NEWS ANALYSIS : Campaign Trail Lures Huffington : Politics: Republican who lost costliest U.S. Senate race begins two-year trek to help elect GOP legislators. He says he may run for governor or senator in 1998.

Mike Huffington is rested. He’s tan. He’s relaxed. He’s cracking jokes about himself and all his money. And he’s back on the political trail in California with an eye on the 1998 California elections.

The lanky former congressman appears to be intent on relearning California politics from the grass-roots level over the next two years after failing to spend his way into the U.S. Senate--and to national political stardom--in 1994.

Over the next two years, Huffington says he plans to shake hands, give speeches and pound pavement--and maybe write a check here or there--on behalf of Republican candidates for the California Legislature.

Then, he says, he will decide whether to run in 1998 for governor or make a second attempt to win a U.S. Senate seat. As of now, he seems to be more inclined to run for governor, telling one interviewer earlier this month: “I’d prefer to be in the state of California than in Washington.”

Huffington would, in short, pursue office the old-fashioned way, through the painstaking building of friendships and loyalties, an investment that presumably would pay off when and if he decided to run again.

That is how Richard Nixon rebuilt his political image during his out-of-office years after his bitter loss in the California governorship race to Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. in 1962 and his vow that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Just 10 months ago, Huffington lost the most costly U.S. Senate race in history to incumbent Democrat Dianne Feinstein after plunging $29 million of his personal fortune into his campaign.

And when Huffington finally--and sourly--swallowed defeat, California political experts began packing away their Huffington files. They doubted that Mike Huffington would seek office in the state again. Many expected Huffington to leave California altogether after just six years in his adopted state, the embittered rich kid who didn’t get his way.

But Huffington sounded determined last week to stick it out and rehabilitate his political reputation in California.

Huffington told a gathering of Republicans in Beverly Hills: “You know, a lot of people who would have spent $29 million and have lost the campaign--you’d probably have to scrape them up off the floor after the election.

“But I got a call today that put everything in perspective,” he continued.

The group of about 80 Beverly Hills Republican Club members and guests leaned forward with anticipation in their chaise lounges and lawn chairs, clutching wineglasses and paper plates holding chicken croquettes.

“Ross Perot called me,” Huffington said. There was a collective chuckle. “And he asked me how I managed to run a campaign so cheaply.”

Again, he joked about all that money spent on a losing cause.

“I read that [Gov.] Pete Wilson has a new plan to stimulate the California economy. He wants me to run again,” Huffington told the group gathered at the sprawling home of club President Jeanette Grattan Parker at Sunset Boulevard and Camden Drive.

Then Huffington got down to his message and new mission.

“This is the beginning of what I hope will be the next two years of going around the state trying to help Republicans [get] elected,” Huffington said.

In the past week, Huffington said, he had been in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Palm Desert and Ontario. Another day, he planned to visit Glendale. The weekend would see him up north in Chico.

Huffington said he hopes to help Republicans win solid control of the Assembly next year and to gain a GOP sweep through the Legislature and statewide offices two years later.

“And if we do that, we’re going to see a very different state,” he said.

Huffington reminisced about the 1960s, when Ronald Reagan was governor and he was a Texas boy attending Stanford. “I can’t recall a more optimistic people than Californians,” he said. “They believed in what could be done, not in what couldn’t be done.”

And Huffington is joining wife Arianna Huffington’s crusade for a more accountable media. He decried “gossip” journalism, citing a profile of House Speaker Newt Gingrich in Vanity Fair magazine, which he described as the National Enquirer, “except it’s glossy.”

“And you know something?” he said. “It will be a better America because the reporters will be more careful about what they do.”

The crowd, a mix of older, affluent people and younger professionals, applauded Huffington and gathered around to shake his hand.

The new Huffington style is a far cry from his first jump into California politics in 1991, when he brought his Texas-based millions to Santa Barbara and challenged one of the state’s most beloved Republicans in the 1992 GOP primary for the House of Representatives.

Huffington defeated veteran Robert J. Lagomarsino after spending $3 million and then won the seat in the fall election. In the process, he bitterly divided Republicans in the region and statewide.

In 1993, Huffington had barely been sworn in before he began talking about challenging Feinstein, the former San Francisco mayor and easily the state’s most popular politician at the time.

The conventional wisdom was that Huffington might be able to buy a House seat, but that he never could win a high-profile statewide contest that way, particularly against a formidable candidate.

But Huffington ran. Focusing heavily on television, his strategists astutely targeted Feinstein’s weaknesses in hard-hitting commercials. Feinstein’s campaign reacted slowly. When she finally counterattacked, the response was ineffective. As November approached, Feinstein was in a battle for her political life.

The revelation that the Huffingtons had a maid who was an illegal immigrant dominated the final days of the campaign in which Huffington had become a champion of Proposition 187, the ballot measure to deny state aid to illegal immigrants. That episode may have saved the election for Feinstein, many experts have speculated.

Huffington refused to concede. Claiming voter fraud, Huffington sought to have the new Republican-controlled Senate deny Feinstein her seat.

Again, Huffington was ignoring tradition: If you wanted to run again in the state, you accepted defeat with grace and offered goodwill for the winner. Huffington seemed to be foreclosing any prospect for another statewide campaign. He quickly faded from the political arena.

Now Huffington is back, helping out in state legislative campaigns and trying to inspire Republican groups on hot August nights with visions of a better tomorrow.

“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have bridges to mend in politics,” he told reporters in Riverside earlier this month. “I’m doing that.”