President Seeks to Place His 1988 Mantle on Wilson : Politics: In California speeches for GOP gubernatorial candidate, Bush depicts senator as a crime-buster and protector of the environment.

President Bush, intensifying the Republican Party’s focus on the California gubernatorial race, sought Wednesday to impart on Sen. Pete Wilson the mixed mantle that served Bush successfully in the presidential campaign.

Bush depicted Wilson as a hard-nosed crime-buster, who believes “it’s high time we took the shackles off the policemen, the courts and the law.” But the President also described the Republican gubernatorial candidate as one who would “protect a fragile coastal ecology or educate a new generation of children.”

The themes worked well for Bush in 1988, when he turned Willie Horton, a convict furloughed from a Massachusetts prison, into a political metaphor for voters’ fears of violent crime, and when he turned the murky Boston Harbor in Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’ political back yard into a symbol of environmental failures.

With Wilson at his side at a $750,000 fund-raising dinner Wednesday evening, Bush gave the themes a try again.

“California needs to continue a crime-fighting tradition, a Republican tradition,” he said in his prepared text. But in his delivered remarks, he chose not to limit that tradition to his party, taking out the partisan reference.

The “tough-on-crime” issue promises to be central in the race to succeed Gov. George Deukmejian. One of the candidates for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, has emphasized her support for the death penalty, and the other candidate, John K. Van de Kamp, is the state attorney general and former district attorney of Los Angeles County.

But in a state that has been graphically reminded of the threat of environmental damage with the Huntington Beach oil spill just three weeks ago, Bush also portrayed Wilson as an environmentalist. “He supports our America the Beautiful initiative to plant a billion trees, to expand our national parks and wildlife preserves, to make this more like the unspoiled green continent our forebears knew,” Bush said.

The President made no mention of the extremely sensitive issue of how much of the nation’s coastal areas should be opened up to offshore oil drilling. White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater has said that a presidential decision on the matter is several weeks away.

Wilson, in a brief introduction of the President, told Bush that as governor, he wanted to be “a partner” with him against drugs, for education and on behalf of child development. “In these things, we share a dream,” Wilson said.

Earlier in the day, Wilson got help for his campaign from a former President, Ronald Reagan, who helped him raise about $200,000 at a luncheon in San Diego.

Bush has two days of appearances planned in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Today, he will tour the new north Los Angeles County prison, a maximum-security jail built to house 2,064 inmates, attend a Republican Governors’ Assn. luncheon at Jimmy’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills, and address a 100th-anniversary dinner of the California Chamber of Commerce at the Century Plaza.