Feinstein Faces a Double-Team.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Both of Dianne Feinstein's political opponents attack her support for the Colombian military aid plan

Outside a San Francisco drug treatment center on a breezy late spring day, Medea Benjamin, the California Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, attacked incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, for backing a $1.7 billion military aid package to fund the Colombian government.

The U.S. government should not be pouring billions into the bottomless pit of misguided foreign drug wars, Benjamin said. It should be addressing the economic and social pathologies that create the demand for drugs on the streets of American cities. "Instead of a drug war in Colombia, we need to be funding drug rehabilitation in San Francisco," she explained, making the connection between the global and the local that underpins this year's most high-profile third party Senate campaign.

At her side was a boyish Stanford Law School professor who echoed Benjamin's arguments, adding that he feared growing U.S. involvement in Colombia could lead the United States into a Vietnam-style quagmire. Sending U.S. tax dollars to Colombia will do nothing to prevent drug abuse in America because the demand for drugs will remain, he argued. "If we have demand, there will be supply," the gentleman explained.

Who was Benjamin's comrade? Representative Tom Campbell, Republican of California, who is running against Benjamin and Feinstein for the same Senate seat.

The unprecedented Green-Republican press conference shows how remarkable this California race has become. Feinstein, the incumbent and a tough former San Francisco mayor with a long history of veering to the right of her own party, remains the clear front runner in her race for a second full term. But she is facing a double-team from Benjamin, a veteran activist and co-founder of the activist group Global Exchange, and from Campbell, a libertarian Republican who comes at Feinstein from both left and right.

In a year when most Senate contests follow the standard Democratversus-Republican script, the California Senate race offers the political equivalent of a Quentin Tarantino story line. To be sure, a state that has elected Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Ron Dellums, and Bob Dornan can hardly be said to follow predictable patterns. But this really may be an "anything goes" year. With Feinstein frequently mentioned as a possible running mate for Al Gore, Campbell says "there are some incredible variables in this race."

Even if the sixty-six-year-old Feinstein is passed over for the Vice Presidency, the California contest creates prospects--particularly involving Benjamin's energetic third party campaign--that could make for a far more interesting contest than the over-hyped Hillary Clinton-Rick Lazio race in New York.

The sage bet is still that--barring a Gore intervention--Feinstein will win. She continues to lead in the polls, and she's far ahead on the fundraising field: She outflanked Campbell by 5 to 1 before the March primary and Benjamin by better than 20 to 1. But the challengers have stirred the pot.

"Feinstein may not have to run a marathon, but she's going to break a sweat," says Jennifer Duffy, the editor of the Cook Report, a newsletter that analyzes Congressional races.

Already, California observers say, Benjamin and Campbell are ahead in that rarest of all political competitions: the battle of ideas.

"So much of politics is just polls and strategy and sound bites, but I think that Tom Campbell and Medea Benjamin really are interested in ideas and issues," says Arianna Huffington, the syndicated columnist who resides in Santa Monica and has stretched some political boundaries of her own...