Summing up their closing statements for the 1998 campaign season, the four major party candidates for U.S. Senate and governor jabbed at their rivals and pleaded with supporters Saturday to search for every remaining vote.
Tension ran highest in the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer and Republican challenger Matt Fong, just as a new poll indicated that the contest is still too close to call.
For the first time, Fong launched a television commercial that directly attacks Boxer. And at a rally in San Diego, he joined Gov. Pete Wilson to promote Proposition 8, the education initiative that Wilson sponsored for the November ballot.
The Republican nominee also took a Halloween stab at his opponent by suggesting that Boxer is a liberal posing as a moderate.
"I'm tired of this trick-or-treat style of politics," he said. "I'm tired of Californians getting tricks played on them by politicians like Barbara Boxer. And now she says she's tough on crime. That's the scariest costume of all."
Boxer returned the fire in San Francisco, ridiculing Fong for his complaints about the accuracy of her television commercials and condemning him as an out-of-touch extremist.
"Matt should grow up and learn to take the heat for his positions," the freshman senator told about 150 supporters at the San Francisco Democratic Party headquarters. "He tries to be all things to all people."
Also on Saturday, a statewide poll for the San Francisco Examiner by Mason-Dixon Political Research gave Boxer a narrow two-point lead among likely voters. A few days earlier, the independent Field Poll gave her a nine-point lead.
Unlike the Senate race, public polls indicate voters are not so divided about their choice for governor. Democrat Gray Davis, striding with a front-runner's ease through the Southland on Saturday, has scored a significant lead over Republican nominee Dan Lungren in several recent surveys.
Still, Lungren sought to rally GOP supporters in the Los Angeles area Saturday by saying his forecasters predict a down-to-the-wire finish.
"We are closing and we are closing this thing very, very fast," he said at a GOP rally in Monterey Park. "On Tuesday, we should peak at the right moment, not a day before and not a day after."
Lungren attended a breakfast rally in Baldwin Park on Saturday before moving on to events in Monterey Park and Long Beach, where he walked precincts and passed out Halloween candy.
