Wilson Stump Will Have Its Roots in S.D. : Politics: The former mayor’s faithful are ready to tout him as America’s Finest Candidate during his bid to become governor.

Come October, a caravan of buses carrying “Wilson for Governor” banners could be groaning northward from San Diego along Interstate 5, fanning out over the state.

The passengers would be bankers, developers, businessmen or representatives from the Chamber of Commerce.

Their mission: to persuade fellow Californians that favorite son and former San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson is one heck of a guy.

So far, the San Diego convoy is merely a vague, back-room concept being bandied about by the political strategists directing the bid by U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) to be elected governor later this year.

But the idea, they say, is indicative of how much the Republican campaign will rely on San Diegans--and Wilson’s record as mayor--to help portray their man as a popular but tough administrator with the acumen to manage a state budget of $50 billion. To underscore that hometown emphasis, Wilson is expected to formally kick off his gubernatorial campaign today at San Diego police headquarters.

The San Diego strategy will feature a “Back to the Future” approach by touching on the idea that San Diego during the Wilson years is a metaphor for California today. During his tenure as mayor from 1972 to 1983, the campaign will assert, Wilson was able to hone solutions to unbridled growth, increasing crime, transportation woes, political corruption and decaying inner cities in the “laboratory” of San Diego.

And while Wilson grappled with those problems, his style was the kind that engendered fierce loyalty from his hometown supporters, who are willing to stump the state on his behalf, strategists are eager to show.

“We’re selling two things: Pete Wilson’s accomplishments as mayor of San Diego, and the second is the warmth and enthusiasm that people in San Diego have for Pete Wilson,” said George Gorton, Wilson’s campaign manager.

For Californians “to see the bond he has for San Diegans will cause them to realize that he must be a terrific guy,” Gorton said.

Wilson’s critics, however, warn that the San Diego story could boomerang on the candidate, whom they claim hogs all of the accomplishments of his era but glosses over the major problems he left behind.

They say the San Diego Cinderella story could be to Wilson what the so-called Massachusetts Miracle was to 1988 Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. That state’s governor started the race bragging about Massachusetts’ economic resurgence under his guidance.

Yet by the end of the race, Dukakis found himself hopelessly mired in criticisms of his Administration. Then-Vice President George Bush seized the issue of the environment by blaming Dukakis for pollution in Boston Harbor.

And in a now-infamous television commercial, Bush took Dukakis to task for the Massachusetts system of granting early parole by showing an ominous line of convicts walking in--and out--of prison through a creaking revolving door.

And so it could be for Wilson, said Richard Ross, political consultant for Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp. Ross is already busy scouring the San Diego record for issues to haunt Wilson, who has criticized Van de Kamp’s handling of the Hillside Strangler case while he was Los Angeles County district attorney.

“I’m not looking to run a campaign that’s a (mudslinging) contest about the 1970s,” Ross said in Sacramento. “The people of California are entitled to a debate about the 1990s.

“But I’m not going to sit back and have John’s record rewritten in the most negative light and (Wilson’s) record rewritten to gloss over his weak points.”

So far, Ross said, he has found several major flaws in the Wilson record: a large increase in major crime during his tenure; acceptance of political contributions from beneficiaries of downtown redevelopment, including the now-bankrupt U. S. Grant Hotel; a city Administration that approved massive development on a former military artillery range in Tierrasanta, where two boys were killed in 1983 while playing with live ordnance.

Sure to come up in the campaign is the persistent criticism of Wilson that he took office as an environmentalist and left office as a developer’s friend, voting to allow the construction of North City West.

Then there’s the coup de grace, the $2.8-billion secondary-treatment sewage plant the city of San Diego is now forced to build largely on its own, without federal grants that were available during Wilson’s tenure. As mayor, Wilson was instrumental in obtaining a temporary federal waiver to avoid building the plant at that time, but his Administration failed to push a backup plan for securing government grants when the reprieve expired.

“This is his Boston Harbor,” Ross said, referring to the ill-fated Dukakis campaign.

Even some of Wilson’s supporters aren’t sure exactly how San Diego will play in a statewide campaign.

“I’m just reluctant to suggest that you can take San Diego on the back of a truck and drag it around and say there’s the answer to your problems, because the problems differ significantly in the disparate areas of the state,” said Mike Madigan, a former Wilson staff member and now senior vice president for Pardee Construction.

Despite possible pitfalls, Wilson and his staff are eager to reinforce his image as “Mr. San Diego.”

For instance, a poster distributed by his staff at the recent state Republican convention shows a caricature of Wilson in front of the state Capitol holding a surfboard and dressed in a Hawaiian shirt.

Such a Wilson-San Diego link evokes good feelings from voters, say those familiar with the synesthesia of politics. Unlike the image of gang-infested, traffic-choked Los Angeles, or overly liberal San Francisco, San Diego remains for many Californians a palm tree paradise adorned with pretty beaches and pristine inner-city canyons.

“San Diego is the easiest thing to point to and say, ‘Don’t just trust what I say but look what I’ve done,’ ” said Larry Thomas, a former Wilson staffer and San Diegan who ran Gov. George Deukmejian’s 1986 reelection campaign. Thomas now works for the Irvine Co. in Orange County.

“I think politics is as much symbolism as action, and by doing that he paints a fantastic symbol with which people can identify,” Thomas said.

Wilson agrees.

“Most people in California have been to San Diego, perhaps spent some time there,” he said in a recent telephone interview from his Washington office. “They have an impression of the city that’s positive. They have seen it grow larger, but in their view it has not only grown larger, it has grown better.

“They give me a great deal of the credit for that, but I would have to say that it is credit that has to be shared.”

Wilson campaign strategists, however, are eager to make sure their boss receives his share of the credit for San Diego’s good image.

“It’s reality that Pete is so close to San Diego and he is credited with taking it from a dark time to make it one of the finest cities in the country,” said Otto Bos, Wilson’s campaign director.

Although it will not be the dominant theme in the race, Bos said the campaign wants to emphasize Wilson’s experience as mayor because it is analogous to the executive responsibilities he will handle as governor.

In addition, he said, the specific problems Wilson dealt with during the 1970s and early ‘80s in San Diego are now looming on the state agenda.

“We think San Diego offers a splendid metaphor for the challenges of the state,” Bos said.

Thus, the fact that Wilson attempted to control and direct San Diego’s construction boom with his Growth Management Plan will mean a lot to a burgeoning state of 29 million people, Bos said.

So, too, will the story of how Wilson took over San Diego on the heels of the Yellow Cab scandal--which saw City Council members indicted on charges of accepting payoffs from the company--and worked to pass one of the strictest local campaign contribution laws in the country, he added. The discussion of ethics is particularly timely with the low public opinion of lawmakers and the recent conviction of Sen. Joseph Montoya (D-Whittier) on corruption charges.

Other San Diego accomplishments destined to be mentioned prominently in the campaign will be Wilson’s efforts to fight crime, his backing of the immensely successful San Diego Trolley, buying more than 5,300 acres of park and canyon open space to save them, and his guidance of downtown redevelopment through the inner-city condominium projects of Park Row and Marina Place and the construction of phantasmagoric Horton Plaza.

For the fiscally conservative, Wilson campaigners will be quick to quote the late tax crusader Howard Jarvis, who once quipped that Proposition 13 would have been unnecessary if all cities were run as efficiently as Wilson ran San Diego.

Wilson’s San Diego ties will also be highlighted in the way the U.S. senator runs his gubernatorial campaign, Bos said. His main headquarters are in Old Town, and San Diegans have prominent roles in his campaign. Aside from Bos and Gorton, Marty Wilson (no relation) is his political director, dentist Albert Anderson is his statewide volunteer coordinator and retired businessman Frank Light is his finance chairman.

Meanwhile, the campaign plans to mobilize some of San Diego’s more prominent citizens to speak on Wilson’s behalf throughout the state.

“We fully expect in this campaign to have the San Diegans on the stump,” Bos said.

“We’re talking about something in the fall,” said Gorton. “You’ve seen the movie-star buses, where they go from town to town on behalf of an initiative. You might see buses of San Diegans.”

Political consultant Jim Johnston said the caravan idea is “corny” but could work. “If I were at some kind of rally and some people with credentials showed up to tell about a guy’s background, I’d probably pay attention to it,” he said.

However, the convoy tactic would have to be employed gently, Gorton said.

“I think everybody’s fond of their city, and if you sell your city too much, that can engender some resentment,” he said. “The slogan ‘America’s Finest City’ cuts both ways.”

Lee Grissom, president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, scoffed at the idea of a bus convoy, but added that he has already volunteered to do some elective stumping for Wilson.

“My commitment to Pete is if he wanted to have somebody with an appropriate level of credibility tell the San Diego story, I’d be willing to tell that,” Grissom said.

Wilson said several others have volunteered to do the same during the gubernatorial race.

“I haven’t called on them to do so, but I probably will say, ‘Go to it,’ ” he said. “I’d be delighted to have them tell the story, especially coming from people who were leaders in the community.”

But San Diego attorney Floyd Morrow, who served on the City Council for Wilson’s first six years, said he believes the San Diego strategy is an attempt by the former mayor to create a “perceived reality” of leadership that diverges widely from the truth.

In the case of government ethics, for instance, Morrow said that Wilson was actually a Johnny-come-lately to the idea of limiting campaign contributions to the current $250 per donor per candidate. Before he supported the stringent limit, Wilson was backing another set of more liberal guidelines that were defeated by a majority of the council, Morrow said.

Morrow also charged that the city under Wilson looked good financially because it failed to keep up repairs on its roads and sewers, which left subsequent City Councils with a legacy of sewage spills that, until recently, even gushed routinely into the waters of Mission Bay.

“He’s going to go off on a campaign and say, ‘Hey, I’m fantastic,’ ” Morrow said. “But the opposite side of the coin is that’s not reality.

“I imagine if it rained and we needed rain, he would take credit for that. If bad weather came by, he would have somebody else take credit for that. That’s part of politics.”