I have a used car I want to sell you.”

The election two years ago gave Democrats reason for hope in the 43rd; Bill Clinton, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer fared well. Then last April, Pat Nolan, the veteran Republican who had represented the district for years, was sent to prison as part of a federal undercover probe of corruption at the state Capitol.

In May, Rogan, a former judge, easily won a special election to pick a replacement for the final months of Nolan’s term.

Seeking a full two-year term, Rogan, 37, focused this fall on three issues--crime, taxes and illegal immigration. He also stressed his experience as a prosecutor and judge. “I think my record commends me for reelection,” he said Sunday.

Schiff, 34, a former federal prosecutor, announced his support for a “three strikes” law for violent criminals. He said he backs measures to ban assault weapons.

He also focused on Rogan’s record, portraying the onetime Democrat as the captive of the GOP’s radical Christian right wing. “I think it says something about him as a person that he would have such wild swings in conviction,” Schiff said Sunday.

In a debate last month, the blunt-talking Rogan acknowledged that he favored the idea of public school instructors teaching the theory of Biblical creationism--along with evolutionary theory--as one explanation of the origins of mankind.

“We had thought originally that the six to eight debates we’d have during the campaign would be like the Lincoln-Douglas debates,” Schiff said Sunday. “It turned out to be more like the Clarence Darrow-William Jennings Bryan debates,” a reference to the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in the 1920s over the teaching of evolution in the schools.

“I am a man of conviction,” Rogan said Sunday. “I’ve never hemmed nor hawed about where I stand.”

But he added: “This is not a campaign about religion or abortion or creationism.” Schiff, he said, has “been very adept at diverting attention from the things we ought to be talking about--the economy, immigration, taxes and the schools.”

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Indeed, both campaigns were dominated Sunday by an appeal to family values--as relatives for both candidates pitched in to pitch for votes.

Walking precincts in Glendale with Rogan was his wife, Christine, as well as a nephew, Nathan Apffel, 10, and a niece, Virginia Apffel, 11. “I’m very proud of my uncle Jim,” Nathan Apffel said.

Working alongside Schiff’s fiancee at the union hall in Burbank were his parents, who had flown in from Texas, and his brother and sister-in-law, down from San Jose.

“As the callers tell me, not every son is a good son,” said the candidate’s mother, Sherry Schiff. “But he’s a good son.”