Decision ’94 / SPECIAL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA’S ELECTIONS : U.S. Senate : THE REPUBLICAN: MIKE HUFFINGTON

MIKE HUFFINGTON, Republican

* Born: Sept. 3, 1947, Dallas

* Residence: Santa Barbara

* Current position: U.S. congressman

* Education: Bachelor’s degrees in engineering and economics from Stanford University, master’s degree in finance from Harvard University.

* Career highlights: Deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy in the Reagan Administration, 1986; vice chairman of Roy M. Huffington Inc., a Houston oil and gas company owned by his family, 1976-1990; co-founder of Simmons & Huffington, a Houston investment firm, 1974-1976.

* Family: Wife, Arianna, and two daughters.

Background

Mike Huffington was born in Dallas 47 years ago, son and namesake of Roy M. Huffington Sr., the legendary Texas wildcatter who struck it rich in oil and natural gas and later became one of the national Republican Party’s major contributors.

When Huffington was born, his father was a geologist for Humble Oil. When Mike Huffington was 9, his father set out on his own to start an oil and gas prospecting company. Huffington and his younger sister grew up mostly in Bellaire, Tex., a middle-class Houston suburb of ranch-style homes, diner-style cafes and Art Deco movie theaters. Huffington was a teen-ager when his father’s work started to pay off and, at 14, he was sent to the Culver Military Academy in Indiana.

Huffington rowed on the crew and excelled as a student military officer. After Culver, he attended his father’s alma mater, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and in 1966 he attended Stanford, where he pursued degrees in engineering and economics.

Huffington showed his first interest in politics at Stanford, volunteering for Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign. That summer he also worked in the Washington office of Houston Rep. George Bush, a friend of Huffington’s father. Later, he earned a master’s degree in finance from Harvard Business School.

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Huffington’s first step into a professional career was at the First National Bank of Chicago, where he spent two years in the finance office with a friend from Harvard. In 1974, with his friend’s connections, Huffington joined a start-up investment company that offered financial advice to companies working in the Houston oil fields.

Huffington left that company two years later, pocketing about $700,000 after a lawsuit against his two former partners.

For the next 14 years, Huffington helped direct the business his father had started--Roy M. Huffington Inc., or Huffco. The company had struck it rich while Mike Huffington was in graduate school by hitting a huge natural gas reserve in Indonesia. It took years, however, for the company to prepare the financing and infrastructure to move the gas from an Indonesia jungle to its Japanese buyers.

In 1986, Huffington married the Greek-born Arianna Stassinopoulos, a noted author and New York socialite. A short time later, Huffington began a one-year stint in Washington, where President Reagan appointed him to be deputy assistant secretary of defense.

By 1987, the couple had bought a $4.3-million mansion in the hills of Montecito near Santa Barbara. Arianna Huffington moved into the home with her mother and sister while Mike Huffington remained in Houston working at the family business. By the time Huffington moved to California in 1991, the couple had two daughters.

Huffco was sold in 1990 to Taiwan’s Chinese Petroleum Co. for about $600 million, making Huffington’s father one of America’s richest men and earning the son an estimated $75-million fortune. Huffington said he remained in Houston for a year after the sale because of ongoing litigation.

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California political watchers first heard of Huffington when he was about to unseat an 18-year Republican incumbent, Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura). What made the feat remarkable was that Huffington, virtually unknown in the area, spent more than $5.2 million of his own money on the race--about double the previous record for the most ever spent on a House seat.

Since his election to the House two years ago, Huffington said, he has intentionally avoided the role of legislative activist. For one thing, he says, Republicans have little chance of success because Democrats control the Congress. For another, Huffington said he went to Washington to scale back the size of government, not to add more laws.

As a result, his tenure has been marked mostly by votes against prominent appropriations bills and other legislation. But he also demonstrated his independence from the Republican leadership by supporting the Family Leave Act and the policy allowing gays to serve in the military.

Huffington raised Republican eyebrows again when he announced he would run for the U.S. Senate barely nine months after he assumed his House office. The power of his wealth cleared the field of any major Republican challengers, leaving only former Orange County Rep. William E. Dannemeyer, who was easily defeated in the GOP primary.

Promises / Goals

If elected senator, Mike Huffington has vowed to:

* Improve the economy by cutting the taxes that were raised in the 1993 economic package, reducing regulations that apply to businesses, requiring the government to consider the economic impact of new federal regulations and reducing oversight of safe financial institutions.

* Make the streets safer with tougher sentencing laws including the “three strikes” language in federal cases. To restrict dangerous weapons, he supports the ban on military-style assault weapons and the waiting period for handgun purchases. He would only vote for judges who support the death penalty.

* Stop the flow of illegal immigration over the border by requiring tamper-proof identification cards, beefing up the Border Patrol and cutting education and health benefits to illegal immigrants.

* Decrease the impact of environmental regulations on business by changing the Endangered Species Act.

The Speech: In His Own Words

* Excerpts from a speech delivered at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Oct. 11.

There is a seismic shift taking place in the country today. Voters are angry and justifiably so. Politicians treated voter anger as a fad in 1992, thinking this too shall pass--after one election cycle. They were wrong. . . . When they voted for Clinton, they voted for change and they didn’t get it. They feel betrayed. And justifiably so.

They won’t be fooled a second time. This will be a watershed year, the year we begin to make the transition from the professional politician to the citizen-politician. When you run to challenge the system, as I have done, you challenge--not just the political status quo, you challenge the fundamental ideas upon which the whole system rests. For a lot of people who are very interested in the system, that’s very threatening.

People who want fundamental change have responded to my message of taking the power out of Washington and putting it back in the hands of ordinary people. But there are others who prefer what my opponent has promised: the security of the status quo. In fact, Sen. Feinstein’s colleague, Congressman Bob Matsui, has said it best: “Dianne is someone the Washington Establishment has taken to right away. She’s not a boat-rocker.” Well, I am a boat-rocker, I am a risk-taker. I am a businessman who wants to get government out of the way so we can unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people. My agenda is about more than just different policy proposals. It is about a different way of thinking about how democracy should work.

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This is why, I believe, there are those who find my candidacy threatening. . . . It’s not just that they’re afraid of my defeating an entrenched California Democrat; it’s not just that they’re afraid of the impending GOP majority in the Senate. It’s not just that they fear that my victory will be seen as a referendum on the Clinton-Feinstein-Boxer regime.

What they fear is that by asking people to question the bankrupt ideology upon which Washington is built, I have exposed this bankruptcy for all to see. And they are afraid that it is only a matter of time--a very short time--before we send the whole rusted, cynical Establishment tumbling down. By questioning the myths of the dominant liberal culture upon which politics as usual is founded, I have drawn a line in the sand of time, and they are afraid of being found out, stranded standing on the wrong side of history.

Well, what specifically is it about my ideas that inspires fear into the hearts of the guardians of the East Coast liberal Establishment? First, I have blown the whistle on the oldest game in town. It’s the I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine, pork-trading game played by lifetime insiders that is designed to keep politicians in Washington forever and voters in the dark. . . .

I’ve broken the first rule in politics: If you want to make friends with the emperor, don’t tell him he’s not wearing any clothes. Well, I don’t want to go to the Senate to make friends with the Establishment. . . . You would think, to judge from the reaction to my candidacy from Mrs. Feinstein and her fellow travelers, that I had uttered not political proposals, but religious heresy. And I guess, in a way, perhaps I have. Their creed is political salvationism. Big government is their god.

And that’s the second reason they are enraged by my candidacy. The myth perpetuated by believers in big government is the government is the source of all blessings to man--it provides solutions, it provides programs, it even provides, if Hillary Clinton is to be believed, a sense of meaning and security. This, of course, is liberal nonsense. . . .

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A prime example of how I’d like to achieve (change) is through my proposal for dismantling the federal welfare state. . . . I don’t care how often Bill Clinton and Dianne Feinstein promise to “reform” it by priming it with more federal funding--it can’t work, because it attempts to solve local problems with centralized government solutions, and because it attempts to help individuals--feeling, thinking human beings--with the anonymous, antiseptic machinery of state. . . .

I’m asking you to imagine an America in which each citizen looks around their communities and takes ownership, takes responsibility for at least one problem or one person who needs help. . . . The cynics who question the feasibility of community-based solutions suffer from nothing less than a failure of the imagination--a pinched view of the generosity of the American people that is, thankfully, not shared by the American people themselves. . . .

The third reason is that I have dared to question the gospel according to the Capital Gang. I have dared to mention that controversial three-letter word, God , and I have had the impudence to suggest that as a society we have forgotten him, that we should remember him, that we should--undeterred by the ridicule of the liberal elite--welcome God back into our lives and into our public square. . . . While it has become acceptable to discuss values, the giver of all values, God, remains taboo. I have broken the silence. . . .

The fourth reason is that my campaign challenges the liberal Establishment’s presumption of moral superiority. Republicans aren’t supposed to show homeless people and volunteers in their campaign commercials as I have.

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So what my campaign is about is not just being against something, but being for something--a new vision of how politics could and should work in America. My opponent says I have no ideas, but the truth is that my ideas are beyond the horizon of her worldview. What little she does comprehend, she does not like one bit, and neither does the liberal Establishment she represents. What my campaign has done is the political equivalent of showing up at the candle-makers union with a flashlight in hand. They do not want to see the light. What’s more, they do not want others, especially the voters, to see the light.

Because when the light goes on, we will realize that for years we’ve been a democracy in the dark, voting, again and again, in the ignorance enforced by those whose whole lives, and livelihoods, and identities are dependent upon selling political candles in the dark. My campaign is about turning on the light.