Senate Rivals Finish Bitter, Costly Race With Final Blitz

The costliest--and among the nastiest--congressional campaigns in recent U.S. history concluded Monday with Sen. Dianne Feinstein insisting that voters cannot allow a Senate seat to be bought and her opponent, Mike Huffington, saying that Feinstein’s record does not merit her reelection.

With polls suggesting a slight lead for Feinstein, the Democratic incumbent implored her supporters to make it to the polls today and return her to a full six-year term; she was elected to a partial term in 1992. “The difference between victory and defeat is in your hands,” Feinstein told cheering supporters at a Monday morning rally in West Los Angeles.

Huffington embarked on the most exhaustive single-day schedule of his campaign, barnstorming to six cities before returning home to Santa Barbara. He repeatedly portrayed Feinstein as a tax-and-spend incumbent beholden to special interests.

The freshman congressman, who has broken national expenditure records by spending more than $28 million of his own money to unseat Feinstein, also released a final television ad.

Notwithstanding the candidates’ last-minute barbs, there were no revelations on the final day of the bitter Senate race. In that regard, it was a departure from the closing weeks of campaigning, when Huffington disclosed that he broke federal law by hiring an illegal immigrant as a nanny and the INS released records showing that in the early 1980s a former housekeeper for Feinstein did not hold a work permit for private employment.

The immigration issue dominated the final days of the campaign, which was largely fought over the airwaves in an unprecedented media blitz. Huffington has spent more than twice as much as Feinstein, and both sides have spent the bulk of their resources on ads attacking the other. Campaign officials expected that Feinstein and Huffington each would spend about $1.5 million on television commercials in the race’s final week.

As the ads continued, the candidates sought to shore up support with last-minute public appearances.

After spending the weekend in voter-rich Southern California, Feinstein made one last visit to her West Los Angeles headquarters before campaigning before large crowds at UC Davis and at the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Feinstein told supporters that if reelected she would continue to press for more crime-fighting legislation and bills involving two other issues that have figured prominently in the Senate race: illegal immigration and campaign spending.

“The message I have tried to bring is that a United States Senate seat cannot be bought; a United States Senate seat must be earned,” she said several times Monday.

“Now know this. We can win this race,” Feinstein said. “We have been going up and down this state and Republicans and Democrats have been coming out, people that didn’t have to have been coming out and endorsing this candidacy, saying that I have earned a six-year seat” in the Senate.

Feinstein called attention to her record by ticking off her support of the federal crime bill, the ban on military assault rifles and authorship of the Desert Protection Act.

“I made a series of commitments two years ago. I have kept every single commitment I made,” she said.

“On this last day of this campaign, I want to make this additional pledge: I will bring the same perseverance, the same tenacity, the same craftsmanship that I brought to the issue of assault weapons to campaign spending reform,” Feinstein said. “Because if anything has taught me that campaigns are not right in this land, it has been this campaign. I am a walking, talking case in point for campaign spending reform,” she said, referring to Huffington’s financing his campaign from his personal fortune.

Later, Feinstein added what has been obvious to anyone following her vitriolic battle with Huffington: “This is the worst campaign I have ever been in. I never thought I would be in a campaign like this,” she told reporters.

Despite the ugliness--or perhaps because of it--Feinstein seemed confident and relieved that the campaign was over.

“We can win this race. Obviously, it depends on people who turn out,” she said. “But I think the choice is a clear one: one who doesn’t believe government should work for people and one who does believe government can and should and will work for people.”

Huffington campaigned Monday at a breakneck clip, hoping to reel in the undecided voters who could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Huffington also released his campaign’s final commercial. “It’s time for a new beginning. A new generation of leaders, a new vision for our country,” Huffington says in the commercial, which shows images of him and his family. “Do we dare break trust with our children and leave them a country that has lost direction?

“I’m running for Senate to change the system, to make it work for you--not the special interests. And to restore the values of faith, family, hard work and responsibility that have made this country great. I’m Mike Huffington and I need your vote,” he says in the ad.

Throughout his election eve appearances, including a big rally in San Diego with Gov. Pete Wilson, Huffington attacked Feinstein’s record and promised that if elected he would move to cut the federal bureaucracy to make it more efficient and responsive.

After morning rallies with supporters in San Luis Obispo and Redding, Huffington told reporters in Sacramento that his efforts at a meaningful debate with Feinstein have been foiled by her negative campaigning.

“For months, I talked about the issues, such as higher taxes, higher spending. . . . I’ve talked about defense, defense cuts. . . . I’ve talked about crime, the fact I was chairman of the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ (initiative),” he said at a news conference.

But Feinstein, Huffington charged, has talked only about his nanny and other issues irrelevant to the campaign.

“Mrs. Feinstein has lied, lied, lied, lied, lied,” he said.

Huffington said he owes no state taxes, took responsibility for the nanny and did not have a racially restrictive covenant deed on his house, as claimed by Feinstein. The senator, he charged, forged the document that she claimed implicated him on the deed.

As for Feinstein’s own illegal immigrant problem, Huffington urged the senator to ask President Clinton to clear the INS to release all relevant documents in the case. He said he believed that a 1993 letter written by Feinstein would confirm his charge that she knew that the housekeeper she had employed a decade earlier was an illegal immigrant.

“Mrs. Feinstein’s character is on the line,” he said.

Late Monday, Huffington’s campaign held a teleconference where a person purporting to work for the INS claimed to have seen a 1988 letter--disavowed by Feinstein--that indicates that the senator knew her former housekeeper had immigration problems.

Meanwhile, at Van Nuys Airport--one of his last campaign stops of the day--Huffington said he agreed with predictions of a strong voter turnout but downplayed the assumption that that would be good news for Democrats.

“I foresee a lot of people coming out to vote for me who otherwise wouldn’t have voted,” he said.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Dave Lesher and James Rainey in Los Angeles, Carl Ingram in Davis, Richard C. Paddock in San Francisco and Tony Perry in San Diego.

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