CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS ’92 : NEWS ANALYSIS : A Road Map to the Political Scars : Campaigns: While the five Democratic candidates in the Senate races are ideologically similar, they all have been bloodied in past political wars with one another.

Republican voters have clear philosophical choices in the two U.S. Senate primary elections Tuesday: Rep. Tom Campbell and Sen. John Seymour representing the moderate wing of the party, Bruce Herschensohn and Rep. William Dannemeyer representing the more conservative wing.

But to a large extent the five major Democratic candidates are ideological peas in a pod--good core liberals whose platforms almost could be Xerox copies of each other.

How does the baffled voter distinguish between the Democrats running in next Tuesday’s primary? One way is to just trace the scars from old political battles.

The blood, sweat and tear stains from past ballot wars provide a road map of how these campaigns are run and how the candidates react to events. Virtually every one of the five Senate candidates has some reason to dislike the others for some past transgression, trivial or treacherous.

Consider how quickly, and with such delight, Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy reacted when it was disclosed in Washington that Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) were major league writers of check overdrafts.

Never mind that neither Waxman nor Berman is running for the Senate this year. Their blood brother, Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), is. And McCarthy used the incident to paint Levine as the captive puppet of “cronies” Waxman and Berman for refusing to condemn them for their check-writing transgressions after Levine himself boasted in his television ads that he didn’t write any bad checks.

Enmity runs deep between McCarthy and the Westside Los Angeles Waxman-Berman political organization. In 1980, when McCarthy was Speaker of the California Assembly and Berman was an Assembly member, Berman launched a sudden and stunning campaign to replace McCarthy as Speaker.

The battle raged for months. It became virtually impossible for any Democrat to avoid taking sides. Many of the current alliances and battle lines within Democratic circles in California were laid down during that struggle.

“The memories here are not to be believed,” commented one veteran of the political wars in Sacramento. “There is such deep-seated dislike and hatred. . . .”

The very presence of Waxman-Berman, and the organization’s political consulting arm of BAD Campaigns, helps define the style of the Senate races. In the battle for the six-year seat now held by Democrat Alan Cranston, Levine is running against northerners McCarthy, from San Francisco, and Rep. Barbara Boxer, who lives in Greenbrae in Marin County but whose district covers much of San Francisco.

In the contest for the final two years of the seat vacated by Gov. Pete Wilson, now held by Republican John Seymour by appointment, BAD is handling media for state Controller Gray Davis, a longtime Waxman-Berman ally. Davis and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein are the major contenders for the Democratic nomination for this seat.

Political insiders have been critical of BAD’s handling of Levine, in particular, calling it cynical politics in the extreme. The firm’s strategy has been to keep the congressman out of the public eye and away from Congress for the last year while he raised more than $4 million in campaign funds. That money is being funneled into a television commercial campaign blitz that aligned Levine with George Bush on the war in Iraq and portrayed him as tougher than the Democratic leadership on law-and-order issues. This was not the image that Levine cultivated in his nine years in the House.

BAD followed a similar course with Davis, although the controller has made more public appearances than Levine and courted media attention, which Levine does not.

The BAD style is viewed as symbolic of Southern California’s drive-in, drive-through society: Sell the candidate ATM-style with floods of computer-targeted mail and television ads.

In contrast are the three candidates from the San Francisco Bay Area, products of “The City’s” compact neighborhoods and Democratic clubs. They have variously sided with and fought with or coexisted with the alliance of the late Rep. Phil Burton, his brother, John, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and the late Mayor George Moscone.

Boxer is a longtime ally of John Burton. Feinstein came from “a sort-of liberal Pacific Heights environmental crowd,” according to veteran television correspondent Rollin Post. McCarthy is a remnant of the old Irish-Italian-Catholic system largely toppled by the Burton group in the 1960s and 1970s.

Their San Francisco origins are reflected in campaign style. Boxer, Feinstein and McCarthy--generally in that order--have been the most active on-the-stump campaigners this year. They have worked to build and solidify coalitions--particularly women’s groups for Boxer and Feinstein--and have tried to cultivate labor unions. Davis also has considerable union support.

The Bay Area candidates may carry old scars from their own intramural rivalries, but they retain more of a common identity than the fragmented Los Angeles political communities. Boxer endorsed Feinstein for nomination for the two-year seat, though Feinstein did not reciprocate because of longtime friendships with Levine and McCarthy, she said.

McCarthy has warred with Feinstein in the past, as he has with Brown. Brown felt he should have become Speaker back in 1974, but McCarthy edged him out and exiled him for two years to a remote, tiny Capitol cubbyhole for an office. In 1980, while McCarthy and Berman battled over the state’s second-most-powerful job, Brown forged a coalition with Republicans to grab the speakership plum.

To this day, a Sacramento source said, the Waxman-Berman group has “never forgiven Willie for taking what they believed was Howard’s due.”

The Speaker always has been an important supporter of Feinstein even though they have dramatically contrasting backgrounds and personal styles. San Francisco insiders say the odd alliance is rooted in Feinstein’s strong support for the civil rights movement in the 1960s and in the common experience of Feinstein and Brown as outsiders--a Jewish woman and a black man trying to crack the barriers of a white, male political ruling class.

Brown’s support for Feinstein for the Democratic nomination for governor in June, 1990, also fit neatly with the political adage: “Don’t get mad, get even.”

Brown opposed Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp with a vengeance because of Van de Kamp’s sponsorship of an initiative campaign to limit state legislators to two terms. Positioning himself as an outsider, Van de Kamp promised to “drain the swamp” in Sacramento, a none-too-subtle illusion to charges of legislative corruption.

Feinstein won the primary.

If Van de Kamp suffered the sting of Brown’s political revenge, he fared little better with the Waxman-Berman organization, which he had counted as an ally. He tried to hire BAD to run his campaign, but was rudely rebuffed and told that he was a dull candidate who had no chance of winning.

After the primary, Van de Kamp lamented: “There’s an old line in politics that, unfortunately in this case, they proved. In politics, there’s no such thing as permanent friends and there’s no such thing as permanent enemies. There are only permanent interests.”

In fact, the realities of each election year often pose hard choices that can bend old loyalties and forgive past animosities.

“Over the years the alliances really do change in relation to elections,” said Kam Kuwata, who has known Levine for years, worked for McCarthy in his 1988 Senate race against Wilson, and was a political consultant to Gray Davis.

Kuwata joined the Feinstein campaign in part because it appeared she would not have any major opposition in the Democratic primary. But then Davis decided to run for the same seat, thus angering Feinstein and creating a sticky situation for Kuwata.

“I was picking among friends and having to go against friends,” he said. “I prefer not to go against friends.”

Kuwata remarked several times during the primary campaign that he found it particularly difficult to campaign against Davis. But even that friendship blew up this week when Davis ran a television ad comparing Feinstein, who is the target of a civil suit over her 1990 campaign finances, and New York hotel queen Leona Helmsley, who was convicted on federal income tax evasion charges and put in prison.

Faced with that attack on his candidate, Kuwata did not hesitate before deciding which came first: old friendships or loyalty to his current employer.

“It’s a cheap, sleazy ad by a cheap, sleazy politician,” Kuwata said.