Irvine Co. VP to Direct Bush Calif. Campaign : Politics: John C. Flanigan, a Wilson associate and longtime GOP power, will try to unite party factions.

President Bush’s reelection staff said Monday that it has ended a difficult search for a California campaign director with the selection of John C. (Jack) Flanigan, a vice president with the Irvine Co. and a longtime associate of Gov. Pete Wilson.

Flanigan has been a low-profile but high-powered political operative in California since the early 1970s, usually working within the state and federal governments as a representative of the real estate industry.

His close relationship with the governor actually dates back to 1967 when Wilson was a freshman assemblyman in Sacramento and Flanigan joined the office staff as a college intern. Flanigan has since worked on most of Wilson’s campaigns and for the last seven years has been the political attache for Irvine Co. Chairman Donald L. Bren, one of Bush’s top contributors.

Flanigan and officials from the Irvine Co. declined to comment Monday. Flanigan is expected to resign from his job with the Orange County development company, but the official announcement of his role with the Bush campaign is not expected to be made until at least Wednesday.

After the campaign staff confirmed Flanigan’s selection, however, supporters said the 46-year-old Vietnam veteran is a good choice to bridge the myriad factions that must unite for the Bush campaign--not just moderates and conservatives, but also the strategy teams from Washington and California.

“Flanigan is probably one of the most universally liked people in the party,” said Ken Khachigian, the campaign manager for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn and a former White House speech writer. “He has an enormous amount of knowledge about all of the political players throughout the state, and he’s almost utterly without the massive ego that most of the rest of us have.”

Originally, the Bush campaign had planned to name Norman Cummings, a Republican party operative in Washington, to head the campaign in California.

Cummings, until recently political director of the Republican National Committee and more recently the committee’s chief of staff, visited Wilson, who afterward maintained his objections to naming a non-Californian to the post. Wilson is the chairman of Bush’s California reelection campaign.

The matter was apparently resolved over the weekend when campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter and political director Mary Matalin visited with Wilson in Los Angeles.

Matalin expressed no dismay over the turn of events on Monday.

“We’re thrilled” that Flanigan is taking the post, she said. “Our first preference always was a Californian. There just wasn’t a Californian available. It’s like manna from heaven.”

She said the campaign leaders in Washington “went round and round” with Wilson and his political team to find a suitable California politician to head the campaign in the state.

“Everyone settled on Norm, and then Flanigan did become available,” she said.

But another senior campaign official said the dispute over the naming of the campaign’s California director reflected the continuing friction between Wilson and his allies, and the Bush campaign headquarters in Washington.

“California is still a complete mess, and no one has figured out how to clean it up,” the campaign official said.

Part of Flanigan’s appeal to the Bush campaign is that he is well known to the Republican troops in both Sacramento and Washington. Flanigan started helping with Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign two years before it began when he was called by his best friend, Craig Fuller, then the vice president’s chief of staff.

From his seat in the Republican-rich corporate offices of Orange County, Flanigan helped organize the fund-raising apparatus for the 1988 Bush campaign.

For more than 15 years, he has also been a key player--often as a fund-raiser--in numerous California campaigns for initiatives and candidates.

Flanigan returned from Vietnam and after graduating from law school at UC Berkeley, he managed Wilson’s 1975 campaign for reelection as San Diego mayor. He has also served in top positions in almost all of Wilson’s subsequent campaigns for U.S. Senate and the governor’s office.

In the early 1980s, Flanigan also served as executive director of the California Housing Council, a trade organization for the real estate industry.

The California Republican primary promises to be a spirited contest, since challenger Patrick J. Buchanan pledged that he would campaign against the President in a state where he could benefit from a widening rift between the moderate and conservative wings of the GOP.

The independent California Poll recently found Bush with a commanding lead over Buchanan in the Republican primary--75% to 16%. But the President faced a shrinking advantage over Democrat Bill Clinton of just 6%.