The afternoon sun is shining on the neatly trimmed lawns of Southern California, but in this area hit by job cutbacks and natural disasters, voters are concerned about crime and immigration -- or at least, they insist, illegal immigration. "People are mixing up immigrants and illegals," says Mary Polick, a resident ofTorrance for 46 years. "It's illegals we worry about. It's not that we don't feel sorry for them, but taxes goup and up." In Woodland Hills, says June Mueller, "there are so many standing at corners looking for work.They stay all day now. You find trouble every day."
In suburban Los Angeles, immigrants from Iran and Israel, Mexico and Korea live next door to old-timers from the Midwest; high-fenced back yards and insulated TV rooms let them all live separate lives. Screen doors have heavy locks, outdoor lights go on when someone approaches, security system signs bristle and the reverberating dweep of car alarms interrupts evening meals.
Tolerant of diversity but wary of crime, Californians are looking to government not for better schools or more jobs but for basic order. For most, that means enforcing the law, punishing criminals and policing the border.
All of this helps explain why Republicans are doing well in the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races in the megastate whose 54 electoral votes are critical to President Clinton's hopes of re- election in 1996. Gov. Pete Wilson, who trailed Democrat Kathleen Brown by wide margins earlier this year, now leads her in polls; one-term Republican Rep. Michael Huffington is running even with, perhaps even ahead of, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Going negative. Both Democrats began campaigning as if this were still 1992, the "Year of the Woman," in which hard-working policy wonkery and attacks on an unresponsive WASP president prevailed. No more. This summer, Brown shifted from Grapes of Wrath-style ads on the economy to spots that tried to match Wilson's tough stands on crime. But the latest Los Angeles Times poll shows Wilson leading 50 to 24 percent on crime and 44 to 32 percent on the economy. Wilson has long complained about the billions California must spend on services for illegal aliens; now, although he supports Proposition 187, an effort to ban such spending, he is running strongly even among Hispanics and Asians. Brown is spending most of her scant TV money on negative ads and relying heavily on efforts to get blacks, Hispanics and liberal women to vote.
Feinstein also is being outspent (Huffington will spend more than $20 million of his own money) and is going heavily negative, despite an impressive record in the Senate. In her two-year term, she single-handedly pushed through the ban on assault weapons, continued a bipartisan (Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson) tradition of representing state business and agriculture interests, sponsored a desert-protection act and maintained her popular abortion-rights and pro-death-penalty stands. She and her supporters are infuriated that Huffington, despite a record that is thin to nonexistent, has a good chance to beat her.
But Huffington possesses some powerful ideas in a year when voters are dissatisfied with conventional politicians and seeking order. The turning point came in June, when a Feinstein ad accused Huffington of refusing to help a business constituent and a Huffington spot responded by pointing out that Feinstein wrote letters for the company days after receiving two $1,000 contributions from its political action committee. Recently, Feinstein attacked Huffington as a Texas oil millionaire who dodged California taxes and Huffington attacked her as a "career politician" who used government limousines; her negatives went up, but his did not. His calls for dismantling the welfare state seem more powerful than her argument that she can work the Washington system for California.
Feinstein's strategists hope attacks on Huffington and his strong-minded wife, Arianna, will turn the tide. They admit glumly that their positive ads have had little lasting impact. Feinstein will not get much help from Clinton in a state he carried by 13 points. At a recent Beverly Hills fund-raiser, Feinstein spoke with her usual effectiveness but never uttered Clinton's name and said "Hillary" only once -- while introducing mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary. The failure of the Clintons' ambitious health care reform plan and the impression of disarray on everything from Haiti to the White House staff have produced a sense of chaos rather than the order California voters seek. "I'd vote for Goofy before I'd vote for Clinton," says Woodland Hills contractor and Ross Perot voter Ellya Calig.
