COLUMN RIGHT / VIRGINIA I. POSTREL : A 68-Year-Old Preppy Won’t Go Far Here : For Californians, big on self-transformation and ardent conviction, Bush is a bore.

George Bush is losing California, and he is losing it big. Bill Clinton is leading him even in the Republican strongholds of Orange and San Diego counties.

Most observers blame the lousy economy for Bush’s unpopularity, and it is no doubt the major factor. To Californians, who barely noticed the near depression of the early 1980s, this recession has seemed as hard and long as the eight-year drought. Layoffs and the bursting real-estate bubble have especially hurt middle-class suburbanites, the core of Republican support.

But even an overnight recovery wouldn’t make the President compatible with California. Bush is about being. California is about becoming. For reasons both personal and political, the President is out of place in the Golden State.

Economically, psychologically, spiritually, physically, Californians are a people defined by their dedication to self-transformation. Along with the surgically enhanced body-worshipers of popular myth, this culture of transformation includes newly orthodox Jews and born-again Latino Protestants, 12-step devotees and work-driven entrepreneurs, immigrant laborers and suburb-dwellers turned rural commuters. About all they have in common is discontent with the status quo, a belief that their lives can change for the better, and a conviction that they know (or can discover) how to make that change happen. Even in its current malaise, California’s culture is one of hope, of dynamism, of adventure.

Politically, this culture rewards candidates with convictions--from Ronald Reagan to Jerry Brown. Such leaders, however odd they seem to the rest of the country, express Californians’ quest for improvement and their willingness to try new ideas. By the same token, plain old politicians without core convictions soon find their electoral mandates vanishing--as Gov. Pete Wilson can attest. After a disastrous first year in which he broke campaign pledges to keep taxes low and support gay rights, he regained some momentum by battling for budget cuts and welfare reforms. Wilson has stopped pretending to be George Bush and started playing Ronald Reagan.

For Bush, California is as foreign as China and much less friendly. He barely won the state in 1988. His first term has rewritten a lot of Californians’ big plans by disrupting the aerospace industry and throwing real estate into free fall. That might be forgivable--it’s pretty petty to complain about housing becoming almost affordable, not to mention the end of the Cold War. But Bush doesn’t seem to understand what it’s like to picture your life better than it is, to live in a culture of self-improvement. So he cannot understand what happens to a dream denied. George Bush is, after all, a man of prudence, not dynamism; of niceness, not conviction. He likes the status quo. He preferred Gorbachev to Yeltsin, called Reagan’s ideas “voodoo economics” and filled his Cabinet with a bunch of dull suits. This grayness, as a man and as a politician, is hardly the stuff of leadership.

Consider his biography. Bush was a war hero. He went west and started an oil business. He spent a quarter of a century in public life, mostly losing elections and winning appointed posts. Through it all, he never changed; he stayed a well-mannered Episcopalian preppy, and if he had any guiding principles or great visions, he has kept them to himself.

Contrary to the Democrats’ class-warfare rhetoric, there is nothing ignoble about Bush’s past. But for the hearts and minds of self-made men and women, his biography couldn’t compete with Ross Perot’s. It even falls short of Clinton’s. Bush can’t boast of any self-transformation, not even self-improvement.

When things are going well, a do-nothing, think-nothing, dream-nothing President can win votes. But come a recession, and voters want vision. They want a politician who will act from conviction.

In the current Atlantic, Richard Brookhiser notes that Bush’s social class is often misunderstood. Bush didn’t grow up super rich, just extremely comfortable; he had to work for a living. He has the temperament of neither the self-made man nor the idle rich. “As a result,” writes Brookhiser, “he lacks the confidence, or the compulsion, to go against the grain.” Bush is at home in the static world of old corporations and inherited Republicanism, not entrepreneurship and idea-driven conservatism.

In short, Bush does not belong in California. Neither, really, does Clinton, whose convictions change with his audience and whose trade-hawk advisers and regulation-loving vice president would further debilitate California’s economy. But in a contest between two men with few convictions, Californians will choose the one who speaks the language of dynamism, who reflects their images back at them.