CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Huffington Says Central Valley Is Key to Election

Zigzagging through California’s farm country, Republican Senate candidate Mike Huffington drew a line in the cornfields and declared that he would beat Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the state’s Central Valley--or he would lose the race.

The valley is a key battleground for statewide candidates in California because its rich earth is also rich with swing voters. But in this race, it has become a fight for political survival because Feinstein has gone after some of the area’s traditionally Republican supporters.

“The valley is critical,” Huffington said Thursday at a town square meeting in Patterson, the “apricot capital of the world.” “He or she who carries the valley wins the race. . . . And I will win the valley.”

Feinstein’s inroads in the area were evident recently when she gained the endorsement of the California Farm Bureau, the state’s largest agricultural organization, which backed her Republican opponent, John Seymour, in 1992.

On Friday, Huffington sought to counter the endorsement by meeting in Fresno with a group of about 30 Farm Bureau members who backed his claim that he has support from the rank-and-file.

“It was a setup deal,” Huffington said about the Feinstein endorsement in an interview. “It was political.”

But Democratic campaign officials said the endorsement shows that Feinstein has been a friend of agriculture in the Senate and, as a result, Huffington’s campaign is now doing damage control in the valley.

“The mere fact that he is fighting for his own (Republican) base . . . is indicative that his campaign is in trouble,” said Feinstein campaign manager Kam Kuwata. “We’re going to compete with him in every part of the state.”

As a battleground in the Senate race, the agricultural issues important to Central Valley voters are likely to get the candidates’ attention. At the top of the list of gripes is the Endangered Species Act, which farmers portray as a federal land grab that has prevented some of them from working valuable property.

Huffington heard the complaint from every audience on his trip.

“The federal government owns 50% of the dirt in this state,” one woman said at the Fresno Farm Bureau meeting. “My personal feeling is that if the critters can’t live on that 50% of the land, then God is calling them home.”

Huffington and Feinstein both favor modifications to the Endangered Species Act that address some of the agricultural concerns. Both candidates support a proposal to require economic impact reports before a species is listed as endangered. And both said there are cases--specifically the kangaroo rat--in which some species might be lost because the economic cost to save them is too high.

“I think people were thinking about the American bald eagle when they passed this,” Huffington said. “How did we ever get to the rat and the fly?”

Another issue that still generates strong feelings among the farmers is “Big Green,” a sweeping environmental initiative that was voted down on the 1990 ballot.

Huffington reminded audiences that Feinstein was a supporter of the initiative. But he was confronted at several stops by Democratic hecklers who charged that he was an officer of a group that was one of Big Green’s biggest sponsors. The hecklers passed out a 1990 annual report from the Natural Resources Defense Council that listed Huffington on the board of directors.

Huffington acknowledged his membership in the group and said that he contributed to it. But he said he could not recall when he served.

“Honest to God, I don’t remember the dates because I’ve been on over 40 boards in my life,” he said. “But I can guarantee you, I never heard the words (Big Green) at any of the board meetings, because I only went to a couple of them. And the fact is, I’m against Big Green.”

At a GOP rally in Fresno on Thursday night, Huffington appealed for campaign workers, saying he and Feinstein are no more than 4 points apart in private opinion polls.

Going on the offensive, he also issued a new challenge to Feinstein for debates. Huffington called for 10 debates--one per week for the rest of the campaign--in town hall forums throughout the state.

Feinstein has offered three debate proposals to Huffington, but the Republican candidate said Thursday they are too “traditional. I mean, people are bored to death,” he said. “This is exciting.”

Huffington spent much of his time in the valley Thursday touring agricultural production plants.

He donned a white hard hat and listened above the roar of machinery to officials at Patterson Frozen Foods describe their processing system. His caravan of about a dozen press and staff cars then whizzed past ranches and fields to a cheese factory in Hilmar and to an egg processing plant in Turlock.

Ernie Gemperle, who became an egg producer when he arrived in California from Switzerland 45 years ago, escorted Huffington through a stadium-sized chicken coop where a conveyor belt automatically transported more than 25,000 eggs per hour under the cages of about 90,000 hens.

Other than company officials, there were no voters at the production plant tours. Reporters were even barred from one tour to protect company secrets. But Huffington said the day’s events demonstrate that he is reaching out to workers and that he is a strong supporter of business.

“This is very important to me, because I think business is the key to prosperity in this country,” Huffington said. “I don’t get to meet a lot of people when I go through those things. But I am a pro-business person. So I go to businesses. . . . I’m promoting these people. These are good people. These are hard-working people.”