Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9411160023
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE GOLDSTEIN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Long
``I did not go to Washington to pass a lot of new legislation,'' said Huffington, smiling, his right eyebrow arching like a rainbow. ``For the past 200 years, that is all they've been doing.''
Here, in the heartland of California-style liberalism, the words sounded like cannon fire at Fort Sumter. Join government! Do nothing!
For Huffington, a one-term Republican congressman challenging Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the shot has hit the target.
Willing to spend more than one-third of an inherited $70 million fortune, Huffington, 47, has unleashed a withering barrage of scathing campaign ads to climb out of obscurity and a 26-point deficit and draw even with Feinstein two weeks before the election.
With television the only medium to get a message to all of vast California's 31 million residents, Huffington has created a Cathode Ray Candidacy, an electronic persona that seems to have more weight and substance than the flesh-and-blood reality.
``Your usual challenger has to have credibility to get money,'' noted Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Berkeley's Institute for Government Studies. ``Huffington has his own money, so he doesn't have to be credible.''
Incredible, say the nonbelievers, horrified by what television and anti-Washington anger have wrought.
``Only in America, only in California, could we get this guy,'' said David Lahar, a Bay area technology company executive.
But other Californians, particularly in the more conservative south and the agricultural central San Joaquin Valley, see Huffington as an unformed image on which they can project their own fears and mistrust of government.
Huffington's ascendancy in the polls and the lightness of his footprints on Capitol Hill have inspired a battery of highly negative profiles in the national media, and a two-week roasting in the socio-comic strip ``Doonesbury.''
His wife of eight years, the Greek-born author Arianna Stassinopoulos, 44, has been called the mastermind of the campaign by former employees who were dismissed in August.
``Arianna makes Nancy Reagan look like Mother Teresa,'' said a Republican familiar with the ex-employees' complaints.
Her ties to a cult called the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness - MSIA, pronounced ``messiah'' - has stirred fears and accusations of a New Age invasion.
Huffington once vowed to serve three terms in the House of Representatives. Now, after one, he says he will limit himself to two in the Senate. But critics accuse his wife of measuring the White House windows for drapes.
Who is Roy Michael Huffington Jr. and what does he really want?
A little more than a year ago, Huffington was the lone congressman at a members' screening of the classic film ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.''
The lanky, 6-foot, 3-inch Texas oil and gas millionaire told a reporter then that he identified with actor Jimmy Stewart's portrayal of Smith, who goes to the nation's capital as the unwitting dupe of corrupt politicians but eventually exposes the dirty deeds of Congress.
But Huffington is being compared by friends and foes alike to another, more recent cinematic figure, Forrest Gump, an elusive cipher leading a charmed life.
A representative of a mainly conservative district around Santa Barbara, Huffington offered only three new bills and barely made himself known in the House chamber during 21 months in office.
A businessman who mostly operated in his father's business, Huffington bought a $4.3 million mansion in Montecito, Calif., in 1988 but didn't legally change his residence from Texas - which has no state income tax - until 1991.
One year later, Huffington spent a record $5.2 million of his own money to win the Santa Barbara congressional seat.
He is described as ``an empty suit,'' a ``mind-boggling'' prospect for the Senate, a ``buffoon,'' and an ``election fluke.''
And those are the comments of Republicans.
``There are a lot of Republicans who are holding their noses and voting for Huffington because they have decided that the need for a Republican majority in the Senate outweighs their distaste for Huffington,'' said a leading GOP strategist in California.
The strategist, who was asked to advise the Huffington campaign and declined, said that if this were not a year when Senate control was in sight for the GOP, there would be ``wholesale defections of Republicans to Feinstein.''
Huffington's team of political consultants - including a resurrected, reinvigorated Ed Rollins - has already spent $15 million of Huffington's money successfully tarring Feinstein as a ``career politician'' who sold out her state by voting to support President Clinton's deficit-reduction tax package.
One Huffington ad declares: ``Dianne Feinstein is a special interest jukebox/ Put in your money and get what you want.''
Huffington's basic message is lower taxes, less government, more personal volunteerism. He is less comfortable with issues that veer from his prepared script.
Asked about the quality of primary and secondary education in California, he said, ``I can't tell you because my kids aren't in school and that's how you get to know.''
He made religion a strong theme in his speech to the Commonwealth Club, despite having earlier said that criticism of his wife's religious affiliation was unfair and irrelevant.
Huffington has refused to release his income tax returns, saying that his congressional financial disclosure statements provide sufficient information. The Orange County Register reported that since 1990, Arianna Huffington has contributed $35,000 to an MSIA foundation run by self-proclaimed guru John-Roger.
A statement released by the Huffington campaign says that Arianna terminated her ministry in 1986 and that she ``rejects any belief that posits a spiritual consciousness higher than Jesus Christ.'' She says she is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Off-balance and dispirited when she returned to California last week for a blitz of Bay-area campaigning, Feinstein, 61, is worried about being outspent 3-1 and battered on 30-second TV.
``If you want to elect somebody who says doing nothing is the highest calling, what you're going to get is nothing,'' Feinstein, the former San Francisco mayor, said as she toured rebuilt homes in the Oakland Hills area devastated by a 1991 firestorm.
``I've never seen anyone buy a house, turn away from the district that elected him, buy ads and try and decimate a record of achievement,'' she said wearily.
Gurugate and the blistering personal attacks by both candidates have fallen flat in Patterson, a town of 9,500 souls in the Central Valley that bills itself ``The Apricot Capital of the World.''
``We're sick of all the mudslinging. It's like watching Roseanne and Tom Arnold,'' said the owner of the Apricot Pit lounge, who declined to give her name. A majority of her companions said they'd vote for Huffington.
It was Jack Gosnell, a salesman, who echoed a sentiment heard frequently in Patterson, 85 miles southeast of San Francisco.
``It would be interesting if they just talked about what they're going to bring to California,'' he said. ``Neither has been very clear on that.''
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB