Duke Yuks It Up, Wilson Furrows, but Most Politicians Can’t Find Fresno : Geopolitics: If Central California is the sleeping giant of state politics, how come big-time office-seekers have trouble locating the place?

The mayor here has a car phone.

Not only that, but the freeway has been extended, which means you can get out of town and to Yosemite 10 minutes quicker. The downtown skyline sports a new high-rise, even though it happens to be a jailhouse. And best of all, chances are good the next University of California campus will be built hereabouts.

So with all this going for us, why isn’t anyone paying attention?

If it happens to be true, as the pundits keep saying one election year after another, that Central California is the sleeping giant of Golden State politics, then why is it that until a few months ago Dianne Feinstein and John K. Van de Kamp rarely got closer than Castro Valley and Castaic?

If it’s such a giant awaiting only a wake-up call, why is it that when Feinstein and Van de Kamp and Pete Wilson flew around the state announcing they were running for governor, they didn’t land here until the next day? All of which is nothing new, because it happens election year after election year.

The last time a politician of any stature made news here was when Michael S. Dukakis, for all the good it did him, finally said the L word, uttered in utter desperation from the back of a train in the 11th hour of a doomed campaign.

And it was during the same campaign that George Bush came right out and called them “those damned Dancing Raisins,” but history shows he didn’t have the guts to do it here.

This isn’t to suggest that the big-time office-seekers totally ignore us. During election years, Wilson has dropped by regularly to walk the furrows and rake up some hard cash from his farmer friends.

George Deukmejian used to do it, too, until he appointed most of his hard-cash friends to positions and commissions. In his nearly eight years as governor, the closest Duke came to saying something of substance here was on a rare recent visit, when he noted how much more he is enjoying himself now that he’s not running for reelection.

“I’m having a laugh a minute,” he explained. “First we have an earthquake. Then we have an oil spill. Then Jerry Brown reappears on the political scene. Shortly thereafter the Medfly comes back. So I’m having a great time.” And some said the guy was short on humor.

Brown, whose undoing was the Medfly, used to show up with some frequency when he was governor but left with little to show for his courtesy. His number of farmer friends he could count on one thumb.

The dirty fact of the matter is that the big-city politicians venturing into this agricultural heartland from season to season have been less interested in harvesting votes than cash from their farmer friends, whose assets keep growing as bountifully as the grapes and cotton they produce--drought or not.

For one thing, there haven’t always been that many votes to worry about; for another, they blow this way and that on unpredictable winds. It is a strange but wonderful political climate here, hot and cold, sprinkled with independence, cloudy with apathy and suspicion and as variable and threatening as the late summer sky in raisin-drying season. On Election Day, the ticket-splitting is positively schizophrenic.

Great numbers of voters are descendants of the Okies, the folks who packed up and moved to the fertile promise of California from drought-stricken Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas. They were the New Deal Democrats who gave their hearts and votes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt but in time left their hot, dusty migrant camps to prosper as landowners and businessmen, staying Democrats in name only.

That has changed. The latest count shows more and more Republicans coming out of the closet. Over the past year in the six San Joaquin Valley counties, the GOP has grabbed five times more voters than the Democrats. Not all of them can be yuppies.

For better or for worse, the political landscape will continue to change here as more and more Californians escape high-rent districts and bumper-to-bumper driving for the fertile promise and high skies north of the Tehachapis and south of the bay.

They are being joined by others with strange-sounding names from faraway places, whose children will become the voters of tomorrow. The day is bound to come here when there will be a greater variety of ethnicity than of crops produced. That’s when the lofty, office-lusting campaigners from the north and south will really start paying attention. Until then, politics will stay mostly local in the valley, sticking to things like school-board recalls, cogeneration plants, Medflies and water meters. Let Feinstein or Van de Kamp take a stand on water meters, then you’ll really see some political heat. Or dare the Southlanders to let the Medfly cross over the ridge.

So much for present images. With another sophisticated, intellectual and worldly campaign upon us, we in the hinterlands need to see and hear more of the people who think they deserve to serve us. Is it any wonder that in all his years in and out of here, Bill Saroyan, Fresno’s most literate son, never voted because he never bothered to register?

But hope springs, sort of. A former mayor once called this the gateway to Bakersfield. His successor appeared disguised as the King of Siam in the late and unlamented “Fresno” television miniseries. And the new mayor has a phone in her car. Progress is rampant.

Already one great institution of higher education is here: California State University, Fresno, whose athletic teams are the Bulldogs. And whatever they elect to do about Feinstein and Van de Kamp on June 5, if voters pass Proposition 111, there could be another--the next UC campus, right in our own back yard. How much you want to bet that the team will be called the Underdogs?