New Wilson--A Cheerleader but Tough

The main message Gov. Pete Wilson was trying to send Californians in his State of the State speech Wednesday was that he neither is a “nattering nabob of negativism” nor--in the opposite extreme--a George Bush.

A nattering nabob of negativism, in this instance, is a governor who runs around bad-mouthing his own state, complaining that it is “a bad product.” A George Bush, by contrast, is a Pollyannaish chief executive who doesn’t get it , who lacks the “vision thing” and passively maintains in the face of rising unemployment that the economy is sound.

Although the words nabob (Hindi for governor) and Bush were not among the 3,300 or so actually uttered by Wilson as he addressed a joint session of the Legislature and a statewide TV audience, they were the silent components of his underlying, subliminal theme.

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It was state Treasurer Kathleen Brown who last fall began tagging Wilson with the nabob of negativism sobriquet, commandeering it from former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s 22-year-old broadside against the news media.

Brown began jumping on Wilson--as did other politicians and some pundits--for loudly lamenting that he could not “market” California to out-of-state businesses searching for a good place to relocate. High taxes, regulatory red tape and a fraud-ridden workers’ compensation system, he said, all added up to a bad business climate he could not sell.

This provided a bull’s-eye for Brown, a fourth-generation Californian inherently proud of her state and coveting the governor’s office previously held by both her father and brother. Her weapon: a traditional pitch proclaiming that California needs new leadership to restore it to its former greatness. Last month alone, she raised $2 million for a likely race next year against Wilson, who grew up in Missouri.

In Brown’s own version of a State of the State message, delivered at UC Riverside in October, she said: “If you hear enough jokes and read enough grim statistics, even those of us born here, with our roots deep in California soil, we begin to lose faith in ourselves. How can we not when our leaders themselves seem to have lost faith, when the governor openly talks about our state being ‘a bad product’. . . .

“I don’t buy it. These nattering nabobs of negativism have got it all wrong. What’s wrong with California’s economy--at its most fundamental--is a simple lack of vision. We are, in that sense, hopelessly and tragically bankrupt.”

Wilson now realizes that his tone last year was too negative. His goal in painting a gloomy picture was to pressure the Legislature into action and, if it didn’t respond, goad voters into tossing Democratic legislators out of the Capitol. But the strategy backfired. He got burned by Brown and others. A governor, after all, is supposed to be his state’s head cheerleader.

But this is risky. Bush’s popularity plummeted a year ago because he was too rosy-eyed. The President was excruciatingly slow in recognizing the recession and then was not perceived to have any plan for ending it. “It’s a delicate line that the governor has to walk,” a Wilson adviser noted Wednesday. “He has to be optimistic but realistic. He has to show he’s in touch with what’s going on.”

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So Wilson’s tone was tough but extraordinarily upbeat Wednesday. And the Republican governor left no doubt that, unlike Bush, he has a plan for restoring California’s economy. He ticked off a long list of proposed business tax incentives and loan guarantees, including help for first-time home buyers. He announced plans to drain a regulatory “sea of red tape.” As a topper, he named George Shultz--the former secretary of state and secretary of the Treasury--to chair a new California Council of Economic Policy Advisers.

“There’s no time for partisan finger-pointing and no time for self-pity; let’s get the job done,” the combative governor admonished legislators. Then he added some cheerleading words: “But let’s begin by showing the world all that is right and good about California.”

“We face hard times now, but we can change that,” he said, as if at a pep rally. “We can make our own future. California has courage equal to any challenge. We have the daring, we have the vision and we have the talent to change our luck. . . . It’s time for us to set the stage for the great California comeback . . . (to) restore California as the best place in America to live and work.”

With Brown and another potential rival--Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi--watching from a few feet away, it was clear that this was more than Wilson’s third State of the State address. It was the beginning of his 1994 reelection campaign.