NEWS ANALYSIS : Huffington and Others Say $30 Million Was Well Spent

Thirty million dollars will pay for 700 new Border Patrol agents. Or a 737 jetliner. Or 1.2 million copies of the best-selling “Book of Virtues.” Or two months of water usage for the entire city of Los Angeles.

But all that money apparently could not buy a U.S. Senate seat in California. Not this year anyway.

After sinking more than a third of his estimated $70-million oil fortune into last week’s nip-and-tuck Senate election, Mike Huffington retreated to his Santa Barbara ocean view estate with a 44% unfavorable rating and a political bruising. By the national media he was deemed variously a “cipher,” a “Martian candidate,” an “empty suit” and a “rich twit.” Esquire magazine said: “Michael Huffington could’ve bought a bad Picasso.”

To hear Huffington tell it, however, his millions were expended wisely as he came within 123,610 votes of toppling Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a popular Democrat who earlier this year enjoyed the highest approval rating of any elected official in the state.

“It was very worth it,” Huffington said of the most expensive congressional race in history.

Many political experts agree. They say Huffington parlayed his vast financial resources into a highly effective--albeit ugly--campaign that featured an unprecedented blitz of negative advertising. By any standard, this was quite an accomplishment for a native Texan who began the campaign virtually unknown to the public, had few credentials in civic life, and only recently relocated to California.

“I don’t think he could have done anything much differently,” said Steven P. Erie, a specialist in California and urban politics at UC San Diego. “I hate to say it, but I think it was money well spent. He came as close as he possibly could.”

The outcome remains so close that Feinstein has yet to claim victory and Huffington has not conceded defeat. But with 500,000 absentee ballots still uncounted, Feinstein’s lead is nearly impossible for Huffington to overcome. Huffington won the absentee ballots already counted statewide by about 6%, according to The Times exit poll, and to win Huffington would need to carry the outstanding ballots by a margin of more than 20%.

In any close campaign, there is second-guessing over whether different decisions about strategy or tactics would have resulted in another outcome. But the lesson of the race may well be that wealthy candidates can buy a major election in a sprawling state like California, according to a wide range of interviews.

“If only Huffington had spent another $10 million he would have won,” said Tom Epstein, the Clinton Administration’s California liaison.

But according to one source, Huffington decided to stop writing checks with only one week left in the race as his highly paid team of Republican consultants presented options for further spending. The 46-year-old Republican congressman told his staff: “That’s it. I’ve put my last nickel into the campaign,” said a Huffington consultant who requested anonymity.

Huffington spent $28.3 million of his fortune and spent about $30 million overall in his bid to defeat Feinstein. The previous spending record for any congressional seat was $17 million in 1990 by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).

The level of spending enabled Huffington to make it a close race, but also cost him some votes as Feinstein repeatedly attacked him for it. A Times exit survey of voters on Election Day found that 28% of Feinstein backers said they supported the San Francisco Democrat because Huffington was trying to buy the election.

Feinstein, one of the most successful political fund-raisers in the country, spent about $12 million to win reelection. At a West Los Angeles rally Monday, she vowed to do everything in her power to pass campaign reform laws that put a ceiling on spending levels. Feinstein said that “if anything has taught me that campaigns are not right in this land, it has been this campaign.”

The race was never supposed to be so expensive. Shortly after announcing his Senate bid last year, Huffington said he planned to spend about $5 million of his own money and raise an additional $10 million in contributions. As the campaign wore on, Huffington’s predictions of his personal contributions grew to $10 million, then to $15 million and finally, it seemed, to whatever amount was necessary. He also ended up raising a relatively paltry $1.4 million from supporters.

“I don’t think any of us conceived that we’d be spending the kind of money we did,” said Ken Khachigian, a Huffington campaign strategist. “I don’t think Mike conceived it, either.”

The primary motive Huffington cited in pursuing a Senate seat was to replace the government’s role as welfare provider with private philanthropy. The issue was of such importance that he and his wife, author Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, discussed the possibility of abandoning the campaign and using their money to start a charitable foundation. On the campaign trail, Huffington spoke of his experience as a volunteer serving meals at a soup kitchen.

If the couple had donated $30 million to a Los Angeles food bank, the money would have fed about 250,000 people for a year, said Carolyn Olney, associate director of the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition.

“It’s just dreadful that that amount was spent on campaigning,” Olney said. “Why not some kind of limit? I’m not so naive to think it should go to feeding the hungry, but it just seems a ridiculous amount of money for what turned out to be such a negative campaign. To me, it’s crazy.”

A Times analysis of federal election records has found no precedent for Huffington’s spending spree. Because it cost him virtually nothing to raise money, Huffington was able to pour more than $20 million into television and radio advertising. No candidate in the history of congressional elections has come close to spending even half as much as Huffington on broadcast ads.

Huffington spent $5.74 in broadcast advertising for each of the 3,484,887 votes he attracted. This year, Senate challenger Oliver L. North generated more than $17 million for his campaign in the much smaller state of Virginia, but spent only $3.70 per vote on TV and radio ads because he was forced to plow $9.2 million into direct-mail fund raising. Similarly, Helms spent $4.62 per vote on broadcast ads in 1990.

With so much money available, Huffington could afford a top-drawer collection of campaign consultants. Records show that through Oct. 19 he paid $220,000 to the Washington consulting firm of Larry McCarthy, a former George Bush media adviser. Senior consultant Bruce Nestande collected $155,000, former campaign manger Bob Shuman was paid $150,000, onetime Richard Nixon speech writer Khachigian received $80,000 in fees and former Ronald Reagan adviser Ed Rollins’ company was paid $73,945.

Huffington also enjoyed the rare luxury of combining his TV spots with radio and newspaper ads statewide. On at least three occasions, his campaign spent an extra $500,000 to supplement television attacks on Feinstein with radio and newspaper advertising, aides said.

The ads sought to destroy Feinstein’s reputation by portraying her as a tax-and-spend liberal and career politician who catered to special interests, acted in ways that benefited her wealthy husband, and would do anything to get reelected. Huffington’s first attack commercial highlighted the Feinstein vote for President Clinton’s 1993 economic package, which the ad described as the biggest tax increase in history.

“I thought it was brilliant negative campaigning,” said Erie, the political scientist. “The television ads were effective and brilliantly conceived.”

The success of the ads--they were instrumental in helping Huffington wipe out the 30-point deficit from early polling surveys--proved once again that negative campaigning produces the quickest results for a challenger running against an established incumbent.

“If you can blanket the media the way (Huffington) did, it looks like you can persuade people of just about almost anything that’s negative,” said Barbara Sinclair, who teaches political science at UC Riverside.

But several political experts suggested that Huffington might have invested a little too much money in negative advertising and too little in positive messages that gave voters reasons to elect him. Given his enormous financial resources, Huffington could have embarked on a wholly different sort of campaign--one that allowed him, not his opponent, to define him, they said.

Huffington kicked off his TV advertising campaign in February with a commercial that opened with him recommending Republican William J. Bennett’s “Book of Virtues.”

But Huffington only occasionally aired similar ads that emphasized his personal values and beliefs.

“With all that money he spent, he’s still an empty suit,” said Bob Hattoy, a Democrat and California political activist who serves in the Clinton Administration. “They should have spent all that money filling the suit.”

Huffington advisers said they intended to flood the airwaves during the final week with uplifting commercials that showed Huffington playing with his children and talking to the camera about his strengths. But when the Feinstein campaign attacked Huffington for hiring an illegal immigrant nanny, his advisers decided they had to pull the positive ads only five days before Election Day. To neutralize the damage caused by the nanny issue, Huffington counterattacked with TV ads that accused Feinstein of lying about her hiring of an illegal immigrant housekeeper.

The positive ad, which some political experts said was very effective, ran the night before the election.

“If he loses, the difference has to be laid on nannygate,” said George Gorton, campaign manager for Gov. Pete Wilson. “It sort of interrupted his flow. Otherwise, I think he would have won.”

For his part, Huffington has expressed no regrets over spending $30 million on a losing effort that brought him much criticism and ridicule.

“I grew a lot,” Huffington said the morning after the election. “I am a very different person than I was 15 months ago. As a result, I think I could probably go through anything today and survive that experience. But it was a worthwhile experience for me personally.”

Times staff writers Greg Krikorian and Dwight Morris contributed to this article.