About 100,000 voters from across California’s first congressional district received a startling phone message Sunday in which a female voice sighed seductively, “Mike Thompson’s been a bad boy.”

The recorded voice purred into the phone, “Vote ‘yessss’ for Zane,” — Zane Starkewolf, the Republican candidate who faces Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, in the November race for Congress.

Starkewolf, the 27-year-old St. Helena native who now resides in Davis, apologized Monday for the message, which has received harsh criticism from Northern California voters. He admitted to writing the script but maintains he did not hear the recording before it went out to 100,000 registered independent and Democratic voters in District 1, including registered independents in Napa County.

“I take full responsibility for everything,” an apologetic Starkewolf said in an interview Monday. “That being said, while the script was written by me, it was given to an unpaid staff member to call up and do the recording, and she took certain liberties, and she’s been reprimanded for that.”

The message is highly critical of Thompson, with a female voice that croons, “We all said ‘no’ to the bailout, but Thompson backed Bush, just like he did with the Patriot Act.”

With a moan, she goes on by encouraging listeners to vote for Starkewolf.

Indeed, Starkewolf said he has been bombarded with furious phone calls and hateful messages on his blog about the robo-call.

“Don’t you ever, ever, have someone call my home and listen to a message like that! I have children!” one fuming voter posted on Starkewolf’s blog.

Another asks angrily what to do when “my daughter answers the phone and has to listen to your pornographic message.”

Starkewolf acknowledged the call was “too risqué considering some of the audience, especially with children,” but he stands behind the idea in his message. Starkewolf said parents should be more concerned about the political issues facing their children than a robo-call.

“The message is there — and what it says is that Mike Thompson went against the people of this district when he voted to pass and have us pay for the $700 billion bailout and went along with George Bush as he has done on various issues including in passing the so called ‘Patriot Act,’” Starkewolf wrote on his Web site. “This is simply appalling. And if a message needs to go out that is ‘appalling’ in a sense in order to get the discussion going, than (sic) I believe it is a worthy cause.”

In the end, Starkewolf said the call was a way to get people talking about the issues and to “get enthusiasm back into politics.”

“In reality, all politics are dirty, and I just want to make sure I’ve got them ‘dirty’ in quotes,” he said.