CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / 1ST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT : Napa Race Is New, but the Bad Blood is Vintage ’92

So you think all politicians are cut from the same cloth? And that nobody talks about issues, real issues, anymore?

Just come to the trees, vineyards and wide-open rural spaces that make up California’s sprawling (and brawling) 1st Congressional District.

Here we have a Democratic incumbent and a Republican challenger who share nothing but a disdain for each other. And their debates are packed with enough facts and figures to satisfy even the most hard-core policy wonk.

The incumbent is Dan Hamburg, 44, a liberal, the product of a wealthy upbringing, a protester against the Vietnam War while at Stanford. He declines to wear a tie even while on the floor of the House of Representatives and is so handsome that People magazine named him to its list of American hunks.

The challenger is Frank Riggs, 46, a conservative, the son of a car salesman, an ex-police officer in Santa Barbara and Sonoma County and a drug investigator in the Army. He graduated from Golden Gate University, wears ties and has plain features and a receding hairline.

The two agreed to half a dozen debates sprinkled around the district, which includes Humboldt, Mendocino, Del Norte and Napa counties, and parts of Sonoma and Solano counties.

Their first head-to-head encounter, at Riesling Hall at the Napa County Fairgrounds, lasted for nearly two hours, with neither combatant giving an inch of ideological turf.

The two disagreed on nearly everything--NAFTA, GATT, how to save the redwoods, health care reform, defense cutbacks, the 1994 crime bill, restrictions on assault weapons, the 1993 budget bill, public funding for abortions and who killed campaign reform in Congress.

“Candidates Stick to the Issues,” said the front-page headline in the (Fairfield) Daily Republic, as if the very idea of politicians talking about issues is unusual enough to be newsworthy.

Two years ago, the roles were reversed.

Riggs was the first-term incumbent and Hamburg, a former elementary schoolteacher and Mendocino County supervisor, was the challenger. Hamburg narrowly defeated Riggs, giving him the ignominious distinction of being the only congressman in the country defeated in the general election.

So single-minded has Riggs been in his pursuit of political revenge that he jokes that when his 7-year-old daughter was asked recently what her father does, she responded, “He’s Frank Riggs. He runs for Congress.”

Hamburg calls Riggs “an attack dog” who, along with his private detective wife, is into the “cop thing,” including snooping into the private lives of political opponents.

Riggs brands Hamburg as a limousine liberal, elitist and hypocrite. Riggs says the only thing Hamburg ever said that he agrees with is when he told a reporter, “Frank Riggs is everything I’m not.”

Beyond being a rip-snorter of a local race, the 1st District fight may affect an issue of statewide ecological significance: the survival of one of the last unprotected stands of redwoods along the state’s northern coast.

Hamburg sponsored a bill that passed the House that would have the federal government buy 44,000 acres of forest, including the redwoods, to spare them from the logging industry. Riggs, who had sponsored a more modest bill, argues that Hamburg’s approach is too expensive and, if adopted, will fail for lack of money.

Hamburg says Riggs is captive to the timber barons. Riggs retorts that Hamburg is part of the radical environmental movement that cares more for trees than jobs.

Neither candidate is reluctant to play political hardball.

Two years ago Hamburg hit Riggs with a last-minute mailer accusing him of reneging on a promise to donate his congressional pay raise to charity. To make the allegation stick, certain facts had to be stretched a bit.

For this race, Riggs has uncovered Hamburg’s draft records, which show that although Hamburg now says he opposed the idea of student deferments, he enjoyed a deferment during the Vietnam War and later was classified 4-F.

As in other congressional districts with first-term Democrats, President Clinton and his slump in popularity have become an election issue. But the use of Clinton is more nuanced in the 1st District than elsewhere.

Riggs has stressed his die-hard opposition to those things most dear to the President: the 1993 budget bill, health care reform, the crime bill and the restriction on assault weapons. But he has not used the scalding anti-Clinton rhetoric favored by other Republicans.

Democrats have an edge of 52% to 33% over Republicans in the district. Still, a poll by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat has the race a virtual dead heat.

Riggs told the debate audience that Hamburg is part of the “liberal left” that is dragging Clinton in its ideological direction.

“We (the Republicans) are going to help Bill Clinton be the centrist new Democrat he promised to be,” Riggs said.

“I don’t consider myself in lockstep with Bill Clinton,” Hamburg said the morning after the first debate. “In fact, I think I represent a different wing of the party.”