Democratic Candidates Send Their Messages From the Pulpit

And on the seventh day they prayed.

After squabbling Monday through Friday, then debating Saturday, the major Democratic candidates for California governor pursued a more righteous path Sunday, taking their campaigns to African American churches across Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their behavior was almost saintly.

Indeed, although miles apart, candidates Al Checchi, Gray Davis and Jane Harman all delivered the same transcendent message of harmony and healing, as if lifting their voices from the same hymnal.

“I intend to make folks understand how we can succeed together,” Lt. Gov. Davis pledged to congregants in San Francisco.

“We need a governor who will heal our state,” Harman, the congresswoman from Torrance, told churchgoers in South-Central Los Angeles.

“Remember the adventure of working together?” business magnate Checchi asked worshipers in east Oakland.

It may have been the setting, all that joyful music, the holy thunder of preachers and the hundreds of worshipers turned out in their Sunday best. It may have been something decidedly more secular, namely opinion polls showing that many voters are tired of negative campaigning.

Whatever the inspiration, the Democrats jabbed in gentle fashion, if only for one day, consistent with their separate pledges to end the bitterly fought contest on a high note--even as the campaign enters its final dizzy week on Tuesday.

Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the presumptive GOP nominee, took Sunday off, although he went to church as well, assuming his customary place at St. Rose’s Catholic Church near his home in Roseville, outside Sacramento.

For the Democrats, the day mixed prayerfulness with purpose. Each of the candidates targeted black churches, a traditional bastion of support, and summoned the names of icons from Nelson Mandela to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to John F. Kennedy in efforts to rally the faithful to their side.

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In San Francisco, Davis made the rounds of five churches, starting with the rhythmic-clapping, foot-stomping revivalism at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church.

“Look at this wonderful, wonderful congregation, with people from all walks of life coming to hear the word of the Lord,” Davis exulted. “That is what Glide Memorial is all about. And frankly, that is what California has to become all about.

“We are the most diverse people on the planet Earth,” Davis continued. “Someone who aspires to be governor, as I do, has to understand that all of the talents and energy and creativity and goodwill that exists in this state has to be celebrated.”

At the Third Baptist Church, Davis was embraced by the Rev. Amos Brown, an institution in local politics and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. “I can’t tell you who to vote for,” Brown said coyly of the Democratic front-runner. “But I can tell you this is the man I’m voting for.”

Davis spoke briefly about the need for improving education, then took up the matter of his wealthy rivals. “My opponents are good, decent people who have spent a good deal of their lives making money--which is great,” he said, though clearly intimating not as great as the time he has spent in public office. “I believe how you spend your life counts on at least two days--Judgment Day and election day.”

Harman, who hopscotched from Compton across South-Central Los Angeles to hit five churches in just under four hours, used her first stop to deliver a mild poke at her opponents, who stayed nameless and largely unmentioned the rest of the day.

“I am the only Democrat running a positive campaign,” Harman told worshipers, speaking from the flower-bedecked podium at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Compton. “I have spent no time on the airwaves trashing my opponents because I don’t think that’s the right way to run for governor. And I don’t think that’s the kind of governor you want.”

Instead, Harman urged congregants at a second appearance, “Please vote for someone who will heal. Who will try to make the state government make music in this state like the music in this church.”

The spirit of uplift was seemingly infectious. Harman--who is running second or third, depending on how the polling is parsed--took heart in a message taken from the books of Timothy, Kings and Philippians.

“That poster on the wall . . . might be my new theme,” Harman told worshipers at one stop. “It says, ‘Going against the odds. Fighting against the odds. And winning against the odds.’ ”

Checchi, for his part, visited seven churches in Oakland and nearby Richmond, aiming each time to strike a common chord by invoking a common set of heroes.

“I’m not John F. Kennedy. I’m not Martin Luther King,” he said, as parishioners shifted in their upholstered pews. “I’m not Bobby Kennedy. But I do have a dream.”

Checchi drew his loudest applause--shouts of “Yes! Yes!” and even a standing ovation--when he called for investing in young people instead of prisons, cleaning up blighted neighborhoods and expanding drug treatment options.

“Have youth changed since we were young? Is it something biological?” Checchi said at St. John’s Baptist Church in Richmond. “I don’t think so. I think we stopped investing in them.”

After each appearance, Checchi’s wife, Kathy, presented ministers a bouquet of flowers and a $100 check for youth outreach programs.

But not everyone took so kindly to Sunday’s parade of worshipful politicians. At St. John’s, the minister drew a chorus of “amens” when he apologized for Checchi’s “interruption” of the ordinary Sunday service.

And at Oakland’s Center of Hope Community Church, Alice Turner observed, “It would be nice if they all did this a couple of times a year, so their faces would be familiar.”

“Not,” she said, “just at voting time.”

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Times staff writer Amy Pyle contributed to this story.