Score One for Campaigns With Honest Content : Strategy: The aloof, negative, media-and-money approach was stomped by voters.

The twin victories of Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein represent more than the emerging political power of women. They also represent a rejection of the aloof, money-driven, bad-mouth political campaigns waged by their principal Democratic opponents, Mel Levine and Gray Davis.

Each of the contests illustrated the difference between public and private, open and closed, clean and dirty. Consider how the candidates spent time and money.

Boxer and Feinstein started campaigning for the Senate in late 1990. For two years, both were highly visible and in perpetual motion (Boxer more so, because she was not well-known); traveling up and down the state, lining up supporters, raising money, giving interviews, speaking to groups large and small, doing the things candidates are expected to do.

Davis and Levine, on the other hand, charted an opposite course. For two years, both, especially Levine, were all but invisible--ignoring the people, making few public appearances and giving rare interviews. Both spent their time, not traveling around the state soliciting votes, but locked up in their offices dialing for dollars.

Every candidate has to raise money. Boxer and Feinstein spent a substantial portion of every week and day on the phone, asking for contributions. The difference is that while raising money consumed some of Boxer and Feinstein’s time, it consumed all of Davis’ and Levine’s time until the final weeks of the campaign. And then, when they finally did emerge, it was only on the tube. Their commercials were among the most negative political ads California voters have ever seen.

Levine was first to attack, his very first commercial announcing that he had “never written a bad check”--a reference to Rep. Boxer’s 143 rubber remittances. When the Los Angeles riots eclipsed the House check scandal, Levine jumped on the law-and-order bandwagon--asserting that he would be tough on looters, implying that Boxer would not.

Davis also beat the tough-cop drum. But it was his Leona Helmsley ad, comparing Feinstein to the jailed hotel queen, that set an all-time low for political sleaze and prompted some supporters to abandon him. The message on one Los Angeles answering machine was this: “Thank you for calling Americans for Democratic Action, the organization that is no longer supporting Gray Davis, thanks to his ridiculous Leona Helmsley commercial.”

In their commercials, Boxer and Feinstein stayed, for the most part, on the high road. Boxer, playing on her name, portrayed herself as a fighter. Feinstein, building on her experience running for governor, showed herself meeting people and talking about state problems.

Boxer did, in the last week of May, use one commercial connecting Levine and her other opponent, Leo McCarthy, with contributions from savings-and-loan executives. McCarthy spent part of his limited war chest painting both Boxer and Levine as tainted parts of an all-corrupt Congress. But Davis and Levine, with more money, went negative.

These campaigns offered a clear choice between candidates who respected voters and candidates who disdained them. Voters renounced the Levine-Davis path so soundly that both men’s political futures may be permanently damaged.

Other elected officials were watching this campaign. One statewide officeholder said before the vote that he was personally disgusted with the cynical Levine-Davis approach, but if it succeeded, he’d have to follow suit in his next campaign. “Raise money, go negative, screw the people,” he summed it up.

He wasn’t the only one watching. So were hundreds of other now and future candidates, campaign managers and consultants, asking themselves whether a totally electronic, totally negative campaign could win in California. The answer is no. The answer, in fact, is just the opposite. You can’t hide and win.

If that message--the demand of voters for positive, issue-oriented, people-oriented campaigns--is indeed the message of the Democratic Senate primaries,Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein weren’t the only ones who won on Tuesday. We all did.