Features

SAN FRANCISCO — As California’s primary draws near, Rep. Gary Condit faces the toughest election of his crumbled political career and Republicans are waging a fierce battle for the right to take on Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. 

Tuesday’s primary comes after a year of turmoil featuring a sex scandal involving a missing intern, a crippling energy crisis and multi-billion-dollar budget troubles. 

Besides determining Condit’s future and Davis’ opponent, voters also will decide whether to send two sisters to Congress for the first time, and whether the state will revise its 12-year-old term-limits law. 

In Condit’s district, once so supportive it was called Condit Country, the 13-year House veteran faces his toughest challenge from Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, a former aide who has garnered cash and endorsements from former Condit supporters. 

The primary winner will face the victor in a four-candidate GOP field that includes state Sen. Dick Monteith, R-Modesto. 

Polls conducted by Cardoza’s campaign showed the state legislator leading Condit by a 2-to-1 ratio. 

Condit’s bid for another term was shadowed by the case of Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy, 24, who vanished as she was preparing to move home to Modesto after her internship ended at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. 

The divisive Republican race for the gubernatorial nomination, meanwhile, has been dominated by two Los Angeles millionaires who attend the same Roman Catholic church in Santa Monica. 

Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, encouraged by the White House to run, once held an overwhelming lead in the polls over Los Angeles businessman Bill Simon. However, Simon, who had never before run for political office, vaulted into the lead in the most recent polls. 

Simon poured millions of his own personal fortune into his campaign and even attracted attention from representatives of President Bush who had become uncomfortable with Riordan’s chances. 

Now Riordan has been forced to try to show Republicans that only he, as a moderate, can beat Davis in a state where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans. Simon, on the other hand, is pinning his hopes on an expected high turnout from conservatives who can’t abide Riordan’s relative liberalism. 

“It started a huge food fight in the Republican party,” said Bruce Cain, a University of California, Berkeley, political scientist. 

On Saturday, Riordan and Simon toured California trying to churn up support and intensifying their attacks. 

Riordan spent the morning in the Bay Area. He visited an office where supporters were calling voters to cast ballots Tuesday for Riordan. Among the notables lending their voices to recorded pro-Riordan messages this weekend was Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Riordan stepped up his Simon attack, calling him too extreme to be elected in California. He also blamed Davis, who already has run a slew of anti-Riordan ads, for his decline in the polls. 

“Gray Davis knows I will beat him in November and his only choice of staying on as governor is to beat me next Tuesday,” Riordan told a crowd of supporters in Burlingame. “Don’t let that happen.” 

Simon, meanwhile, flew around the state, stopping at airports from Chico to Santa Maria and thanking supporters. He did not attack Riordan, though Riordan had called him a “sanctimonious hypocrite.” 

“It’s the closing days of the campaign, I’m obviously sad to hear of this,” he told reporters as he got on the plane in Sacramento to head to Oakland. “Emotions are running high and a lot of things are being said.” 

A third candidate in the Republican primary, Secretary of State Bill Jones, is the most politically experienced candidate in the field. However, he never managed to build any momentum or raise cash for his campaign. 

Until the final weeks, the Republican candidates had concentrated on bashing Davis, who is unopposed in the Democratic primary but has spent nearly $15 million on his campaign — more than any of his GOP rivals. 

California voters face a ballot initiative to revise the term-limits law that was approved in 1990. If passed, it would let legislative districts’ voters petition to extend their legislators’ tenure by an extra term. A poll released Friday showed opposition to the initiative was growing, rising to 51 percent in late February from 45 percent in late January.