Pete Wilson, Long-Distance Campaigner : Politics: Can the senator do a good job in Washington and run for governor of California, too? He’s trying.

Even with the wonders of modern communication, can Sen. Pete Wilson faithfully perform his senatorial duties and successfully seek a different office 3,000 miles away?

So far, he apparently has passed the test: Wilson has emerged as the likely Republican nominee for California governor next year, a race that GOP national chairman Lee Atwater ranks as the most important in the country.

But Wilson is discovering that running for governor from the banks of the Potomac is not the same drill as protecting one’s incumbency, a feat he accomplished with extraordinary ease last year.

Polls, to be sure, don’t reliably predict the future. But their latest message is clear: Wilson’s early gubernatorial lead has vanished, putting him in a dead heat with Atty Gen. John Van de Kamp, the leading Democrat.

History isn’t smiling on Wilson, either. The last time a U.S. senator from California attempted to switch seats was in 1958, when Republican William Knowland elbowed aside GOP incumbent Gov. Goodwin Knight to become the party’s nominee.

Wilson can rightly claim that he simply answered the urgent call of his party in January when Gov. Deukmejian announced his retirement from politics. Knowland, the ultraconservative Oakland publishing scion, certainly had no such noble motive. Being governor, Knowland reasoned, would be an important addition to his resume when he sought his party’s 1960 presidential nomination. But the “Lone Moose” lost to Democrat Edmund G. Brown by a million votes.

Knowland was virtually invisible during the campaign, especially in vote-rich Southern California. The political post-mortems judged him a victim of an affliction known in California as “Potomac myopia,” to use Gladwin Hill’s term for the dubious idea that time spent in Washington adds votes back home.

Is Wilson vulnerable to the same affliction?

Aside from paid television ads, the senator’s partisans worry about whether he will be able to spend quality time in the state as the campaign heats up. Weekend jaunts, his current routine, aren’t enough.

“Being out here is a distinct advantage for Van de Kamp,” Wilson recently told a Times reporter, adding that he would have to work hard to overcome the attorney general’s edge.

It was a candid admission by Wilson that his bicoastal predicament--the requirement to be in Washington to cast crucial votes and his campaign’s constant need for free media exposure in California--may prove more of a burden than anticipated.

Wilson’s job rating, now the highest since his election to the Senate in 1982--up 10% since last April--offers a clue about how he’ll try to escape Knowland’s fate: Be a good senator, become a great governor.

While he and Van de Kamp stress competing visions of leadership and change for the 1990s in their stump speeches, Wilson, for now, has no choice but to use the Senate as his bully pulpit.

L.A. whispers. Ronald Reagan, in his first major appearance for a GOP candidate since leaving the presidency, headlines a Nov. 29 Century Plaza dinner for Wilson with a million-dollar campaign target. . . . West Side political cognoscenti say that Frank Wells, president and chief executive officer at the Disney Co., is seriously considering a 1992 run for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. Unless Wilson becomes governor, forcing a second Senate race in 1992, the only seat up would be that of veteran Democratic incumbent Alan Cranston, already raising money and running hard for reelection. . . . This week, the state GOP’s board of directors, following the lead of Common Cause, will ask the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate whether Cranston intervened improperly with federal regulators on behalf of his major contributor, businessman Charles Keating Jr., in the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal.