Democrats Clean Up Despite `peckerdilloes' Eric Ellis San Francisco

11/05/1998

The booming States of the US West put performance over peccadilloes in snaring the biggest prize of the night for the triumphant Democrats, California's governorship. The Democrat rout of the Grand Old Party was no better expressed than in California where former State Lieutenant-Governor Gray Davis beat his long-time office colleague, State Attorney-General Dan Lungren.

It will be the first time in 16 years, since Vietnam veteran Davis's one-time boss Jerry "Governor Moonbeam" Brown held the Sacramento capitol office - that a Democrat is governor of the US's richest and most populous State. The Democrats also prevailed in one of the night's most bitterly contested races, the battle for liberal Senator Barbara Boxer's California seat. Both victories will have considerable impact outside a State often considered the model for future US political, economic and social trends.

Governor-elect Davis will be in a position after a census in the year 2000 to re-draw the boundaries of congressional districts in California, the State which sends the most delegates to Washington.

That could be advantageous to Vice-President Al Gore's efforts to ensure a Democratic grip on the country past the Clinton term.

The Senate race has more immediate impact for President Clinton. The Republicans were counting on a victory for former State Treasurer Matt Fong over the Democrat Boxer to shore up numbers in the ongoing Lewinsky impeachment action against Mr Clinton.

Fong's loss, added to those elsewhere in the country, in particular that of vocal Clinton critic Alfonse D'Amato, weakens the Republican effort on Capitol Hill.

Boxer's victory is seen as a national touchstone for voter apathy towards the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Fong criticised Boxer, whose daughter is married to Hilary Rodham Clinton's brother, as too slow to condemn the presidential affair and televised mea culpa but her victory seemed to support pre-election polls that showed Americans had separated presidential peccadilloes from political performance.

The US West was a clean sweep for the Democrats in the key gubernatorial races. In Oregon, popular incumbent John Kitzhaber won strongly over GOP anti-tax crusader Bill Sizemore.

The governorship of Washington State, held by Democrat Asian-American Gary Locke, was not up for election but a key Senate race was won by Democrat Patty Murray, the so-called "mum in tennis shoes", who beat Republican Linda Smith in the US's only all-female Senate race. Murray is a staunch pro-abortion rights campaigner and environmentalist, while Smith was backed by the ultra-conservative Christian Coalition.

The victories in Arizona of Republican Senator John McCain and in Wisconsin of Democrat Russ Feingold, both of whom ran on a campaign finance reform agenda, suggest Americans were more agitated about that issue than about the "presidential pecker", as one commentator put it.