LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Pete Wilson : On the State of the State, and the State of his Party

Pete Wilson appears more rested and relaxed than he has a right to be. After a messy and painful state budget fight, the 59-year-old Republican governor of California finds his job-approval ratings in the cellar. A Times poll shows voter anger skyrocketing. Weeks before a critical election, Wilson’s goal of a GOP-controlled state Assembly is threatened by a President trailing badly in the state and a Republican Party at war with itself.

When Wilson took office in 1991, he was hailed as California’s first “real” governor since Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. served in the ‘60s. After election to the Assembly in 1966, Wilson ran successfully for mayor of San Diego in 1971. Following his loss in the 1978 GOP gubernatorial primary, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1982 and reelected in 1988.

In 1990, California Republicans, out to avenge the lop-sided Democratic reapportionment of 1980, made Wilson an offer he couldn’t refuse--a virtually uncontested nomination for governor. He went on to narrowly defeat Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the general election.

After eight years of George Deukmejian--”Gov. No”--Wilson won Democratic friends with a policy agenda that stressed health and education programs dear to liberals. He won--or so he hoped--the fealty of conservative Republicans by wresting control of redistricting from the Democratic legislative majority. And, with moderate GOP and Democratic legislators, he averted, briefly, the state’s worst budget crisis with a Solomon-like package of tax increases and program cuts. Then, anti-tax anger, explosive population growth, a string of costly natural disasters, a stalled economy and partisan feuding soured Wilson’s early victories.

Sitting down for a mid-term assessment of his governorship, Wilson projects buttoned-down blandness. But sometimes an interesting dichotomy shines through. When Wilson talks budget, he clips off numbers and specifics. When he talks politics, he appears less sure, more testy. Reviewing the events of the past legislative year, he is taut, precise and straight ahead. Assessing the future, his attitude shows far less command.

Wilson has been described as part policy wonk and part Marine. There are glimpses of both in this governor under siege. But there are also flashes of a politician in search of himself, his mission and his party.

Q: What is the most important lesson you have learned from the budget crisis?

A: To decide early just exactly what your bottom line is and then stick to it. And, in this case, it was relatively simple, because the options were so narrow. We knew that there couldn’t be tax increases without doing real harm to the jobs climate. In the same way, I am even more passionately opposed to deficit spending. I’ve seen too much of it in eight years in Washington. The deficit spending side of the thing is even trickier . . . but, for example, if there is an accounting gimmick that would leave you with a gaping hole, or if you enter into some kind of arrangement that you know will be challenged in court and that the provision that you have relied upon will be knocked flat.

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Q: You’ve been very critical of ballot-box budgeting. But are you not engaging in budgeting-through-initiative yourself with Proposition 165?

A: Not in budgeting. What I am doing with 165 is attempting to prevent what happened this summer from ever happening again.

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Q: But why use the initiative?

A: Because I couldn’t begin to get it through the Legislature.

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Q: You really don’t trust the legislative process?

A: Well, it isn’t that I don’t trust the legislative process. But there are certain things that I think you have to differentiate--between the use of the initiative for what I have termed “ballot-box budgeting” and its uses for other purposes. It is, I concede, a mixed blessing. If it were not for the initiative, you would have no remedy for legislative default. Now, you ask: Do I trust the legislative process? That’s almost an academic question.

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Q: If you could take back any one decision that you have made over the past two years, what would it be?

A: I’m glad my wife’s not here. She’s a smart aleck; she would say (my decision) to run.

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Q: That’s a fair one.

A: No, I don’t feel that way. People constantly come to me and say: “I bet you wish you were back in that pleasant little academic cloister called the U.S. Senate.” That’s not true, although I would have been just as pleased to be governor without the necessity, or with a little less necessity, to have to engage in the kind of austerity that we have engaged in.

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Q: What does George Bush have to do this year to close the gap in California?

A: He has to persuade California voters that, in fact, his plan for economic recovery is a more realistic plan than Bill Clinton’s.

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Q: In seven weeks?

A: Yes, ‘cause that’s all he’s got left.

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Q: Is that possible?

A: Yeah, it’s possible. It’s possible, just as the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. As the election draws nearer, people, I think, begin to pay it attention that they earlier just didn’t want to give to it. And I can understand that.

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Q: How would you rate Bush in terms of his treatment of California and its problems?

A: Well, I think there’s a strange mythology that I don’t quite understand, because, actually, I think George Bush has been pretty good to California. He’s personally visited the state--I don’t know how many times. But not as often as he would like, simply because, as someone who used to make that commute, it is not as easy as running up and down the East Coast or even going into the Midwest. But he’s been out here a great deal. And much more important than his actual number of visits, or his personal presence, has been what his Administration has done with respect to California.

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Q: Like they’re holding up riot aid to shift money to Florida? There’s also some criticism that he hasn’t fully funded the Immigration Reform Act, which has been adding to the state’s budget problems.

A: No. 1: No state has hit the federal government quite as hard as we have. Certainly, not as frequently, or as repeatedly, for natural-disaster relief. (Sen. John) Seymour says (he) and I have really got that drill down. What is also true is that what happened with (Hurricane) Andrew is the most devastating thing I think I’ve ever seen. So, it is not really comparable. I will tell you that the response of the federal government to the riots in Los Angeles this spring was all that anybody could ask for. I think it’s significant that you haven’t heard any real honest criticism, because they came out here, very quickly. And they came out in force. They worked with the local and the state officials.

They have what you’re seeing in California--this is a microcosm of a nation that is unhappy about the economy. And, in California, you’re seeing that situation aggravated by the fact that we are harder-hit, because this state is peculiarly vulnerable in two ways. First, we have enjoyed a bonanza that I don’t think people began to appreciate until they began losing it. We have been the premier defense state, both in terms of being host to military installations, and we have been the premier defense state as the site of defense contractors.

When Congress begins really slashing--they’ve been cutting back for five years but in the last two they have made deep deep cuts in defense and aerospace spending--it not only affects the major prime contractors, the household word names--but it affects hundreds of small companies that are their vendors, their suppliers. Little 25-and-under employee shops. And we’ve lost 200,000-plus jobs just in aerospace alone, and these are good jobs. These are not minimum wage. These are people who’ve never been unemployed. They are engineers, highly educated, highly skilled with Ph.D’s.

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Q: Who bears responsibility?

A: For the depth of the cuts, the Congress. And I speak I think with some authority, having spent eight years on the Armed Services Committee.

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Q: It was a unilateral decision?

A: It wasn’t unilateral. This Administration has made cuts. We were compelled to in order to deal with the deficit. But the proposed spending and the actual cuts that have been sent back to the President’s desk have been far deeper than anything that he wanted. Deeper than he thinks wise. Does the public appreciate that? I don’t know that they have an understanding of it.

The second way in which California has been peculiarly vulnerable is that our state has an economy driven more than most by real-estate development. And the credit crunch has just knocked that flat. And that also has an enormous ripple effect.

So we’re in deficit about a million and a quarter jobs. Three-quarters of a million that we have lost over the past two years, beginning about a year before I took office. I mean it was starting in the spring of ‘90, and to keep pace with the kind of relentless population increase that we have experienced every year. until this present year, we have to provide about half-a-million new jobs every year. We haven’t done that. So you add those two, and we’re about a million and a quarter in deficit.

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Q: Are you gonna run in 1994?

A: Probably.

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Q: If the GOP continues to move right and the Democrats keep beating you up, would you consider doing what Lowell Weicker did, and run as an independent?

A: I don’t think so.

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Q: Because?

A: Because it leaves you really without much of a base, either in the Legislature or in the general public. . . . One of the strengths of our system has been that, as a two-party system, we don’t suffer from the tremendous fragmentation that leads to coalition governments in all the Western democracies. I can remember my first visit to Israel some years ago. It was a fascinating time, because every Western democracy, except the United States’, was in some form of paralysis because of the splintering and the coming apart of all of these coalition governments, whether it was Iceland or Denmark, or Israel or the United Kingdom. And they were having a helluva time. I went to visit the president of Israel. On that night he was to receive Golda Meir, who was to come to him and tell him whether, in fact--I think her fourth try--she was able to put (a government) together. She couldn’t. And that’s what she had to tell him.

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Q: Sounds like California Legislature.

A: Well, in some respects. I mean, I would agree that it is more Balkanized than simply two parties . . . and that dynamic does affect the process, for better and for worse. . . .

I learned a long time ago, though, that I’m not clever enough to be what the Brits call “too clever by half.” And it’s a whole lot easier. You just do what you think is right and let the chips fall where they may. It’s worked pretty well so far.