Advisers Devise Options if Bush Loses California

As President Bush begins yet another California campaign trip today, anxious strategists have begun to devise alternative routes to reelection if it becomes clear to them he cannot win the state and its 54 electoral votes.

After initially targeting California as crucial to the Bush strategy, the advisers concede that unless he can start showing signs of winning back support in core Republican areas--such as Orange County--it may prove necessary to shift resources this fall to states where he has a better chance.

The Bush strategists insist that it is far too soon to abandon hopes for victory in California--and say that if they decided to do so they would never admit it publicly. But as the President arrives in the state, a new poll showing Bush trailing Democrat Bill Clinton by 34 percentage points among California voters has left the President’s camp in a state of near-despair.

“People do talk about how at some stage down the road we may have to give it up,” a senior Bush campaign adviser said of the presidential race in California. “You look at the numbers and you talk to our people and it’s not encouraging news.”

Bush has already spent nine of the last 90 days in California, more time than in any other state. But the sense that he has been running into a political wall can be seen in a two-day campaign schedule for the current visit that focuses on courting conservatives in Orange County and the Inland Empire.

“It’s the path of least resistance,” concedes Marty Wilson, the manager of Bush’s California campaign.

With the new public opinion survey, conducted by San Francisco-based pollster Mervin Field, showing Clinton leading Bush by 62% to 28%, Wilson said Wednesday that the top priority for the President is to “regain our Republican base.”

Another Bush loyalist, state Republican strategist Steven A. Merksamer, offered an even blunter assessment. “It’s still not too late for him to win California, but we’re rapidly getting to the point where it will be too late,” said Merksamer, who served as chief of staff to former GOP Gov. George Deukmejian.

Charles Black, a senior adviser to the Bush campaign, insisted that “only amateurs” were talking about abandoning California to Clinton. He also stressed that a defeat in California would be less disastrous for Bush than Clinton because the Republican ticket can draw from traditional strength in the South and Rocky Mountain states.

But Republicans have not won the presidency without winning California since 1880, and the very real prospect that the party must assemble a strategy conceding its 54 votes to the Democrats has left GOP strategists anxious.

“You can drop money into a black hole, spend millions of dollars on ads in Los Angeles and San Diego and never make a dent,” Republican pollster Bill McInturff says. “Your money’s gone for good, and if you lose California, it’s money you haven’t spent in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, where the presidency might really be won and lost.”

The new pessimism about California is based on a series of public and private polls showing the President running well behind Clinton not only statewide, but in such Republican strongholds as Orange County.

Additionally, the Field poll showed former-Perot supporters in the state have shifted to Clinton over Bush by a 4-1 margin.

And perhaps more ominously for the President, only 12% of the Californians surveyed said the nation was on the right track.

There was more bad news for the Bush team Wednesday as senior campaign officials met with sharp criticism in Washington as they briefed congressional Republicans on the status of the reelection effort. House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich said the session had left the lawmakers “depressed and despondent.”

Bush campaign spokeswoman Torie Clarke acknowledged that the GOP congressmen had been outspoken in their concern. But she quoted campaign manager Frederic V. Malek, a former Green Beret, as discounting the intra-party sniping. “They shot real bullets in Vietnam,” Malek was reported to have said.

Both in Washington and California, top Bush advisers said they believed the criticism and the Field poll results for Bush reflected an exaggerated sense of Clinton’s strength at a time the Democratic campaign is riding a wave of momentum created by the party’s successful convention in New York.

“It’s a lot of people expressing their frustration,” state GOP strategist Kenneth L. Khachigian said. “It doesn’t mean they’ll really vote that way.”

Merksamer, an outside adviser to the GOP team, said Bush could still win the state, just as Deukmejian overcame a 35-point deficit in the polls to win the 1982 gubernatorial campaign against Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. But the Bush effort can succeed only if “fundamental changes” are made to his campaign, Merksamer said.

“We need a two-step approach,” he said. One is national game plan for securing the required 270 electoral votes.

“And we need to take the gloves off and vigorously contrast this Bush team with the Clinton-Gore-Cuomo-Jackson-Kennedy ticket,” Merksamer said, attempting to link Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, with New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, a trio of liberal Democrats.

Another Bush campaign strategist suggested that even such efforts could be doomed by economic despair that has fed voter alienation in the state. He called it a Republican Catch-22.

“The dilemma is that if you talk about the economy, they don’t believe you,” he said. “And if you try to talk about something else, they say what about the economy?”

There were some indications Wednesday that the Bush campaign had begun to adopt a more aggressive stance. It bought full-page advertisements in at least half a dozen newspapers across the country--including USA Today and the Orange County Register--to display an open letter from President Bush to “every Perot supporter in America.”

Perot’s “message has reached many receptive ears,” the letter said, “and his recent decision not to run has left a void. . . . I’m asking for your vote. Give me a chance to earn it.”

At the same time, the Bush team released the first of a promised series of “exhibits” challenging Clinton’s claims about his record as governor of Arkansas. It charged that Clinton had repeatedly broken his pledges not to raise state taxes.

Deputy campaign manager Mary Matalin and others also sought to squelch what they dismissed as rumors that the Bush team was preparing to abandon California.

“It’s our hardest, hardest state,” she said. “But Clinton can’t win without it, and we’re not going to give up trying to take it away.”

But other senior officials said the bleak California picture for Bush was prompting discussion of possible adjustments in the campaign strategy. One strategist close to the campaign said a “constructive result” of the current campaign trip might be a more somber recognition that Bush’s problems in California appear “almost inconquerable.”

If the Bush campaign elects to shift its resources from California, Republican pollster McInturff said, that decision would be most apparent in decisions about how much advertising to buy.

Bush and his Republican surrogates might well continue to campaign in the state as part of a deliberate “smoke and mirrors effort,” McInturff said.

Matalin acknowledged that the difficulties Bush faces in California--a state won by every Republican presidential candidate since 1968--presented a confounding challenge to strategists reviewing possible state-by-state strategies to win an Electoral College majority.

OTHER POLITICAL COVERAGE: A5, A20-21