Rivals for Senate, Governor Battle Across State

Campaigning across the length of California, the four major candidates for U.S. Senate and governor readied their final pitches to California voters Sunday, each of them expressing a politician’s confidence in his or her own chances for election 48 hours hence.

Gubernatorial candidates Kathleen Brown and Pete Wilson continued their angry back-and-forth about illegal immigration, Proposition 187 and crime, issues that have dominated their campaign in recent weeks.

“I should be dead. I oppose the death penalty. I’m Jerry Brown’s sister. I am a woman. I’m running against an incumbent. I’m being outspent by 3 to 1, and I have (opposed) an initiative that was going to win by 66% of the vote up until two weeks ago and even now it’s on the edge,” an upbeat Brown told reporters. “I should be dead. I don’t feel dead for some reason. I feel really great, so we’ll see.”

Wilson was equally confident, telling GOP volunteers in Monrovia that they should not be swayed by his lead in the polls but should work hard until Election Day.

“Run up the score,” he told them.

Senate candidates Dianne Feinstein, the incumbent Democrat, and Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Huffington kept a somewhat slower pace but the heat of their rhetoric was nonetheless intense. Feinstein reminded voters of her work on the federal crime bill and the ban on military assault rifles; Huffington spoke in favor of the initiative on the California ballot that would imprison for 25 years to life those who commit three felonies.

Huffington, in Monrovia, called Feinstein and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer the “Thelma and Louise” of politics.

“And you remember what happened at the end of the movie,” he said, alluding to the characters’ demise off the end of a cliff. “We’re going to send Dianne Feinstein home in two days to the city by the bay.”

For her part, Feinstein was more confident than she has been in recent weeks and exhorted her followers to work hard through Election Day.

“If we let these races be bought, if we let these people who have huge amounts of money go on and run slanderous ads and you can’t do anything about it . . . the American political process will be rent asunder,” Feinstein said in Pasadena.

Brown, whose campaign aides said they were convinced that the treasurer is making up ground, campaigned vigorously, her speeches firm and feisty despite a weekend spent explaining her campaign’s financial troubles.

She made campaign stops in San Diego, Sacramento and in Los Angeles, where Brown spoke at a rally against Proposition 187, which would deny public education and non-emergency state services to illegal immigrants. She said the election presented a distinction between “politicians who use issues just to hold onto power and politicians who use power to address the issues of the day.”

Brown characterized Wilson as one who “would use our fears and our anger and our frustration just to hold onto power.”

“It has happened before,” she said to a standing ovation at the West Los Angeles United Methodist Church. “We must not let it happen again.”

Speaking to reporters later, Brown dismissed the open worries of many Democrats that her campaign’s decision to air virtually no television advertisements on the final weekend before the election would be harmful to her and other party candidates.

Brown aides said Saturday that they were unable to air ads this weekend because they had essentially run out of money last week. They still planned to run two anti-Wilson immigration ads beginning today.

Brown said she had decided instead to put her campaign money into a field operation that could persuade voters to turn out on Tuesday.

Asked if she felt that her staff had mismanaged the finances--as White House officials had grumbled Saturday during the President’s visit to California--she said, “I think you evaluate all of that afterward.”

But Brown defended her campaign against accusations that it had violated the first rule of financing--make sure there is money for the end of the campaign.

“It’s also been a rule of politics for the last decade and a half that you don’t put one dime into the field,” she said. “It’s a rule of politics that you spend it all on TV. I have not done that. I have been unconventional in a whole variety of ways in this campaign.”

Wilson spent the day with other GOP candidates at a series of events that exuded Americana, from the huge American flag and Marine Corps hymn that greeted him in Riverside to the Little Leaguers with caramel popcorn and hot dogs in Monrovia.

At the Riverside VFW post, Wilson took credit for building the state’s second veterans’ home in Barstow and for making the Department of Veteran Affairs a Cabinet-level agency. He criticized the Clinton Administration for cutting military spending and wove that together with a subject that has drawn his focus all year: crime.

Veterans, he said, “fought for a California that would be free and full of opportunity, and not one where men and women who are decent have to live behind bars or in gated communities to ensure their own safety.”

He also pleaded with voters to pass Proposition 187.

“We will not shortchange the education of legal residents, the health care of legal residents, or the opportunity of legal residents in order to reward those who violated the law by crossing the border and entering this country illegally,” he said.

At the Monrovia rally in favor of the “three strikes” proposition, Wilson exhorted voters to pass that measure and dismissed suggestions that it might lock up felons who are not truly dangerous.

“They are incurable, incorrigible repeat offenders,” Wilson said of the measure’s targets.

Feinstein spent the final Sunday of her campaign at a union hall in San Luis Obispo and before supporters in Pasadena, where she talked about the ban she authored on military assault rifles. She said illegal immigration and campaign finance reform would be her top priorities if she wins a full term in the Senate.

With an eye toward the $28 million of his own money that Huffington has already spent on his own behalf, Feinstein said her reforms would include meaningful spending limits.

As she has many times before, Feinstein used the Pasadena event to tout her bipartisan support and was joined by the city’s Republican vice mayor, Bill Paparian. He announced not only his support but Feinstein’s endorsement by the Armenian National Committee, a politically conservative group that is supporting Wilson and carries some sway with the state’s 500,000 Armenians.

“This race is, in fact, much more about our nation than it is about Republicans and Democrats. It is much more about people than it is about partisanship,” Feinstein said.

About her own chances, Feinstein was pleased but somewhat subdued about a new poll that showed her pulling away from her challenger.

“I feel very good about it,” she said, “but the only poll that matters is the poll on Tuesday.”

Huffington, meanwhile, appeared at two events with Wilson and other GOP candidates. At one, the rally for the “three strikes” initiative, he brought up the recent deaths of two South Carolina boys, allegedly at the hands of their mother.

“I was disgusted,” he said. “I cried. I was racked with pain. Our society is too lenient. We have too many liberals saying it’s our fault, it’s society’s fault.

“No, it’s not. It’s the criminals’ fault. Let’s elect a senator to the United States Senate who is going to appoint the toughest judges available.”

Huffington continued to accuse Feinstein and the Clinton Administration of a cover-up--denied by those parties--of Immigration and Naturalization Service documents relating to the senator’s employment of a Guatemalan woman whose work papers expired while she was employed by Feinstein.

“This is an election about character,” he said at the Orange County Fairgrounds. “Character you cannot buy, you are either born with it and learn it or you do not have it.”

This article was written by Decker in Los Angeles and reported by Times staff writers Greg Krikorian with Feinstein, Amy Wallace with Brown and Dan Weintraub with Wilson and Huffington. Also contributing was Times staff writer Dave Lesher.