Davis and Lungren Travel Divergent Campaign Trails

Monica Jones was determined, hellbent that her children would meet Gray Davis when he visited Edison Middle School in Fresno last week.

She’d taken her two oldest out of class, and as the lieutenant governor threaded his way across the campus, gathering a crowd of several score, she thrust 5-year-old Keke through the crush of TV crews, creating a pint-size blockade in the path of the man who would be governor. “Shake his hand,” she prodded the uncertain child-barricade. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

About the same time, Republican Dan Lungren was at Santa Barbara City College, addressing instructor Peter Naylor’s business class. Eight students showed up, barely outnumbering the entourage of the state attorney general. A laggard camera crew arrived toward the end. “We made the calls,” Bob Brown, the campaign press secretary, said with a shrug.

October can be the cruelest month in politics. Winning--or, at least the aura of success--can have a transformative effect. Suddenly, Gray Davis--the man too bland, too boring, too innately blah to ever be elected governor--is the hottest commodity in California politics.

And Dan Lungren, whose Sacramento sojourn surely would be a brief one en route to the White House--or so some pundits said--suddenly faces the prospect of losing his first election in 22 years--and perhaps the biggest of his lifetime.

Their dual fortunes, plumbed in the depths of public opinion surveys, have a tangible translation on the campaign trail. There is money, momentum and the mantle of success that alights on the front-runner, drawing new acolytes daily.

For the underdog, there is the constant struggle to dispel the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom, to inspire dispirited troops and to never, never give in to doubts.

The transformation is the more remarkable for Davis, given the distance he covered to achieve his slow but steady primary victory over the imploding Al Checchi and the overmatched Jane Harman in June. Riding high in the polls ever since, Davis has embarked upon what gleeful staffers dub the “road-kill comeback tour.”

“Here’s a guy who, for all of his political career and particularly in the early primary season, was dismissed, was dissed,” said campaign manager Garry South, Davis’ constant companion during the wilderness days not many months ago, when Davis’ candidacy could barely draw flies.

Now, like a studio mogul with a monster hit on his hands, South savors the memory of sifting through daily fund-raising receipts: $400,000, $800,000, $900,000. Davis finally peaked with a $1-million day when he wrapped up his fund-raising a little more than a week ago. “Winner’s circle money,” South calls it. “Cover your a-- dollars.” Davis is giving the spillover to needier Democrats.

As he travels the state, candidates from the local school board on up now clamor to appear alongside Davis, including officeholders who wouldn’t be caught dead at their own funeral with the party’s last nominee, Kathleen Brown.

“Gray’s been able to center himself with strong support from law enforcement and his military service,” said Rep. Cal Dooley (D-Visalia), who showed up last week--with more than a dozen local leaders--to tag along with Davis at the Fresno school. Dooley, a moderate Democrat typical of the Central Valley breed, confessed to making himself scarce when Brown made her campaign rounds four years ago.

As Davis made his way across the spare campus, there was even--could it be?--a hint of electricity. The crowd of hangers-on, including Jones and her four children, grew until finally Davis burst into the gymnasium to the shrieks and squeals of 250 overheated junior high schoolers. The excitement visibly dissipated as Davis delivered a largely nonpartisan speech calling for tougher academic standards, Saturday and Sunday school sessions, and the like.

But at the finish, students crowded two- and three-deep, thrusting scraps of paper and posters at Davis in search of his signature. “He’s, like, doing a lot for schools and that’s really good,” said 13-year-old Brittany Briscoe. (“Dear Brittany,” Davis penned. “You have a great future!”)

On Sunday, Davis toured black churches in San Francisco, where preacher-politician Amos C. Brown offered one of the more epic endorsements of the campaign. Speaking from the pulpit of the city’s Third Baptist Church, Brown declared that no less than God wanted to see Davis elected governor.

Outside church, Davis demurred on the endorsement while being careful not to disavow Brown, a member of the local Board of Supervisors.

Back on the Roller Coaster

Every political campaign tries to create its own self-sustaining universe, and Dan Lungren’s most definitely has. In the bubble he inhabits, every public word uttered by the candidate and his trailing staff is predicated on “when” he becomes governor, not “if.” Even as polls cast ever more doubt on that possibility, the Lungren campaign creates ever more reasons why everyone else is wrong.

But a campaign cannot control the atmosphere that surrounds it. The Lungren campaign breathes the apathy of a losing effort far more often than it inhales the heady emotions and big crowds of a winning tour.

On Saturday in San Diego, a glorious fall day that had thousands of people flocking to Balboa Park, Lungren decamped at the veteran’s museum there to formally receive the endorsement of the National Vietnam and Gulf War Veterans’ Coalition.

The endorsement was something of a coup in the hand-to-hand combat of the campaign, since Davis is himself a Vietnam veteran. But as Lungren came to the podium to accept the group’s accolades, the cavernous museum held 34 people, including some curious tourists.

As one campaign aide hastened to point out, the crowd had swelled to a few score by the time the event was over. But two weekends out from election day, the disinterest was palpable.

Lungren came to the stage, clearly moved by the sentiments of the veterans. With tears in his eyes, he spoke for a long while about his best friend, Marcus Gravel, a Marine commander in the Battle of Hue in Vietnam.

“Marc was the kind of man I always wanted to be,” a choked-up Lungren said of Gravel, who died several years ago.

The event was thick with emotion, with Lungren’s accolades to Gravel and to his father, a World War II veteran. A day earlier, Lungren also had been publicly overcome, as he told a Sacramento rally of Republican women that his mother was “my hero.”

But if the close of the long campaign, with all its weariness and stress, has brought a certain humanity to Lungren’s demeanor, it has also diverted him at times from the battle at hand.

His speech to the veterans was oddly disconnected from the governor’s race, which Lungren did not even discuss until reporters asked him about his campaign’s underdog status.

“It’s a roller-coaster ride,” he said, before insisting that things were turning his way.

One could have concluded from the morning event that Lungren had succumbed to the conventional wisdom that Davis has it in the bag. But then, only three hours later, he bounded onto an Orange County stage with such vigor and enthusiasm that one bystander joked that he must have watched “Rocky” on the drive north.

He delivered a podium-thumping address, comparing himself to the spiritual head of the party, Ronald Reagan, invoking his desires when he entered politics--”I was not satisfied that men and women in the military qualified for food stamps!” he thundered--and slammed President Clinton and Democrat Davis as well.

Two days later, Lungren was back on the roller coaster.

With an entourage in tow Monday, he toured the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, where he passionately exhorted a group of Los Angeles police recruits to be mindful of the “awesome obligation” they have to treat all citizens with equal respect.

Then, in a speech to students gathered in a sweltering courtyard, he renewed his call for religion-oriented values in society. But, like his address in San Diego, the speech was politely distant from the hurly-burly of the governor’s race. He did not mention Davis. And more glaringly, given that he was speaking in the shadow of a museum dedicated to tolerance, he chose not to mention two apparent hate crimes that have riveted national attention in recent weeks.

The man who introduced him, former vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, invoked the killings of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student recently slain in Wyoming, and Dr. Barnett Slepian, an obstetrician who was slain in his New York home Friday, apparently because he performed abortions.

While he mentioned a hate crimes division in the attorney general’s office, Lungren did not go further. He only discussed Shepard and Slepian after being asked by a reporter if conservative groups that inveigh against gays and abortion rights shouldered some of the blame for the killings.

Then he was off to another event, another chance to rally the voters and hope things will turn around. Another event where he will exude public confidence. A reporter threw a question at him as he trotted off: Was he here, at the Museum of Tolerance, to buff his image? No, the attorney general said. He had been here before.

“And I will be here again, as governor,” Lungren tossed back.

Times staff writers Hector Tobar and Max Vanzi contributed to this report.

Profiles of Gray Davis and Dan Lungren, their positions on key issues and video clips from their debates are on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/elect98