Wilson Says He Wants to Unite All Californians

Denying he is the candidate of the rich, Republican Sen. Pete Wilson denounced Dianne Feinstein’s last-minute campaign rhetoric Sunday as “a little pathetic” and accused the Democratic candidate of cynically trying to divide Californians.

Wilson said as he toured the San Joaquin Valley with the rest of the GOP statewide slate that he intends “to be a governor for all Californians, to unite them and to lead them.”

During a traditional train ride up the same valley Saturday, Feinstein espoused a populist message that the election of Democrats would best serve the interests of working men and women, rather than cater to the rich and to powerful special interests, as she claimed the GOP would. She harked back to every underdog’s hero, Democratic President Harry S. Truman, who pulled out a stunning upset victory over Republican Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.

As Wilson hedgehopped the valley by chartered jet, stopping at Bakersfield, Fresno and Modesto, he denounced such talk as “the tired, stale bromides of the 1930s,” a reference to the rich-vs.-poor rhetoric of the Great Depression, which brought many of today’s prosperous San Joaquin Valley farmers to California.

“They’re still running against Herbert Hoover,” Wilson said of Feinstein and the Democrats.

But as both campaigns moved toward Tuesday’s election, Wilson said that the economic populism argument is wrong. The Democratic-sponsored tax bills that were part of the recent federal budget settlement, he said, will hurt the middle-class, working taxpayer more than any other group. At the day’s first stop, a get-out-the-vote rally in Bakersfield, Wilson lashed out against Feinstein’s most recent campaign message, declaring:

“I think there’s something a little pathetic in a campaign that depends on dividing--and dividing the city against the rural areas and the rich against the poor and black against white. I think that, frankly, is a losing tactic that deserves to be defeated.”

Then, at Fresno, Wilson played tit for tat by inviting the so-called Reagan Democrats to remain with the Republican Party and vote for him even if they do not choose to change their party registration.

Another Feinstein appeal has been to the conservative Democrats who deserted the party in 1966 to vote for Ronald Reagan for governor and have since repeatedly helped elect Republicans as governor and president. She has argued that working men and women are paying the price for Reagan economic policies of the 1980s that favored the rich, and that it’s time for them to return to the Democratic fold.

Wilson said that Reagan Democrats are just as interested as other Californians in his major campaign themes--streets that are safe from crime, low taxes and the educational reforms that will give every California child a chance to excel.

“They are as concerned as you are for the future of California,” said the 57-year-old former San Diego mayor, who seemed confident of being elected to a four-year term on Tuesday. Directing his message specifically to the valley Democrats, Wilson appealed, “You are welcome in this party . . . (that) really represents your values.”

Wilson also used Sunday’s events to again campaign as the candidate of change, “the kind of change that affects every Californian. It affects the poor who are more often than not the victims of crime than those who are better off, and certainly those who are most in need of the freedom of a better education, those who need that kind of reform as a method of upward mobility. . . .

“We are going to unite and lead all Californians into the 21st Century with the kind of change that you can’t bring if you are obligated to the status quo.”

One of Wilson’s oft-repeated messages is that Feinstein is so tied to the entrenched Democratic leadership in the state Legislature that she cannot carry out her promise to change California for the better.

Throughout this tour, and the entire campaign for that matter, Wilson has talked like an outsider promising to make change. For example, he said Sunday that “We cannot afford mediocrity in education,” making it sound as if he blamed the two-term incumbent Republican governor, George Deukmejian, for the ills that beset public education in California.

But Wilson said his ire is not aimed at Deukmejian, but at Democratic-aligned interests such as the California Teachers’ Assn., which bitterly opposes Wilson’s proposal for merit pay for teachers.

Wilson and other Republicans have focused special attention on the San Joaquin Valley, which has undergone a development and population boom in the last decade, and where Republicans have made major gains on Democrats in voter registration.

The senator is counting on a rich harvest of valley votes to carry him into the governor’s office.

“As the valley goes, the state will go,” he said.