CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : Wild Ride Helping Wilson Strip Away Undercover Reputation

Midway through a campaign speech anecdote about a ride he took last summer with undercover cops, Pete Wilson stopped short.

“Under cover,” the Republican nominee for governor repeated in mock dismay. “I’ve been under cover without intending to be . . . for years.”

Not anymore. Wilson, engaged in the toughest political task of his lifetime, has taken voters on a wild ride the last few weeks, hurtling between attention-getting stunts and hard-edged portrayals of a declining California, between warmly personal commercial advertisements and stilted, yet earnest policy statements.

At root, Wilson is attempting to mix a carefully crafted appeal as a “compassionate conservative” with the sort of offbeat folksy appeal that George Bush used successfully in 1988.

This has led to events hardly foreseen for the usually buttoned-down, 57-year-old senator. On Friday, for example, he met--privately--with the gold chain-bedecked television personality “Mr. T.” Wilson’s campaign tried to line up the dancing California Raisins for a Central Valley event--but were thwarted by the grapes’ refusal to prance for politicians.

What the campaign has pulled off, in the three weeks since the traditional Labor Day kick-off, has been visually striking. That very day, several hundred supporters in Folsom gaped when Wilson donned an Indian war bonnet and modeled it on stage.

Ten days later, he walked into downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market, handed out pig parts to shoppers and dished up a spicy seafood concoction, all the while grinning for the cameras.

None of the visual devices are accidental, and Wilson’s campaign has not tried to make the events seem spontaneous. At the market, the only signs welcoming Wilson were at the two stalls where he stopped along with trailing camera crews. When Wilson donned his apron and cameras began clicking, some Wilson aides exulted.

“This is the photo right here! Wasn’t this a good idea?” one said to another. Sure enough, the picture dominated television and newspaper accounts of Wilson’s day.

Beyond the energetic mugging for cameras, Wilson also is hammering home a specific set of issues, all meant to reinforce his self-description as a compassionate conservative. Strikingly, the slogan mirrors his Democratic opponent Dianne Feinstein’s--”tough but caring.”

Crime merits mention at almost every stop, with Wilson playing to voter impressions that Republicans take a tougher approach than Democrats to criminal justice. Running his campaign against an opponent seeking to be the first woman governor of California, Wilson is also aiming his appeal at women.

Murder, gang warfare or drive-by shootings, for example, are rarely mentioned. But rape is commonly cited. “Why should a woman have to fear to walk from her job to a car in a parking lot?” Wilson asks at almost every stop. Wilson’s campaign director, Otto Bos, has denied that the appeal is directed at women.

Prenatal health care, and the plight of premature babies, is also a common theme in Wilson’s speeches, and one that runs counter to the approach of traditional conservatives who oppose government intervention in such matters. The senator emphasizes not only the humanitarian aspects of providing care but also the fiscal ones--increased health care before birth, as he points out, can mean decreased expenses afterward.

“Every woman in this state who does not now have prenatal care should have it,” he says regularly. Wilson does not explain in detail how many women would be covered, what the costs would be, and how women would be reached to take part in such a program. In that, Wilson is not unlike most politicians. Rather than explain his prerogatives in specifics, he frequently leaves the details to briefing papers and delivers to audiences a once-over-lightly view of what he won’t do.

As governor, Wilson tells listeners, he will be an activist but will not make “enormous additions to government.” He says he will add money in areas that have been ignored--prenatal health care, mental health services--but he won’t gut necessary services to pay for those concerns.

Increasingly, Wilson has emphasized volunteerism--which by definition carries with it a small price tag--as a solution to pressing problems.

Last December, in a proposal that drew praise from surprised teachers and others not usually in Wilson’s camp, the senator said he would integrate social welfare programs into the state’s schools. He promised that he would establish county councils that would move social workers into elementary and secondary schools.

At the time, he acknowledged that the program would cost money, and said he would talk more about that later in the campaign. But now Wilson does not talk about that program--or its cost. These days, he suggests that problems in the schools, ranging from overcrowding to high dropout rates, can be solved if adults and student peers pitch in to provide support for troubled students.

Increasingly, Wilson is trying to broaden the gulf between him and Feinstein--a reflection of Republican fears that if the two candidates are perceived as holding the same positions on the issues, Feinstein will have the advantage because of her more charismatic image.

As part of that strategy, Wilson has taken to telling audiences, as he did to a group of Latino business leaders in Los Angeles the other day, that “I am a lifelong conservative Republican.”

He tries to ally Feinstein with what he calls “a handful of arrogant liberals” who have stymied changes in criminal law and made California “needlessly dangerous.”

Crime victims do, indeed, represent an emotional element of Wilson’s campaign. A recent Wilson campaign commercial features crime victims thanking Wilson for his support. Another ad, in the same emotional vein, shows a concerned Wilson peering over the edge of a neo-natal incubator and speaking of the horror of drug abuse through the umbilical cord.

In person, Wilson’s approach rarely meets the standard set by his campaign commercials. His dry wit, effective one-to-one, can get lost when he is before a microphone in a room with hundreds of people. Although it loosens up occasionally, his oratory tends to be bureaucratic.

On Labor Day, before an audience of police officers at Mile Square Park in Orange County, Wilson was appealing for better benefits for the families of slain officers. He was using a personal pitch--the shooting death in 1908 of his grandfather, a Chicago detective.

But while the anecdote was personal, Wilson’s descriptions sounded like they came from an IRS manual. The shooting, he said, left his grandmother a “single female head of household.”

In contrast to the warm, positive image Wilson presents in his television ads, he adopts a biting edge when he talks about Feinstein on the campaign trail.

At a press conference two weeks ago, Wilson was asked about Feinstein’s just-announced support for Proposition 133, the November initiative that would add a half-cent to the state’s sales tax to benefit drug-fighting programs.

“What Dianne is doing is what she usually does, she says put somebody else’s money (into the fight),” Wilson told reporters.

The tart remark led reporters to believe Wilson opposed the proposition. It turned out, however, that he does not. Indeed, he said, he “may very well” vote for it.