Go back to Special Report front pageSAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 4, 1994 -- When California voters mark their ballots for Democrat Dianne Feinstein or Republican Michael Huffington in Tuesday's Senate race, they also will be making a choice about the type of federal government they want in years to come.
Feinstein, the 61-year-old former mayor of San Francisco, has run the traditional incumbent's campaign. She has boasted of her years of experience in government, pointed at a raft of accomplishments in the two years since she ousted appointed incumbent John Seymour and promised to do more in the future. In tune with the times, and faced with an increasingly conservative electorate, she has viewed with alarm such hot-button issues as crime, illegal immigration and the federal welfare program.
Huffington, however, has put together a campaign effort the likes of which has never before been seen in California. Spending nearly $30 million of his own money, the Santa Barbara congressman has flooded the airwaves with commercials assailing Feinstein as a career politician and a greedy tax-and-spend liberal more concerned with feathering her own nest than taking care of the problems faced by California.
Elect me, Huffington has said, and you won't get someone who is going to make a lot of laws and get the federal government involved in more of the state's problems. Instead, he has promised to slash the size of the federal government, eliminating such programs as the federal welfare system and much government regulation of business.
That's not Feinstein's style. She is an unapologetic activist who says that the reason she ran for the Senate was to get things done for the people of California.
"I probably have produced as much for the state of California as any United States senator who has gone to Washington, and (I) had just two years," she said in an interview.
Feinstein's accomplishments belie her status as a rookie in Washington. When she proposed banning a wide variety of assault weapons, she took on the much-feared gun lobby, a group led by the National Rifle Association, which has sent more-experienced politicians running for cover. Feinstein not only moved her bill through both houses of Congress as part of this year's multibillion-dollar crime bill, but she also managed to keep the ban safe from Republicans, surrendering such things as national park status for the Mojave Desert in an attempt to win passage.
Although the Senate's GOP leadership tried to tie up the bill until next year, Feinstein pushed it through on the last day of the session with the help of some Republicans who broke from their own leadership. President Clinton signed the bill into law last month, preserving millions of acres of Southern California deserts as national parks and nature preserves.
Feinstein has had her problems, too. She has raised millions of dollars from such special interests as labor, the entertainment industry and agriculture during her statewide campaigns, opening herself to Huffington's charge that she is a "special interest slot machine - put in a campaign contribution and get something in return."
Huffington also has exploited Feinstein's support for Clinton, whose unpopularity has made him and his backers favorite targets for Republicans across the nation. When Feinstein voted for the president's budget last year, which raised a variety of taxes and fees, "she chose Clinton ahead of California," Huffington said.
But Feinstein's biggest political problem this year is an increasingly grumpy and impatient electorate. Voters are not happy with the way things are going and they want changes now. And those changes are likely to include any legislators who happen to be in office.
Huffington has worked hard to exploit that voter dissatisfaction. A former Texas oilman whose only political experience has been a year in a mid-level Defense Department job and a single term in Congress, Huffington has made a virtue out of his inexperience.
"This will be a watershed year, the year we begin to make the transition from the career politician to the citizen politician," Huffington told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last month. As a senator, his job will be to "send the whole rusted, cynical establishment tumbling down."
By financing his campaign with his own money, and not accepting donations from political action committees, he can stay his own man, unbeholden to anyone, Huffington has said. By decreasing the size of the federal bureaucracy and moving its responsibilities to local governments and volunteer organizations, "we can empower people to make their own decisions about how their lives are run, how their money is spent, how their children are educated and how they can best solve the problems of their communities."
Huffington stumbled late in the campaign, when he was forced to admit that he and his wife, Arianna, had employed an undocumented worker as nanny for their two daughters for more than three years, including part of the time he was in Congress.
Besides violating federal law, the "nannygate" affair also embarrassed Huffington because of his vocal support of tough restrictions on illegal immigrants, as well as his backing of Proposition 187, which would deny all but emergency government services to llegals. Polls taken when the story about the Huffingtons' nanny broke showed that the congressman's standing took an immediate dip. Just as important, he found it hard to get the media to talk about much of anything else in the critical last weeks of the campaign.
Going into Tuesday's election, Huffington is hoping that his call to trim back the federal government and move from politics as usual will strike a chord with voters. His saturation television campaign, combined with an expected strong showing by Governor Wilson and other Republicans, could help his chances.
Feinstein, on the other hand, goes into Election Day leading by as many as 10 points in some polls. Her final round of campaign commercials scorched Huffington over his employment of an illegal alien and again stressed her accomplishments in office. A strong turnout at the polls by opponents of Prop. 187 would be good news for her and the other Democrats on the state ticket.
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