Should the Huffingtons Be Stopped?

By MARGARET CARLSON

Michael Huffington campaigns sparingly, and he prefers sterile, controlled environments. On this bright September morning, the G.O.P. Senate candidate is visiting the neonatal unit of the Long Beach Community Hospital. He makes the smallest of small talk, marveling at how big the monitors are and how tiny the babies. Well over 6 ft. tall and thin as his pinstripes, with a smile that never seems to reach his eyes, Huffington manages to escape without having a real conversation with anyone. At his next and last stop, he thanks volunteers and ticks off his reasons for trying to wrest away the seat of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. He says she is for Big Government, high taxes, socialized medicine, a weak defense and special interests. He is not.

Others have tried, but Huffington may be perfecting campaigning as an out- of-body experience. Although he has no other appearances on his schedule for this day or the rest of the week, his staff, only three of whom are allowed to speak to the press, insists he will have no time to sit for a real interview to explain what he is for. This is not surprising. Huffington, 47, did not go from political virginity in 1991 to a dead heat with Feinstein (the latest Field poll has them at a 42-42 tie) by providing his unscripted musings to print journalists. He did it with an outsized pile of Houston oil money ($5 million in his congressional race and more than $10 million so far this year) and a team of high-priced packagers -- Ken Kachigian and Lyn Nofziger (both political consultants to Ronald Reagan), the formerly disgraced Ed Rollins (who claimed, then later denied that he paid black ministers for their indifference to help his New Jersey gubernatorial candidate) and admaker Larry McCarthy (of Willie Horton fame). They have made him virtually tamperproof. Republican Congressman Robert Lagomarsino couldn't crack his veneer when the tall Texan appeared out of nowhere to beat him in 1992. Nor could Huffington's Senate primary opponent, former Congressman William Dannemeyer. Huffington sent his wife Arianna Stassinopoulos to debate Dannemeyer -- six times -- instead of going himself. "Campaigning against Huffington," says Dannemeyer, "is like running against a missing person."

When you do catch up with him, he still doesn't seem to be there. With his glazed tranquillity, he is reminiscent of the old Dan Quayle. His most satisfying moments in Congress? He pauses. "It's such a corrupt institution, it's hard to get anything done," says Huffington, who has introduced no major legislation except a bill to expand the deductions for charitable donations. He continues, "I guess I would have to say, one, being sworn in; and two, hearing Richard Nixon give a speech on foreign affairs." One of the few times he's said anything on the Banking Committee was when he scolded White House counsel Lloyd Cutler for taking fees from his law firm while working for the President. Cutler doesn't, and the press went on to point out that as a Reagan appointee in the Pentagon, Huffington accepted $95,000 from Huffco, his father's company. "Mrs. Feinstein wants government that does everything; I want a government that does nothing. What's great is what's private." He concedes there are some things Washington should do: "It should maintain a strong defense that keeps jobs in California -- Mrs. Feinstein has lost us 179,000 jobs with her defense cuts -- and a space program that can also do things like warn us about the weather." He would replace the welfare state with volunteers who have tapped into their spiritual side. He would make everyone get a job, although he does not explain what he would do about the fact that there are not enough jobs to go around. On the death penalty, he says, "I'm for it," then, perhaps remembering that Feinstein is as well, he adds, "ever since I was a little boy."

Lucky for Huffington, his wife, 44, a past president of the debating society at Cambridge University in England, is eminently coherent. On a day when she has to tape her own one-hour cable show Critical Mass, appear on Mary Matalin's Equal Time and sit for two other TV interviews, she has lots of time to talk. A best-selling author of two biographies, Stassinopoulos was much better known than her husband before he went on his political spending spree. She began her climb in England at age 23, writing The Female Woman, an antifeminist book. She became an indefatigable networker, giving dinner parties on two continents, charming such British literati as Bernard Levin and Lord George Weidenfeld and American real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman. She bonded with established social X rays like Selwa Roosevelt, Mercedes Kellogg, Francoise de la Renta and Ann Getty. Getty arranged a date for her with Huffington in 1985, and the two were married in a lavish ceremony (an $18,000 gown, a $100,000 dinner paid for by Getty, Barbara Walters in a pastel bridesmaid's dress and a floppy hat). Guest Henry Kissinger remarked that the event had everything but a "sacrificial Aztec fire dance."

The marriage is, at the very least, a merger of purposes: hers to be famously successful, his to find something to do. According to the Wall Street Journal, Huffington was not the business success he makes himself out to be. In 1976 the Harvard graduate joined the already successful family business, Huffco, formed when his father Roy Huffington discovered an immense gas field in Indonesia in 1972. On Michael's watch, however, several ventures lost millions of dollars. In 1985 Huffington, whose family and company PAC had given $300,000 to Republicans, sought a Reagan Administration job. But his initial nomination -- as an assistant secretary of commerce for trade administration -- was pulled the next year. Afterward it came out that Huffco had been fined for selling shock batons to the Indonesian regime. The next - year Huffington was appointed to a lesser Pentagon post that did not require Senate confirmation. He made no mark there and returned to Houston in 1987 and persuaded the family to sell a chunk of the business. He bought a $4 million mansion in Montecito, California, but did not officially change his residence from Texas -- which does not have a state income tax -- until he decided to run for Congress in 1991.

As Santa Barbara's new Congressman in 1992, Huffington moved to Washington with his wife and their two young daughters. They bought a $4.5 million mansion in Wesley Heights, and Arianna set out to conquer the capital. But rather than cater to the mindless glitterati chatter, as she did in Manhattan, Arianna wanted to have a serious salon. Thus while bold-type names were invited to these Critical Mass events -- Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, Norman Lear, Irving Kristol and every journalist she could get her hands on -- so were operators of soup kitchens. And while some people snickered that the dinners were phony set pieces (she had hired Pamela Harriman's cook and butler, who have since quit), few people sent their regrets. Still the buzz was hardly what she wanted. Bradlee called one dinner "a disaster, and that was before I knew she was taping the damn thing." Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen says of the evening, "It had the potential to become like Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panthers, famous for its silliness."

More troubling are criticisms of Arianna's past involvement with John-Roger, a cult operator whose credibility has been challenged by an investigative series in the Los Angeles Times and charges by staff members who have left in disgust. In 1974 she began a spiritual quest that led her to Roger Hinkins, a former schoolteacher who assumed the name John-Roger in the early '70s after the "Mystical Traveler Consciousness" entered him after a kidney-stone operation. The Cult Awareness Network classifies John-Roger's Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness as "destructive," its most damning category. Author Peter McWilliams, a former colleague of John-Roger's, has detailed in his investigative book about cults, several instances of John-Roger's taking sexual advantage of teenage male acolytes, harassing followers who quit and using tax-exempt church donations to live luxuriously. Through a spokesperson John-Roger refused to comment. Arianna became a "Minister of Light" in MSIA, whose followers accept John-Roger as a personal savior. She says the charges all stem from disgruntled employees and have yet to be proved in court. She also says she has not actively participated for eight years, or given money. But MSIA records show that she has given $35,000 since 1990. Huffington denied in a radio interview that his wife was ever a minister. Arianna calmly admits to the connection. "John-Roger is my friend, and he is only one of many people whose philosophies I have studied." But her latest book, The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul, is filled with his New Age bromides, well meaning, probably harmless, but not the stuff of governing.

She describes as "hit pieces" articles about her ministering to affluent John-Roger believers in Beverly Hills, and she doesn't think she should have to answer questions about her private life. In the next breath, however, she says the Clintons' reluctance to turn over all their records suggests "they have something to hide." At the same time, the Huffingtons stubbornly refuse to release their own tax returns.

The Huffingtons relieve themselves of the stress of politics with Saturday Night Live-type skits for their friends, in which they mock Feinstein. Says Arianna: "We had her pulling toy levers, saying, 'There crime goes down; there unemployment goes down.' " Then someone mimics a grumpy judge in a courtroom, "Oh, let me see, what kind of race are you? Oh, you're African American. We are not going to sentence you. Our list is already full." The latter refers to Feinstein's hope of finding a way to ensure that convicted blacks aren't sentenced to death in numbers disproportionate to whites convicted of the same crimes.

Many Republicans in California have not embraced Huffington. He got a lukewarm reception at a recent G.O.P. state convention, although they appreciate his deep pockets. Many are suspicious of his decision to run for the Senate after scarcely eight months in the House and fear that he may grab at the presidency with the same restlessness. So far, Dannemeyer has refused to promise the usual endorsement of the winner. A month ago, Barney Klinger, a wealthy Republican industrialist who has entertained Nixon and Reagan in his house, held a fund raiser that made $100,000 -- for Feinstein. Says Klinger: "Michael fooled us once . . . He has no goal. She does, and she's about 10,000 times smarter than he is, but her goals are to promote her cult, of which she is a high priestess, and become First Lady. I'd like to see him lose by 20 points to send a signal that you can't buy a seat in our Senate."

But this year no voter is more ticked off than those in the Golden State, and stuck on the freeway listening to the radio or watching television, there will be no way they can avoid the $20 Million Man. And so the fall season brings back Seinfeld, Roseanne and one new series on all channels, at every time of the day, Huffington. After a while, he will be as familiar as the most popular sitcom star and just about as real. If the ads are successful, voters may think they know this person well enough to vote for him. They really won't know him at all.