THE CALIFORNIA PRIMARY : Race for Senate Shifting Out of Low Gear

Now that the primary is over, the Senate race is shifting out of low gear as Republican Sen. Pete Wilson campaigns with growing confidence on his record of flexible conservatism in an effort to defeat one of the state’s most durable Democrats, Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy.

A year ago Wilson was in some danger of losing to himself. He was a freshman lawmaker with a flat stare and gravelly monotone who was virtually unknown to 30% of California voters. But the former English major from Yale has shown himself to be a more shrewd politician than some people expected.

Ahead in the polls, his challenge now is to hold together a patchwork of interest groups stretching from the defense industry and agribusiness to elements of the environmental community, Latinos and Democrat-heavy Hollywood.

This unorthodox coalition has provided Wilson with the richest campaign treasury of any Senate candidate in the country. Moreover, it is meant to insulate him against the charge his opponents would love to make stick, that Wilson, along with Vice President George Bush, is just another uncaring “country club conservative”.

“Pete Bush” is the moniker McCarthy would like to hang on Wilson as he tries to liken him to the Republican presidential candidate, a fellow Yale graduate, who is off to a slow start in California.

The McCarthy camp hopes to persuade voters that Wilson is too far to the right of most Californians and that he hasn’t made an impact in Washington. “A rock in the pond that has made no ripples,” is the way one McCarthy ally described Wilson.

However, Polls say that McCarthy is running 12 to 20 points behind, his early struggle prompting one top adviser to observe that the campaign was waiting for “a new beginning.” McCarthy insists he has not yet begun to fight. He speaks of a summer push that will clarify his stand on issues and sharpen his campaign image as a friend of the common man.

While the presidential race threatens to distract voters from the Senate contest, it could help McCarthy where he needs it the most, in the pocketbook. At last count, he had $700,000 in his campaign account compared with Wilson’s $2.45 million.

“The Democrats know they probably have to win California to win the presidency. That means they’ll bring a lot more resources out here. Leo can’t help but benefit from that,” said one of the state’s top organizers for Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

In California, experts in both parties predict that the winner in the Senate race will be the candidate with the most appeal to the state’s shifting tide of swing voters. Wilson hopes to lure Democrats who no longer trust their party to be tough enough on crime and national defense. McCarthy, meanwhile, is reaching out to moderates in both parties who believe that the Reagan revolution has lost touch with the concerns of ordinary people about child care or the costs of education and housing.

“While you hope to have your base on the right or the left, you have to capture the center if you want to win in California politics these days,” said former Rep. Ed Zschau who lost to Democrat Alan Cranston in the 1986 Senate race.

Zschau and other analysts of this year’s race speak of another concern--a strain of voter anxiety--that the candidates must come to grips with.

“Issues like homelessness, the gang problem, drugs, the huge national debt and the dependence on foreign capital have created a general feeling of uneasiness,” said Zschau who sees this as a particularly troublesome problem for Republicans.

“People aren’t going to buy it if Republicans simply tick off their successes during the past eight years and don’t level with people about the problems we all face.”

McCarthy says he senses the uneasiness as he travels through small towns in a Winnebago, his folksy campaign style a quaint contrast to Wilson’s reliance on chartered planes and TV advertising.

Assembly Career

McCarthy reminds people of his long career in the state Assembly as a reformer of child labor laws and nursing home care and as a leader in the fight for the state’s first coastal protection law.

He expressed early enthusiasm for what has become the Democrats’ election year prescription for the national jitters. It is a call for increased domestic spending, based on the argument that national security these days is threatened more by an economic and educational decline than by flaws in our defense systems.

This week, there were signs of McCarthy’s promised “new beginning.” McCarthy announced Wednesday a four-point drug plan highlighted by a call for transferring $1 billion from strategic missile defense research to drug interdiction efforts.

McCarthy called his idea a sound alternative to “election-year gimmicks,” a jab at Wilson’s recent proposal for mandatory drug testing of young people applying for a driver’s license.

The Wilson campaign represents a triumph of strategy over spontaneity. It started with the packaging of Wilson’s campaign kickoff event in a suburban San Diego back yard overlooking a strip of park land that Wilson had saved from development while he was mayor of that city.

Orchestrated Greeting

Under the direction of Wilson’s staff, a crowd of well-wishers was assembled and cheers rehearsed. Then, as Wilson arrived, his staff videotaped the welcome and distributed the tape to television stations throughout the state in time for the evening news.

Television plays a big part in Wilson’s campaign. An ongoing $1-million series of TV ads shows Wilson beside the wheelchair of an Alzheimer’s patient as he pledges to donate his pay raise to fight a variety of diseases. Another ad presents Wilson’s wife, Gayle, talking about her husband’s plans to start a foundation for abused children. The latest commercial, starting this week, alludes to Wilson’s efforts to help Latino medical students. The ad is entirely in Spanish.

The ads speak to Wilson’s claim of “compassionate conservatism,” a phrase first used by former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, whom Wilson felt closer to than Bush, according to Wilson’s aides.

While the TV ads reach out to old people and ethnic groups, Wilson will keep faith with conservatives through a series of planned California campaign appearances with President Reagan, Gov. George Deukmejian and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Out of Wilson’s blend of TV and personal appearances comes a carefully modulated campaign message. The television-watching public can hear how Wilson bucked the Reagan Administration when it wanted to drill for oil off the California coast. Well-heeled Republican audiences who pay to hear Wilson speak can listen to his fervent advocacy of the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars).

Cites Drug Flow

In front of Latino audiences, Wilson criticizes the Administration for doing too little to promote minority education and business. With law enforcement groups he talks about his bill to cut off foreign aid to Mexico until officials there do more to curb drugs flowing into the United States.

As the campaign moves into the fall, each man will try to cancel his opponent’s appeal to moderate voters. The two candidates already are trying to brand each other as extremists.

Wilson points to McCarthy’s support for former California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird who was best known for her unbroken string of votes against imposing the death penalty. Wilson delights in taking McCarthy to task for a recent joint appearance with peace activist Helen Caldicott who compared Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with Jesus Christ and likened the U.S. defense industry to Nazi gas ovens.

The McCarthy campaign describes Wilson’s foreign policy record as a carbon copy of Sen. Jesse Helms, the conservative senator from North Carolina. McCarthy decries Wilson’s support for the Contras and reminds people of the senator’s statement last summer that former Lt. Col. Oliver North ought to be pardoned.

But it is the issue of Wilson’s stature in the Senate that McCarthy keeps coming back to.

‘Deserves More’

“California deserves more than Pete Wilson,” McCarthy says, arguing that Wilson’s most memorable moment in the Senate came when he left a hospital bed after an appendectomy to vote against cost-of-living increases for senior citizens. (The increases were part of a deficit reduction bill.)

“What is the one thing we remember about Pete Wilson’s thoroughly undistinguished six years in the U.S. Senate?” McCarthy asks. “We remember the day he was rolled in on a stretcher from Walter Reed Army Hospital (Army medical Center), where his medical bills were completely paid for, so he could vote to cut Social Security and health care benefits for our elderly citizens.”

Wilson fires a little bird shot of his own. Referring to McCarthy’s duties, Wilson is fond of repeating the old saw that the lieutenant governor’s only job is to check every morning to see if the governor is still alive.