Lungren, Davis Still Marching to Different Drums

By CATHLEEN DECKER

Sept. 7, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

Dan Lungren watches cowboy movies to check out the horseback riding, grew teary-eyed at “Saving Private Ryan” and believes that rock ‘n’ roll began to die when “a couple of guys from, where were they from, Birmingham?”--well, Liverpool--”thought they could sing as well as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.”

Gray Davis isn’t a big Beatles fan himself, preferring Sinatra and Streisand to rock ‘n’ roll rebellion. The last time he went to a concert--Linda Ronstadt’s, when the singer was dating his boss Jerry Brown a couple decades ago--Davis wore a suit and told the guy in front of him to please pipe down.

They are the two major candidates for California governor. Between today, Labor Day, the traditional fall campaign kickoff, and election day in November, each will offer his name to the questions asked by voters: Which one is more like me? Who better understands my dreams and fears?

Lungren, the Republican attorney general, is publicly passionate, crying openly as he formally announced his campaign. He is by turns arrogant and charming, an Irish-Catholic pol who reflects his suburban California roots, like Ward Cleaver with macho swagger and blinding self-confidence.

Davis, the Democratic lieutenant governor, is carefully controlled and cautious, rarely deviating publicly from his personable yet uptight image, the master of small talk that bares little soul. He is a private and solitary man who has chosen the most public of professions, an enormously ambitious career politician whose aggression is masked at least in part by the starchy formality of his East Coast upbringing.

From a distance, there are similarities.

“These are two fairly evenly matched candidates,” Davis campaign manager Garry South said recently. “Two middle-aged white males, both over 50, both Roman Catholic, both lawyers, both attended private college and parochial schools. . . . Both served in the legislative branch and both in the executive branch of government.

“But when you take a yellow legal pad and start looking at the similarities, there are a helluva lot more differences.”

Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who has worked closely with both men, believes that the two approach life in fundamentally different ways.

“Dan’s style is one of being very, very deliberate, sometimes very intense, and when he takes a position, it is one that has to comport with what his own frame of values happens to be, whether you like that or not,” Connerly says. “Gray, on the other hand, is more politically pragmatic.”

With Davis, who sits on the regents’ board with Connerly, ideology “is subordinated to the whole issue of style and keeping an eye on how this will play out. Dan is sometimes not concerned enough about that.”

Where the Buck Stops

The notion that Lungren runs everything through the prism of his moral sensibilities, and Davis through his political calculations, threads through interviews with the two men, whether the subject is their own character, their views on compromise or the movies they see.

Intellectually, both say that they like to cull ideas from a broad range of sources--what they read, meetings with aides, one-on-one sessions with associates. But those who know them say that each believes he is his own best counsel. Neither has a broad range of advisors; their wives, as much as anyone else, provide their longest-standing and bluntest sounding boards.

“In the end, I take responsibility for every decision,” says Davis. “I learned several years ago not to rely on the advice of others, not to go with advice that I think is wrong.”

Davis says he likes to ruminate as he travels around the state, and prefers to hold decisions in abeyance.

“I like to live with a decision for a couple of weeks,” says Davis, who has a reputation for stalling on issues as he parses the political fallout.

Lungren, the erstwhile high school jock, says his best thinking comes as he rides horseback or works out in his home gym.

He took up riding more than a year ago. It happened when Lungren told a friend that he channel-surfed old westerns “as much to watch the guys riding the horses as anything.” The friend offered the use of his Sacramento-area horse ranch. Lungren accepted; recently, he bought his own saddle.

As he campaigns around the state, Lungren offers his idea about how to solve problems--gathering opponents around a common table and hammering out compromises. But he won’t budge on anything that matters. He endorses what he calls the “iron-butt” system of negotiating.

“If you out-sit the other side, you tend to get more than you would otherwise,” he says.

When Davis is asked his views on compromise, he first slams Lungren. “My opponent is an ideologue and tries to make solutions fit his ideology,” Davis declares. “I try to solve the problem, period.”

But Davis endorses compromise in much the same fashion as Lungren, albeit in a more roundabout way:

“Let’s say I want to make the state fish salmon, but you will do it only if I agree to make the state vegetable asparagus,” he says. “I’d say that’s OK with me. I’d rather have green beans and broccoli, but any green vegetable is OK with me. But if you want to make the state vegetable French fries in deep batter, I wouldn’t do that.”

A Question of Character

Lungren’s and Davis’ approaches are never more disparate than when they are asked simply to describe their own character.

To Lungren, the answer is personal and moral. He remembers that when he was in Congress several years ago, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered. His response, then and now:

“A good father and good husband, because to me that’s the most important thing,” he says. “Everything else comes second.”

Davis, on the other hand, brings up his professional actions. “I was raised to be a good citizen, to do the right thing,” he says. “I believe in, I think where possible, being a good moral exemplar.”

Then he points out that he has refused pay raises while in office and has not asked for per diem expenses he could have received.

Though both men are Catholics, they carry their faith in dramatically different ways. Lungren openly discusses religion and the importance of inspiring moral certitude in young Californians. Ask where his competitive instincts developed and he cites his alma maters, St. Anthony’s High School in Long Beach and Notre Dame, the nation’s best-known Catholic university.

Ask him whom he admires, and he immediately offers the name of Henry Hyde, the Illinois congressman. It is an example of Lungren’s defiance of the politically pragmatic; Hyde, after all, is a congressman best known nationally for opposing abortion rights, which polls show most Californians support.

His description of Hyde blurs any separation between church and state, and seems to echo how Lungren himself would like to be seen.

“He is one of the most principled people I have ever known,” Lungren says. “Intellectually sharp, disciplined, great sense of humor, he can battle you on the floor in the toughest kind of battle, then after it’s over, he comes over and punches you on the arm and tells you a great joke.

“Just a great man. A great, committed Republican. A committed lawmaker, committed Catholic, committed American. You just name it, he is.”

Of course, Lungren exists in a political party that values religious involvement. Davis, who does not share that advantage, has kept his faith largely to himself, though this year he has repeatedly made religious references.

“I don’t wear it on my sleeve,” Davis says of his Catholicism. “I believe in God. I go to church on Sunday. It gives me a sense of peace.”

Unlike Lungren, whose religious involvement has never wavered, Davis says that he fell out with the church in adulthood, until his wife, Sharon, brought him back a few years ago. “The Lord was working through her,” Davis says.

Lungren’s more vocal moral underpinnings are evident in his reaction to President Clinton’s admission of a relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He prefaces his denunciation by noting that his wife worked in the Nixon White House when she was in her 20s. His sister was also a White House intern, his daughter worked for a congressman, and he has managed hundreds of interns.

“It is incomprehensible to me that the president of the United States would do that sort of thing,” he says. “So as a father, as a husband, as a brother and as someone who has been in a position of authority with interns, I find it totally unacceptable.

“If he were the principal of a grade school or a high school and he was hitting on a college intern or a brand-new teacher, I don’t think we’d accept that. He’d be asked to leave. And I don’t understand why one would think the standards of conduct should be less for someone higher up the authority chain in government.”

Lungren declines to say whether he believes Clinton should resign. “I’m not going to give him advice,” he says.

Davis, asked about the transgressions of a president who has raised money for his gubernatorial campaign, avoids any discussion of morality. Clearly wanting the subject to go away, he says that Clinton “deserves credit for doing a very good job as president. He has apologized to the nation. . . . Would I have used slightly different words? Yes.”

How would you handle it, Davis is asked, if an aide engaged in a similar relationship with an intern? “Well, those are personnel matters and we’re not allowed to talk about personnel matters,” Davis replies.

The question was hypothetical, he is reminded. “I don’t want to get into hypotheticals,” he says.

A Contrast in Lifestyles

The outlines of Davis’ and Lungren’s lives reflect their stylistic differences.

Lungren, a suburbanite to his core, revels in his relationship with his wife, Bobbi, and their three children. He was moved when his son Jeff surprised him by coming back home from Washington to help with the campaign. He was touched when his daughter Kathleen, during one testy campaign appearance, kneaded his shoulders in support and revved him up with exhortations as if he was suiting up for his beloved Notre Dame football team.

Davis is the urban yin to Lungren’s suburban yang. At 55, he lives in a 1,000-square-foot condominium in West Hollywood with his wife. He good-naturedly laments the sacrifices he has made to engage in public service. But he has brought many of those sacrifices upon himself with his legendary drive for nonstop campaigning.

Witness their leisure pursuits. Lungren catches movies at the mall--”Saving Private Ryan” was the latest--with his wife and other couples “who are not involved in politics,” the candidate says pointedly.

Davis’ friends are his political aides and benefactors. He regrets, for example, that he has yet to see the new movie that Lungren so revered. He says he recently called his supporter Jeffrey Katzenberg, a partner in the DreamWorks studio that made the film, to ask if he could come over for a screening.

He does like to golf, but plays only a half-dozen times a year these days.

When it comes to music, Lungren is more eclectic. Aides say that sounds from a boom-box filter out from his office; he says he often listens as he thinks about political issues. In the course of a 60-minute interview, the only time he visibly relaxed came when the discussion turned to Elvis.

“I liked his music, pure and simple,” Lungren says with a smile. “I never took his rebellion seriously. It was entertainment. . . . The guy had an excellent voice, had rhythm.”

“To me, the era of rock ‘n’ roll had its zenith just before the Beatles showed up. I could never understand how anybody thought that the Beatles could sing as well as Chuck Berry. I just couldn’t understand.”

Davis says he is “very much a traditionalist.” Indeed, it is hard to imagine him taking to the stage at a party convention, as Lungren once did, and belting out an Elvis tune.

“Streisand, Sinatra. Let’s see, who’s more current? Who’s that fella?” he said when asked his favorites. “Harry Connick Jr.?”

“The only concert I went to was a Linda Ronstadt concert,” he says, laughing at himself. “I wore my suit to the concert. I asked the guy in front of me to tone it down. He said [to his friend], ‘Hey, better watch out, there’s a narc behind us.’ ”

More is ahead of them than musical pursuits, of course. For all their differences, Davis and Lungren are united in their quest for the highest elective office in the nation’s largest state. At times, this thought alone can be overwhelming, as when Lungren teared up at his announcement speech, when he caught sight of his parents, his children, his teachers, all there together and proud.

Ahead will be scores of appearances, solicitations of support, fund-raising efforts and outright begging of the electorate. Each will praise himself and disparage the other. That is ahead, but when he talked about what got him here, Davis could have been speaking for both himself and Lungren.

“It’s all fate,” he said. “Fate has set the table, and I will do my best to be worthy.”