Statewide Campaigns Shift Into High Gear

Job-hunting on a day that celebrates labor, candidates for statewide office scattered across California on Monday, kicking their campaigns into high gear as they kept a wary eye on the complicated fall electoral environment.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren, lagging in his race against Democrat Gray Davis, traveled to Sacramento, Fresno, Encino and San Diego, stumping for votes and trying to quiet the emerging panic among Republicans about his thus-far lackluster candidacy.

At a morning waffle breakfast, the attorney general burned his finger on a griddle and also unleashed a mossy political cliche to accuse his Democratic opponent of equivocating on the issues.

“With me, what you see is what you get,” said Lungren, who throughout the day stuck to a diet of crime, lower taxes and family values.

Lt. Gov. Davis, incongruously attired in a Los Angeles Country Club polo shirt at a breakfast honoring labor workers, retorted in kind.

“I don’t know if Mr. Lungren has waffled or not,” Davis said in Sacramento, “but where he is standing, very few Californians want to stand. . . . My values are in sync with Californians. He’s out of step and out of sync.”

Neither man directly addressed the furor over President Clinton’s relationship with a young intern in their remarks to audiences, but it was indirectly a focus of Lungren’s day. He was introduced at each stop by his wife, Bobbi, who was on stage with two of their three children.

“We have been married 29 years, and during that 29-year period of time, I have never been embarrassed or ashamed by anything he has said or done,” Bobbi Lungren said in Sacramento.

Accompanying Davis to Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, was incumbent U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer. While she did not accompany him to an evening appearance in San Diego, for most of the day she used his leading coat-tails much as she did Clinton’s and Dianne Feinstein’s in 1992.

Republican Senate candidate Matt Fong, California’s state treasurer, ventured to Carson to talk to clients of a welfare-to-work program. Later, he met Lungren in Encino, where he lobbied to forge a lead in a Senate race which polls say is a dead heat.

Strategizing as They Go

As they campaigned, the candidates sought to fashion strategy in an environment growing quirkier and less predictable by the week. The Wall Street roller coaster, the virtual collapse of the Russian government and, not the least, the president’s extramarital scandal could dramatically complicate the fall elections.

Democrats are particularly fearful. They worry that the growing debate in Congress over the president’s behavior--sure to heighten when special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report is released--will both dampen turnout and obliterate their own messages. The only optimistic sign on the horizon for them is Davis’ good showing against Lungren, whose own party loyalists are beginning to publicly question his campaign’s competence.

In some ways, the campaign this year is reminiscent of the 1990 governor’s race, which moved placidly along in the summertime only to be pitched asunder in September as concern grew about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and troubling economic times at home. Democratic and Republican strategists say that environment played a large role in Republican Pete Wilson’s eventual victory over now-U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic nominee.

In those cautious days, voters went with the candidate perceived to be less risky, which was Wilson--then a U.S. senator with foreign policy experience.

Others see similarities to 1994, when Republicans swept control of Congress in large part because Democrats failed to turn out at the polls in sufficient numbers. That year, Democrats statewide took a hit when the candidate at the top of the ticket, gubernatorial nominee Kathleen Brown, pulled her advertising over the final week, essentially conceding defeat to Wilson.

Concerns among Democrats are national in scope, but in California, their worries have additional permutations. In a state where controversial initiatives frequently are the drawing card for voters, there is little on the ballot of statewide consequence, barring a late-in-the-game dust-up. The Indian gambling initiative, Proposition 5, has prompted massive spending on the airwaves, but has yet to engender huge public excitement.

“There’s a legitimate concern that with nothing packing a lot of emotion, no specific issue around which voter concern will coalesce, that turnout will be low--which does not help Democratic candidates,” said political consultant Darry Sragow, who is managing the statewide campaign for Assembly Democrats.

The impact could be quite different on different races, analysts caution. In the contest for governor, Democrat Davis holds a significant lead in public and private polls, so in some ways is insulated against a small-to-moderate downturn in party voting. At least at this point, Senate incumbent Boxer is most at risk, since she is already in a dead heat with Fong in public polls.

Moreover, the issues rising to the fore would seem to help Fong. He has been campaigning for heightened spending on defense and for such anti-terrorism devices as a national missile shield. While those items seemed a few months ago to be quaintly reminiscent of the Reagan administration, events have given them a new currency.

Fong, campaigning Monday, went out of his way to describe national security and the military as salient issues in this campaign.

“Foreign policy and the economy overseas are not something that voters ever pay attention to,” Fong said. “But with Russia being in the newspaper, North Korea shooting their missiles over Japan, the Asian economy impacting California, I think that at least more California voters are recognizing that they should start paying attention.”

But Boxer can come at the race as an incumbent who has at least dealt with foreign policy issues in the House and Senate; in contrast, Fong’s career has been based in Sacramento and he turned in a rocky performance during a recent debate. Boxer has, however, come under fire for her response to Clinton’s problems, which has been more tepid than her earlier criticisms of Republicans accused of wrongdoing, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon.

In part, attempts by strategists and candidates to assess the fall environment have been made more difficult because neither of the races has gotten off the ground--though the gubernatorial candidates took the first steps in that direction Monday by beginning their statewide advertising. Lungren’s ads emphasize his commitment to fighting crime and his support for the death penalty. Davis’ focuses on education, the issue that pollsters say has captivated Californians this year.

While Republicans nationally and in California hope that Fong will pick up steam because of current events, they are less sanguine about Lungren’s chances in the governor’s race.

Most believe the race will tighten up, given both the political environment and historic precedent. Governor’s races where there is no incumbent have been decided by an average of less than two points over the last generation.

But many Republicans question whether Lungren’s campaign can take advantage of an outside boost, as Wilson’s did in 1990.

“Do you know the theme of the campaign? I don’t,” said one prominent Republican strategist, who like others declined to speak for attribution. “They haven’t effectively landed any good punches on Gray. They haven’t defined Lungren in a way that can appeal to a majority. People have a hard time seeing how they get the 50% plus one.”

Lungren tried to allay those concerns on Monday.

“People don’t have time to listen to every single debate and to watch every single speech,” he told supporters in Sacramento. “That does not mean we have not been campaigning. . . . But the traditional day of starting campaigns is Labor Day.”

Throughout the day, he called for the elimination of the state’s car tax, pledged to lower taxes overall and tried to cast Davis in the image of former Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., for whom the Democratic nominee once worked as chief of staff.

“If you liked Jerry Brown, you’ll love Gray Davis,” he said.

Davis, in his addresses, accused Lungren of wanting to pull California in a direction its voters do not wish to go.

“He wants to roll the clock back,” Davis said. “I want to move California forward.”

In the same vein, Boxer--who piggybacked her campaign onto Davis’ for most of the day--said that the Republican ticket “wants to pull us back.” And she, alone of the candidates, brought up the White House sex scandal.

“We know President Clinton has problems,” said Boxer, who is related by marriage to the president. “But we also know that he led us out of darkest recession since the Great Depression, and we’re not going to forget it.”

Fong, for his part, told supporters in Encino that he would eliminate the capital gains tax and the so-called death tax, which is applied to estates. Earlier, in Carson, he hewed a more personal and moderate line as he met with former welfare recipients who have won jobs through the county’s welfare-to-work program.

He told the mostly Latino and African American families in Carson that his family, too, had faced discrimination, and suggested he had a special insight to their struggles.

“The reason why I’m running for the United States senate is because I believe everybody here in this great country of ours deserves a chance to have a stake,” he said.

Contributing to this story was Times staff writer Dave Lesher.