GOP’s Hard Right Flank Under Attack in Idaho House Race : Ultraconservatives helped put Chenoweth in office. Now she’s the target of the AFL-CIO, conservation voters. Opponent calls her an ‘embarrassment.’

A man in khaki overalls with a beard halfway down his stomach stands next to his wife, dressed in an ankle-length skirt and modest head scarf. Together, they look like they just stepped out of the Bible, and not merely a cabin in the mountains of northern Idaho. The man wants to know what’s going to be done about the United Nations takeover of America’s national parks.

“I’m talking Yellowstone, the one with Teddy Roosevelt’s name on it,” he declares, alluding darkly to the 1972 international treaty designating world heritage sites around the globe, from the Taj Mahal to the Pyramids of Egypt. Should we see this as a toehold, the man wants to know, of the coming “one-world order”?

The woman in the sequin-spangled denim jacket at the front of the room nods gravely. “It is true, about 20 national parks have been taken over by the U.N.,” says Helen Chenoweth, the congresswoman who calls Idaho’s rugged northern Panhandle, the mountainous boiling point in America’s simmering decade of anti-government discontent, her home turf.

“You know,” she adds, “I used to think I was elected to go back to make bad laws better laws. Now I realize it’s going to take 60 years just to clean up the process. These kinds of issues galvanized America to the point where in 1994, they said we need a group of individuals who will be serious about government intrusion into our lives. For the first time in a long time, promises that were made were kept. And I think it shocked a lot of people that we did what we said we’d do.”

Nineteen counties farther south, in the potato and seed fields around Boise, 34-year-old lawyer Dan Williams grabs sugar beet factory workers as they flock out of the overnight shift, lunch pails in hand. “Hi, I’m Dan Williams,” he says two dozen times, and almost everybody keeps right on walking until he adds, “I’m running against Helen Chenoweth.”

“All right!” a man exclaims then, patting Williams on the back. “Good luck, buddy!”

Idaho’s 1st Congressional District, sprawling 600 miles from the Canadian border south to Nevada, is the meeting point between two Americas: the rugged mountains of the north that are home to remote cabins and such organizations as the Aryan Nations, the American Militia Assn. and the Christian Identity ministries; and the farm fields, high-tech industries and bedroom communities of the south, where a flood of new immigrants with moderate political ideas has exploded the Boise suburbs and, for the first time, challenged the notion that Idaho sets the standard for the hardest core of conservatism in America.

Chenoweth, widely considered the most radical of the Republican freshmen swept into Congress in 1994, finds herself in the weekend before the election in a dead heat with Williams, a political novice.

A barrage of spending from the AFL-CIO and the League of Conservation Voters focused against Chenoweth have made this western Idaho district one of the most heavily targeted in the nation.

Chenoweth, a longtime Republican activist, was a timber and mining lobbyist in Idaho before a powerful, conservative grass-roots campaign propelled her into the House of Representatives. Now she has become a lightning rod for the American right, gleefully antagonizing everyone from federal bureaucrats to environmentalists to, on occasion, the Republican leadership itself in her campaigns against government spending, curbs on natural-resource extraction and gun control.

In a region where miraculous runs of wild salmon, once able to swim hundreds of miles up into the Sawtooth Mountains from the sea, are dwindling to extinction, Chenoweth roused a storm early in her term when she publicly wondered what the fuss was about when you could still buy salmon in a can at the supermarket.

(“Can Helen, Not Salmon,” says one of Williams’ bumper stickers, countered by another popular one: “Give ‘Em Helen.”)

Chenoweth has sponsored legislation to force federal law enforcement agents to obtain permission from local sheriffs before conducting operations and moved to allow landowners to sue if they were hampered by the identification of endangered species on their land. White males, she once said, are the only endangered species.

During the current campaign, she referred to global warming as “a myth,” described Native American sovereignty as “a special privilege,” and said Americans ought to be able to opt out of Social Security and Medicare.

And she infuriated many when, after the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, she condemned the violence but said the nation should also look to public policies that are “pushing people too far.”

It was that comment that propelled her opponent into the race.

“When she said after the bombing that we ought to be looking at the public policies that are pushing people too far, as a native Idahoan, that is the point that I decided that, no matter what, I would run,” Williams said.

Chenoweth was focusing last week on northern Idaho, home not only to much of her ultraconservative base (several friends and neighbors of anti-government militant Randy Weaver were at the Bonners Ferry meetings), but farther south in tourist-oriented Sandpoint, which often swings to the Democrats.

Most analysts believe the trenches will be in populous Boise and the suburbs and farm fields around it. There, Chenoweth is pushing her balance-the-budget message and touting her legislation that aided seed farmers, producers of one of Idaho’s biggest cash crops.

“The people I’m talking to are people who expect to be able to have a future that’s stable, one that they can plan on, one that isn’t continously moving,” Chenoweth said.

“They want to be able to work hard and know that at some point they’re going to be able to send their kids to college, and there’s going to be something left over.”

She expresses puzzlement at the national attention she has drawn. “You know, I just can’t figure it out,” she says in her characteristic soft, musical tone. “Maybe it’s what I saw in a sign in Coeur d’Alene. It said, ‘Republican men are afraid of strong women. Now, who is it who’s afraid of Helen Chenoweth?’ ”

Chenoweth goes out of her way to avoid gender issues, always calling herself a “congressman” and often as “a guy,” as in, “I’m a guy who . . . “

“If it’s the fact that I’m a woman, it sets the women’s movement in reality back quite a bit,” she says.

“Was the women’s movement a movement that said certain kinds of women should have the opportunity to break the glass ceiling, but other women shouldn’t because they’re too conservative?

“I think the most unfortunate thing that’s been said about me is that I’m an extremist,” she said. “But those who have taken the time realize I am really mainstream Idaho and mainstream America.”

Williams, not surprisingly, takes a different view. He has called Chenoweth “an embarrassment.”

“Whether I wanted to or not, this election was going to be a referendum on Helen Chenoweth,” he said.

Labor-financed ads have targeted Chenoweth’s votes on slowing the growth of Medicare, but Williams said the new demographics of Idaho--an influx of young, family-oriented voters from places like California, who are committed to issues like education and environmental quality--could dictate a dynamic much different than the one that propelled Chenoweth to office in 1994.

“This election will be the first test,” he said. “My belief is those people will support Democrats and Republicans, if it’s the right person and the right message.”