Wilson’s Hope for Second Term--a Clinton Success : California: The governor needs help from Washington to get the economy moving, and the President-elect needs to keep the state in his column.

As Bill Clinton goes, so goes Pete Wilson. That is the story behind the governor’s State of the State address, delivered under appropriately gloomy Sacramento skies last week.

Wilson said nary a word about health care, education or what portends to be the emotional political issue of 1993--immigration. Indeed, he virtually ignored every pressing problem facing a state under fiscal siege.

Except for one. Wilson’s address, like Clinton’s successful presidential campaign, focused squarely on the economy.

If you closed your eyes and listened to Wilson inventory his proposals for a “California comeback”--job creation, business-tax incentives, high-tech development, defense conversion--he sounded a lot like last year’s self-styled “Comeback Kid.”

Clinton gambled he could persuade Americans that his economic ideas formed a blueprint for recovery. They believed him. Now he must deliver.

In particular, Clinton owes California. The state’s reliable and steadfast support of his candidacy allowed him the luxury of shifting valuable time, energy and resources to other critical, but more hotly contested, states.

What California wants is an economic upturn and the jobs that flow from it.

Potential Democratic challengers to Wilson in 1994 understand how important an effective Clinton economic plan for California is to them. State Treasurer Kathleen Brown recently wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post pleading with the President-elect to help California first.

The funny part is, if Clinton succeeds in fixing the economy, he boosts not only his political stock and that of his California Democratic allies. He would wind up helping Wilson, too.

Wilson knows that just about the only hope he has of recapturing the governorship in next year’s election is an economic turnaround, or at least a hint of one. He also knows that the state’s economic crisis cannot end without help from Washington. His budget, for example, is looking to Washington for $1.5 billion to help cover federally mandated state and local expenses related to immigration.

Who will have the job of pleading Wilson’s case to the Clinton Administration? Ironically, it will have to be California’s two new Democratic senators, one of whom Wilson defeated for governor, and a congressional delegation dominated by Democrats. Can this cast of characters abandon Wilson and their own constituencies without risking a political mugging? And can Clinton ignore their pleas without risking a load of badly needed votes for his own budget proposals? Wilson is betting they can’t.

The flip side of all of this, of course, is that whatever hamstrings Clinton, hamstrings Wilson. Whatever closes off the President’s economic options, shrinks those available to California’s governor.

The revised federal-deficit projections are a case in point. They’re higher than Clinton feared. His campaign promise to halve the deficit during his first term is already history, unless he’s decided his first term will be his last. And there’s practically no money for increased public-works investment, which he promised to prime the economic pump, without abandoning his middle-class tax cut.

What this means for California is that money may still come, but it likely won’t be enough. And deeper cuts in defense spending and higher gas taxes, now under consideration as deficit-pruning measures, would hit this state harshly.

There’s more potential bad news for Clinton’s and Wilson’s entangled fates. Crises in Somalia, Iraq and Bosnia may distract Clinton from doing what he was elected to do--deal with domestic problems. That would make his economic job more difficult, with the fallout hurting everybody in California government.

Will Wilson find himself reliving the frustrations of 1991? The then-new governor outlined an ambitious agenda to deal with California’s burgeoning fiscal crisis and made plans to sell his programs up and down the state. Weeks later, the Persian Gulf War exploded and state government disappeared into the smoke. Last week, he said he was planning again to take his case directly to the people--even as a showdown between Washington and Baghdad over missile placement was nearing.

In the end, it may be simplistic to portray Wilson and Clinton as political Siamese twins, joined at the hip by the economy. The complexity of California politics defies pat assumptions. There’s already speculation here that the Democratic strategy will be to maintain legislative gridlock, giving Wilson nothing, denying him a record to run on and making him a scapegoat for all the state’s ills.

But California Democrats can’t count on Clinton’s successes to cleanse them of blame for another bruising budget battle. And Wilson, too, must take responsibility for his own political fate.

The governor must be able to point to some successes of his own direct making if he wants to build a case for reelection. That’s why Wilson’s tone in this State of the State address was more conciliatory than last year.

Still, such achievements won’t come easy. Wilson’s budget discloses an economic reality so brutal and choices so painful that solutions--and civility--will be difficult to come by.

Tossing out what Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti characterized as an “olive twig” of accommodation, Wilson told legislators that “I can’t do it without you. And you can’t do it without me. But together, we can get the job done.”

He might as well have been talking to Clinton. Politics really does make strange bedfellows.