CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Boxer Assails Rival’s Offshore Drilling Views

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Barbara Boxer stood on the Santa Monica Pier with environmental supporters Monday, pointed out to the bay and said that if Republican Bruce Herschensohn had his way “we would see oil derricks right here.”

Boxer thus sought to re-energize her campaign for the six-year Senate seat with an all-out attack on Herschensohn’s environmental program.

Actually, Herschensohn would not be able to put derricks in Santa Monica Bay because the State Lands Commission controls the waters within three miles of the shoreline. But Boxer quoted Herschensohn accurately as saying, in one of his KABC television commentaries in 1989, “I would like to see oil exploration in the plains, in the coastal waters, drilling everywhere.”

In seeking responses from the candidates on 11 key questions, the California League of Conservation Voters received 11 “no,” replies from Herschensohn--indicating that he disagrees with its positions--and 11 “yes” responses from Boxer, the five-term congresswoman from Marin County who has sponsored legislation banning drilling in federal waters off the California coast.

Herschensohn told reporters later in the day in Irvine that those who oppose offshore oil drilling usually are “elitists.”

“We need to be as self-sufficient as possible,” said Herschensohn, who wants to abolish the U.S. Department of Energy. “If we are going to destroy a view for a period of time, I should imagine that Americans will go along with that.”

In attacking Herschensohn on offshore oil, Boxer sought to exploit a popular issue in Southern California, even among voters who might find many of her other positions too liberal. Opinion polls have indicated solid opposition to drilling along the California coastline.

Boxer campaigned in the Los Angeles area one day after the Los Angeles Times Poll showed that Herschensohn had trimmed Boxer’s lead from 19% in September to 9% among registered voters and to 5% among those likely to vote.

Boxer acknowledged that Herschensohn got the jump on her with two weeks of unanswered television commercials, but she said Monday “now we are toe to toe with him” on television.

Her key commercial violates an old political rule to never show your opponent on your ads. Boxer acknowledged that some viewers at first think it is a Herschensohn ad, but she said: “It’s working. . . . I would rather people see the real Bruce Herschensohn because I think he is so extreme and the best way to show it is to show it in his own words.

“Bruce Herschensohn is a great danger, not only to our environment, to our future, to our jobs, but to our survival as a human species,” she said.

Boxer argued that Herschensohn would allow the unrestricted cutting of ancient forests, thus eliminating logging jobs and the trees that provide the base stock for important pharmaceuticals.

When a reporter suggested that Congress is not likely to go along with Herschensohn’s ideas, Boxer said Herschensohn still would be “dangerous” because of the ability of a single senator to block action through the filibuster, which can only be broken with a three-fifths vote of 60 senators.

“One person can have a lot more impact there than in any other institution I know about,” she said.

Republican Sen. John Seymour threatened at a Riverside County Farm Bureau event to use the filibuster as a weapon to get Congress to soften restrictions of the Endangered Species Act. He is demanding that the law be changed to put “people and jobs ahead of plants and animals.”

Seymour vowed that if the act came up for renewal without such changes, “I will give them the longest goddamn filibuster they ever saw in their lives.”

That drew cheers and applause from about 400 people attending the Farm Bureau’s “First (And Last) Annual Kangaroo Rat Barbecue,” held Saturday to support the organization’s efforts to get the Stephens’ kangaroo rat removed from the endangered species list.

Seymour has claimed that protection for the rat would cost 30,000 to 45,000 jobs in Riverside and San Bernardino counties and add $234 million to the cost of new homes. But he reduced the jobs claim to 5,000 Saturday after he was asked to document the larger figures.

Dianne Feinstein, Seymour’s Democratic opponent for the two-year Senate seat, attended fund-raising events in her home territory of the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday. One appearance, at a Haight-Ashbury drug rehabilitation clinic, was canceled because of a scheduling conflict, her staff said.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson also contributed to this story.