Wisconsin Voters Looking for ‘None of the Above’ Box : Primary: Clinton and Brown fail to whet appetite of electorate fed on New York media leftovers. GOP contest has barely registered here.

From his corporate suite, George Thompson tenders a radical thought: Can’t we just postpone the election, reject the candidates and demand better ones?

“I wish,” sighed Thompson, a political independent, “that they made a box called ‘none of the above.’ That would be my vote.”

His refrain, by turns plaintive and angry, is a common one here, where voters seem to be singing the same maudlin song as Tuesday’s primary approaches.

A place of hard-pressed farmers and union workers, of college intellectuals and city residents so old-world ethnic that a Milwaukee Arby’s Roast Beef offers fish for Lent, Wisconsin will cast its vote, ready or not.

What focus there is on the primary exists largely on the Democratic side. President Bush has ignored the state and its 35 Republican delegates recently, and challenger Patrick J. Buchanan did so until this week, when he passed through trying to stir up a protest vote.

But in odd ways, the Democratic battle is also yet to be joined. The campaign lies under the dark shadow of the Democratic destruction derby in New York, which shares its primary date. Unfortunately for Wisconsin, it has a mere 82 Democratic delegates to New York’s 244.

So, although appearing daily in New York, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton has been here only two days, with another visit scheduled for today. Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., by contrast, has visited Wisconsin six times and appears to have made headway. One poll, published Thursday, even showed him leading.

In substantive ways, the Wisconsin campaign has fed on New York’s leftovers, the issues Wisconsinites crave submerged in the daily East Coast tabloid fray.

The New York echo appears to have hurt Clinton, whose image has largely been a televised vision of him responding to a series of controversies, including his angry outburst at an AIDS protester and his admission that he tried marijuana during his youth.

“It hasn’t been a simple time for the message because of things going on,” said David Wofford, who is coordinating Clinton’s Wisconsin campaign. “You can’t deny that when you’re responding to charges, fair or unfair, you’re not telling people what you’re about.”

Brown, with an effort that his Wisconsin manager, Ed Garvey, describes as a hand-to-mouth “free-for-all,” is generally acknowledged to have drawn even with Clinton in the last week. In fact, a poll published Thursday in the Milwaukee Journal showed Brown ahead among likely Democratic voters by a margin of 46% to 37%, a virtual reversal of its earlier poll. In between the two surveys, Brown clipped Clinton in the Connecticut primary.

“He’s really stirred up some resentments and anger,” said Garvey, a two-time unsuccessful Senate candidate and the former labor representative for NFL players. “Finally, somebody has said what people have been thinking.”

As the primary approaches, voter anger is palpable. That alone makes for dangerous conditions, even without the state’s penchant for being notoriously contrary.

It was in this birthplace of the progressive movement that, in 1984, Establishment candidate Walter F. Mondale lost to upstart Gary Hart.

The primary is open to all residents who have lived in the state 10 days, and voters can choose their party at the polling place.

Brown’s greatest asset is the seeming fit between the mood of voters, who like their peers everywhere are frightened by bad economic times, and his angry, assertive message that the political system needs to be overthrown. To counteract that advantage, Clinton has been under pressure to detail his own plans.

“Clinton comes in with a more complex message that . . . requires more personal intervention and more personal selling,” said state Democratic Chairman Jeff Neubauer, who has endorsed Clinton.

Has Clinton sold himself? “No, he really hasn’t,” Neubauer said. “It’s very difficult in this time frame.”

The last week has been flooded with missed opportunities for Clinton. Over the weekend, his campaign sought to portray Brown’s major policy proposal--a 13% flat income tax and a 13% value-added tax to replace the entire federal tax system--as a burden on the poor and middle class. Both attempts were lost in the hubbub when he stepped on his own message--first, by admitting that he had smoked marijuana, next, by saying he might give his wife, Hillary, a Cabinet job. (She has since said she doesn’t want one.)

Clinton’s first television commercial Tuesday night was an overt attempt to get the campaign back on track. Similar to an ad running in New York, the spot says the flat tax would “triple taxes for the poor, raise taxes on the middle class and add a new 13% sales tax.”

Brown also began running a commercial Tuesday, a biographical one that touts his accomplishments during eight years as California’s governor.

Clinton’s tactics were meant to win over voters like Jill Friedrich, who met Clinton on Monday and pressed him on his commitment to ensuring child support benefits.

Friedrich is a single mother living in an urban area, dependent on welfare to support herself and her 6-year-old son, Robby. In short, she is the kind of voter that Clinton has captured all across the country. But this week she was still holding out.

“I like Jerry Brown, and I’m glad I had an opportunity to speak with Clinton,” she said. “I just would like to find out more about each candidate and what issues they are going to deal with.”

Brown, in contrast, is depending on voters like Harold Langhammer, the proprietor of Shakespeare’s Books in Madison, who recalled with some whimsy the last time Jerry Brown tormented political opponents in the state.

That was during Brown’s second presidential bid in 1980, when he staked his future on a wild video extravaganza on the Capitol grounds orchestrated by Francis Ford Coppola, the director of “Apocalypse Now.”

Unfortunately for Brown, technical glitches made it such a mess that it has been known since as “Apocalypse Wisconsin.” A chastened Brown withdrew from the race on election night.

“Kind of goofy,” Langhammer said, eyebrows raised.

But half a generation later, the bookstore owner finds Brown to be a “changed person.” As the only candidate willing to take a jackhammer to the citadels of power, Brown has struck a chord.

But many voters agree with George Thompson, the director of corporate communications for Briggs & Stratton, the state’s largest private employer.

“Frankly, I am not happy with the choices I have in front of me right now,” said Thompson, who wants to hear someone talk about trade and societal problems. “Why the hell can’t we start all over again?”