Candidates Enter Final Week of Campaigning

With one week to go before election day, the race for governor grew geographically more frenetic and thematically more refined Tuesday as Democratic challengers Jane Harman and Al Checchi sharpened their focus on issues they hope will vault them past the race’s front-runners.

For Checchi, that meant education. For Harman, it meant education and gun control. For both, the issues served as metaphors for what they see as their strengths against Democrat Lt. Gov. Gray Davis and Republican Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, who led comfortably in polls taken last week.

Davis and Lungren, meanwhile, tried to hold on to their leads and gird, a tad prematurely, for a general election campaign.

The four candidates hit virtually every part of California on Tuesday, diversifying their itineraries in an attempt to rev up enthusiasm for next week’s showdown. While Davis now leads the Democratic contest, Harman and Checchi were buoyed by the roller-coaster history of this race and the eternal confidence of political challengers.

“I don’t think anybody knows what’s going to happen,” Checchi said Tuesday. “What this race will boil down to is who turns out. You have a very soft electorate out there, and you don’t know what people will do when they go into that ballot booth.”

Harman and Checchi pared their messages back to what they were at the beginning of the long campaign, before the television advertising that has defined the contest took over from the candidates themselves.

Harman, campaigning in San Diego, Orange County and Santa Monica, sought to join the seams of gun violence and education--a top voter priority--with a startlingly blunt observation.

“You can’t educate a dead kid,” she told audiences in San Diego and Santa Ana.

She reiterated her support for stiffer gun controls--a notion that she has been hammering daily, particularly since the Oregon high school shootings last week--and said that as governor she would press for a ban on assault weapons and on so-called Saturday night specials. She also endorsed a partial rollback of the state’s vehicle license fee and said Sacramento should give some of the money it takes from property taxes back to city and county governments.

In the coming week, Harman will hit hard on gun control, not only because of voters’ interest in the issue but because she feels that it provides a contrast between her and both Davis and Lungren, her chief strategist said.

“It happens to be something that distinguishes her from the other candidates,” said Kam Kuwata, adding that “everyone is talking about education and saying similar things.”

Harman’s campaign believes that Davis’ relatively tepid support of gun control efforts prove that he “takes the safer route,” Kuwata said. “There’s no bold action taken.”

“The greater metaphor for the Democrats is that to beat Lungren, you have to be bold,” Kuwata said. “You cannot be passive.”

Harman entered the race by noting that she was once called “the best Republican in the Democratic Party.” Although that characterization caused her grief among party activists, she again embraced it Tuesday.

“It means building coalitions and working together to solve problems,” Harman said, when asked about the remark during a campaign stop at a Latino bookstore in Santa Ana. “I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want that to be said about them.”

Checchi, like Harman, pared his message to what it was long ago, when he began his long-shot bid for the governorship. He spent time at a Sacramento high school and in Chico, as his campaign geared up for an 11-city, four-day school bus tour of California that begins today. At McClatchy High School in Sacramento, before about 150 students in the well-worn school library, Checchi said that as governor he would press for testing of teachers, an end to social promotion of students and a boost in school spending that would bring California to the national average.

“The real issue is, do you want more of the same?” he said in an understated slap at his opponents. “If so, then for God’s sake, don’t vote for me. But if you want change . . . then you might consider me.”

Afterward, he said voters’ concern about education was “not getting through” to the other candidates. He cited statements by Harman, Davis and Lungren that they would return some or all of the state’s $4-billion budget surplus to voters. Checchi has insisted that the entire overage should go toward the state’s overwhelmed infrastructure.

In Sacramento, Checchi received the endorsement of state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), a lion of the party’s liberal wing, who called Checchi “the brightest, the boldest, the most passionate and the most progressive instinctually of all the candidates.”

The two front-runners meanwhile adopted a more leisurely pace, mindful of their mandate: Play it safe until Tuesday.

Davis’ only public appearance Tuesday was on the friendly turf of the Venice Family Clinic, where Dr. Joanne Jubelier, a clinical psychologist and clinic volunteer, announced that she had circled Davis’ name on her sample ballot earlier in the day. Davis gave her a hug.

Davis said it was “embarrassing” that the state provides only about 18% of the clinic’s $8-million annual budget. But he said the key to increased funding was to come up with economic arguments for such support--such as the relative costs of prenatal care versus care for damaged babies.

“I know I could pencil something out showing how this will save us, as a society, money,” he said.

Although Davis is keeping his appearances to a minimum this week, he said he has not turned his attention toward November. “I don’t believe in looking beyond Tuesday,” he said, “because polls don’t vote.”

Lungren, who is virtually guaranteed the Republican nomination, also could afford to campaign casually, in his case raising money to spend against whichever Democrat emerges the winner Tuesday.

In a show of Republican unity, Lungren was the guest at a fund-raiser that featured the state’s two most recent governors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, in Fresno. Earlier in the day, he reiterated his support for a University of California campus in Merced.

“The major glaring omission is the great Central Valley of California,” he said, referring to the absence of a UC campus in that area.

“The question does not appear to be whether we will have a campus--and we’re committed to it--but what will be the time sequence, and the dollars to get this up and running.”

Lungren said he was committed to beginning operations in 2005, but held out the possibility that the date might have to be pushed back.

Times political writer Mark Z. Barabak and Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga, Dave Lesher and Amy Pyle contributed to this story.