NEWS ANALYSIS : Governor’s Race Quickly Moves Onto the Low Road : Politics: Wilson and Feinstein campaigns are dominated by harsh attacks, particularly on S&L; crisis.

The 1990 contest for governor hinted at an elegant promise: two cool, confident, articulate candidates with more than 40 years of government experience between them, claiming they would inspire voters with strong and vigorous solutions to California’s problems.

Instead, with lightning speed, the campaign has taken on an edgily personal tone of yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t bickering. Dianne Feinstein, Democratic nominee and the latest bright light on the national political horizon for her party, and Pete Wilson, the veteran Republican senator engaged in the hardest race of his career, are caught like two kids arguing over one last piece of candy.

In the space of only two days recently, when the subject at hand was their involvement in the nation’s savings and loan crisis, Wilson was forced to heatedly defend his integrity and Feinstein was forced to defend hers and her husband’s.

In the windblown plaza of a West Los Angeles office building, the normally low-key Wilson seethed as he blasted Feinstein for television ads implying that Wilson had traded votes on behalf of the savings and loan industry for a quarter of a million dollars in campaign donations.

“Smear tactic . . . McCarthyism,” Wilson called Feinstein’s move. Later, he switched his historic references, reviving World War II descriptives to accuse Feinstein of forwarding “the big lie” and of “profiteering” from the savings and loan crisis.

“California wants a senator and a governor that does more than sit and watch while the biggest and costliest scandal in American history unfolds,” retorted Feinstein, who then defended her husband, Richard C. Blum, as an honest businessman who helped bail out a failing savings and loan but did not profit from it.

Reflected pollster Mervin Field, who has been watching California politics for 44 years: “It certainly has gotten to a low level very quickly.”

Rather than the once-promised high-road campaign, some fear that the 1990 gubernatorial contest is headed toward the kind of wholesale, personalized sniping that defined the 1988 presidential race between now-President George Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Field, for one, believes the only predictable result is that the electorate, already disaffected, will find even more reason to tune out.

“When the mud brush is used by both candidates, they both get sullied. I don’t think it helps either one,” said Field. “. . . It’s getting increasingly painful to vote and the kind of campaigning Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein are doing just makes more pain.”

What Feinstein and Wilson are doing is battling for primacy along the two colliding axes of political life--issue positions and character. To that end, they have focused on filling voters’ minds with negative perceptions of each other in the hope that any positive images floated later will find no place to root.

“You are trying to tear your opponent down,” said Democratic political consultant Joe Cerrell, who favors Feinstein’s current assault on Wilson on the S&L; issue.

Wilson and Feinstein have not entirely shunned policy and substance. During occasional public appearances to friendly groups, they have talked about their own pet issues. For example, Wilson pledges prenatal care for every expectant California mother and Feinstein promises to extend early childhood education to all 4-year-olds who need it.

Sometimes they try without success. When Feinstein on Thursday called a press conference to announce her endorsement by a group of California Highway Patrol officers, most of the questions centered on the S&L; controversy. Feinstein seemed to expect it, because she had carried to the podium a sheaf of background papers on the issue.

But there has been no specific exchange of views on other matters of substance such as the state budget crisis, growth management, water and transportation policy, health care and the faltering economy--in short, the sort of issues that normally consume a governor’s attention. Both have declared they want to debate, but there have been no debate negotiations so far.

In the vacuum, a blizzard of negative television commercials has taken on even more prominence.

Wilson’s early television ads generally were low key. They focused largely on his record as a fiscally conservative mayor of San Diego--while claiming Feinstein left San Francisco in debt--and as a friend of the environment while in the Senate. Then the tenor abruptly changed.

On July 17, he escalated his offensive with a so-called “quota” ad claiming that Feinstein would fill state jobs by formula and not on the basis of merit. He based it on Feinstein’s primary election campaign statement that she would fill appointive positions with minorities and women in parity with their proportion in the population.

Aware that opinion polls indicate most Californians oppose racial and gender quotas, Feinstein rebutted with her first general election commercial on Aug. 2, calling herself an opponent of quotas and contending that Wilson, as San Diego mayor, had imposed a quota system on hiring for city jobs.

Seven days later, Feinstein jabbed again with a new statewide ad claiming that Wilson’s acceptance of $243,334 from the savings and loan industry during his two Senate campaigns prevented him from adequately protecting the public interest in the thrift scandal. Feinstein officials followed up by accusing Wilson of seeking special assistance for California thrifts, but his aides defended his actions as those of a senator making routine inquiries on behalf of constituents.

The latest entry into the crowded television market is Wilson’s commercial linking Feinstein’s husband, investment banker Blum, to the purchase of a failing Oregon thrift with the aid of federal cash and tax benefits. Blum, in his defense, said that if he had to sell his minor interest in the institution now, he would lose money. The couple contended that Blum’s infusion of capital saved the government the money it would have had to spend in insurance payoffs if the thrift had gone bankrupt.

While appearing to be knee-jerk attempts to demean an opponent in voters’ minds, the commercials actually fit, like pieces of a puzzle, into a campaign media strategy that will play itself out from now until November.

Wilson’s campaign will try to portray Feinstein as a candidate who has “flip-flopped” on a number of issues ranging from abortion to the death penalty--a candidate, in other words, who lacks the internal compass that leaders need to follow.

His strikes on the savings and loan issue also hint at an effort to remind voters of Feinstein’s personal wealth--her husband earned more than $7 million last year in his investment banking business--and separate her from the voters she appealed to in the primary.

Feinstein will seek to wedge Wilson into the mold of laissez-faire Republican deregulators on whose watch, Democrats claim, the savings and loan scandals ballooned into the most expensive bailout in the nation’s history.

A woman who seeks to personify changing political momentum in California, Feinstein also will attempt to undercut Wilson’s claims that he will be an activist and moderate Republican governor committed to spending money to combat some social ills that his GOP predecessors preferred to ignore.

Feinstein’s entry into the advertising blitzkrieg surprised some observers--and Wilson’s brain trust--because the costly outlay is depleting her campaign treasury during the usually slow summertime. Going into July, Wilson’s bankroll was more than $3 million fatter than Feinstein’s.

But Feinstein’s campaign manager, Bill Carrick, indicated that her strategy was motivated by fears that Wilson was picking up momentum with his commercials, particularly the one on quotas.

“The lessons of the 1988 presidential campaign are pretty clear,” said Carrick. “We’re not going to sit back the month of August and do a Michael Dukakis imitation.”

After winning the Democratic presidential nomination, Dukakis entered August with a lead in the polls of as much as 17 points. He then saw his standing plummet as Bush attacked with commercials on such items as state prison furloughs, support for the American flag and pollution in Boston Harbor.

But there remains substantial question as to whether Feinstein’s savings and loan attack on Wilson will be the heavy blow her strategists perceive.

Wilson strategists, admittedly partial, believe it will backfire because of their countering effort to muddy Blum, who personally financed about half of Feinstein’s $6-million primary expenses.

Pollster Field, basing his opinions on years of public opinion research, said he is uncertain whether the savings and loan crisis is reverberating strongly in the public’s mind. He drew a contrast between the implications of the state budget crisis--stringent cutbacks in programs and increases in taxes that could personally affect voters’ pocketbooks this year--with the impact of the savings and loan crisis, which has yet to be widely felt.

“The large mass of S&L; depositors hasn’t lost money,” he said. “You haven’t had the current and immediate touching of the pocket nerve.”

But Democratic consultant Cerrell suggests that Wilson is vulnerable on any sort of existing crisis because he, unlike Feinstein, is an incumbent officeholder.

“Incumbency also has its drawbacks,” Cerrell said. “You have to explain why different things were done. . . . I can blame you for too much trash on the streets if I want--though whether I can get away with it is another question.”

The candidates share an advantage of sorts--because neither has a strong and resonant public image, either is vulnerable to the kinds of negative attacks that they are launching.

Wilson, for all of his years of public service in the Senate, as San Diego mayor and as a state assemblyman, has failed to register strongly on the public’s radar screen, state pollsters say.

And Feinstein is making her first try at statewide office. While she swept to a convincing victory in the June primary, a Los Angeles Times poll taken then found considerable confusion about basic attributes, such as whether she was liberal, moderate or conservative.

At this early stage, most political observers are throwing up their hands when asked who will likely win the race, assuming that Feinstein can raise enough money to be competitive with the well-heeled Wilson campaign.

An indication of the squeamishness of predictions came from Roger Ailes, the nation’s best-known Republican political consultant. Ailes, who ran Bush’s 1988 media campaign, predicted that Wilson will win--but not by much. And he offered surprisingly congratulatory words for Feinstein.

“Feinstein’s doing a pretty good job,” he told political reporters in Los Angeles last week. “She’s been more on offense than people expected. I think Wilson’s got his hands full. Wilson should win the race, but this one’s going to be . . . very close to call.”