A Candidate Gets In Over His Head : Campaign: Tom Houston tries to revive his floundering mayoral bid with an undersea news conference. But he has trouble breathing and has to be rescued.

The Los Angeles mayor’s race has sunk to a new low--10 feet below sea level, to be exact.

That’s how far mayoral candidate Tom Houston got in his “underwater news conference” Wednesday morning before he had trouble breathing and had to be rescued by a dive master.

The scuba diving gimmick, staged about a mile off the coast in Santa Monica Bay, was intended as a last-minute splash for the floundering Houston campaign. Instead, it turned into a metaphor for Houston’s struggles since he announced he wants to be mayor.

Even if Houston had not needed to be plucked from the ocean, the visibility was so poor that several members of Houston’s diving party lost contact with their partners, causing some panic on board the boat--which was ominously named Disappearance.

The murky ocean also meant that Houston’s huge campaign banner was never unfurled and that he did not have an opportunity to whip out his underwater slate and jot down his plans for cleaning up pollution in the bay.

Adding more insult, the only reporter on the trip got seasick, further polluting the ocean. He spent most of the early morning trip recuperating below deck.

Houston’s bungled dive was just the latest stunt performed by the cast of 24 mayoral candidates.

Julian Nava crooned. Stan Sanders piled former gang members into a Greyhound bus for a tour of the city. Richard Katz crashed a Michael Woo press conference.

And why not? With the race dominated by two well-funded front-runners--Woo and Richard Riordan--and with public and media riveted on the Rodney G. King civil rights case, the wanna-bes have nothing to lose.

“They’re willing to make themselves look like fools. That’s how desperate they are for free media,” said political consultant Rick Taylor. (Taylor should talk. He’s the man who once had a school board candidate dress up in a chicken outfit and chase an opponent down the street.)

Even Woo has occasionally resorted to theatrics. When he called for a ban on Saturday night specials, he did it in front of the coroner’s office--and with a pile of guns spread on a table in front of him.

Houston’s dive, however, was unquestionably the most spectacular gimmick of the campaign.

If Houston had had his way, he and a crew of scuba-diving reporters would have descended 60 feet to the opening of the old discharge pipe from the city’s Hyperion Sewer Treatment Plant. There, he would have pointed out the contaminated state of the ocean floor and announced his plans to clean up DDT and other pollutants, all the while gurgling through his respirator.

But instead, Houston acknowledged, the dive was a “total fiasco.”

“I have a 26-page plan on what I would do as mayor, but I couldn’t get anyone to read it,” said the former deputy mayor, an adventurer who, even before his mayoral bid, got married in a hot air balloon over Kenya and once took Mayor Tom Bradley white-water rafting. “So you try to do something that attracts the imagination.”

As the boat returned to shore, Houston caught his breath and struggled to put a positive spin on his difficulties at sea.

“I just couldn’t catch my breath so I came back up,” he told the queasy reporter. “I was fine. How are you feeling?”