NEWS ANALYSIS : Reality Lessons for New Senators : Washington: They will be joining an exclusive 100-member organization that prefers not to have its cage rattled. And the Californians’ colleagues won’t be impressed by the state’s size.

The champagne may still be fizzing and the networks calling for interviews, but by this time on Wednesday the two bleary, weary and euphoric Senate election winners from California, instant celebrities both of them, will have to begin thinking about coming down to earth and getting organized.

Decisions they make now will live with them throughout their terms, Senate insiders say. And the winners, whoever they are, will have to rethink all those brash campaign promises about being outsiders bent on rattling the cages of the system.

Sen. Paul Wellstone, the rock-the-boat progressive from Minnesota, tried to buck the system at every turn in 1991 when he joined the exclusive 100-member institution that reveres tradition and cringes at change.

Wellstone recalled in a telephone interview Monday: “One group (of senators) would take me outside and they would say: ‘You don’t understand. You’ve got to get along with people here.’ ”

Wellstone did not give up his reform efforts, but he said the voters who elected him, and those who elect other outsiders today, have this view: “We want you to be an outsider who is effective on the inside.”

“Therein lies the challenge,” said Wellstone, a member of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a former political science professor.

And just the fact that the senators are from California, with more than 30 million residents, does not ensure any special standing in the Senate chambers, cautioned Bob White, chief of staff to Gov. Pete Wilson and Wilson’s top Senate aide.

Not long after Wilson took office in 1983, Republican Sen. Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming (pop. 453,588) approached White and said: “Let me tell you something. After you’re here about two months, you’re going to say: ‘These guys don’t understand what it’s like to represent a big state. They have no sympathy for it. They don’t care.’ ”

“And you know what?” Simpson added. “You’re going to be absolutely right.”

No matter how Californians vote today, there will be dramatic change in the state’s Senate delegation, which has been virtually invisible and relatively ineffective in recent years.

California will be reduced to almost zero seniority in a place where seniority still counts for a lot. But both winners are likely to have considerable celebrity status at the outset.

The most dramatic change would be the election of two Democratic women, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and five-term Rep. Barbara Boxer of Marin County. No woman has ever represented California in the Senate.

Should Republican Bruce Herschensohn win, he too would be a celebrity of sorts, and be among the most bedrock conservatives in the Senate.

If Feinstein prevails, she faces the task of starting to work right away. Because incumbent Sen. John Seymour’s appointment was through the 1992 election, Feinstein would be eligible to join the Senate as soon as her election was certified, giving her a leg up in seniority over the rest of the class of 1992.

In that event, White said, “she’ll be back immediately and for all practical purposes be recognized by the Senate as the senator.”

And because she would come up for reelection to a full term in 1994, Feinstein would have to begin campaign fund raising all over again.

If Boxer wins, she would remain a member of the House until the first week in January although sometimes retiring senators will resign a few weeks before their terms formally end in order to give a successor from the same party a slight edge in seniority.

A victory by Seymour would be considered a major upset, lending to his stature. But Seymour would have considerable fence-mending to do after irritating a number of senators, many of them fellow Republicans, with his handling of a water reform bill this year.

White said the first and most critical decision a new senator must make is to pick a staff, a decision that can affect an entire six-year term.

He added that “a senator is simply so busy with committees and on the floor” that he or she must delegate many major decisions. This can be difficult for executives “who are not used to relying on other people to help them,” White said.

White added: “What will greet them the first day of office in January is probably 250,000 pieces of mail and maybe 3,000 to 4,000 job applications. . . . It’s pretty tough.”

Former Sen. John V. Tunney of California said that Boxer would find the change dramatic even though she has been serving in the same Capitol for 10 years.

“It’s very different,” said Tunney, a House member from the Riverside area before he was elected to the Senate in 1970. “You have to be prepared on every bill . . . you have to be prepared for everything.”

Tunney also said it is essential to forge close working relationships with other senators, including ones from the opposition party. House members have found this a difficult transition because it is more difficult to develop friendships in the Senate, Tunney said.

One reason is that senators tend to be stretched very thin, often having one or more of their own committees or subcommittees and a floor session scheduled at the same time.

“Oh boy. Oh yeah,” Wellstone affirmed.

About six months after he went to the Senate, Wellstone said, a couple of colleagues took him aside and cautioned: “You’re not going to make it. The pace that you’re keeping is so intense. You’re just going to drop. You’ve got to start prioritizing. You can’t do it all.”

Wellstone welcomes the prospect of more anti-Establishment senators joining his reform efforts, possibly in conjunction with a Democratic-controlled White House.

After two years of battering, he said, “this is the class I’m anxious to join.”