COLUMN ONE : The Trick to Getting Wilson’s Ear : How do you make your case to a man known for circuitous decision- making? The key, insiders say, is to pique the governor’s interest. Know your facts. And make your idea <i> his</i> idea.

If you want to influence Gov. Pete Wilson, don’t corner him, rush him, threaten him, try to slide something past him or seek to overwhelm him with a brilliant argument.

Instead, pique his curiosity. Give him something provocative to read. Tell him what the experts think. Know your facts. Be prepared to answer dozens of questions. Give him time. Make your idea his idea.

These insights, gleaned in interviews with many of Wilson’s closest advisers, as well as lawmakers and private citizens who have known him for years, paint a portrait of a governor whose method of decision-making might best be described as circuitous.

Like most chief executives, Wilson has a system in place to funnel ideas, proposals and arguments to his office from throughout his Administration. But more often than not, he overruns that blueprint as he personally examines a problem from every angle and down to the finest detail before committing himself.

In this quest for information, the governor is known to roam the hallways that surround his inner office, chatting with junior aides about a subject that interests him. If he has a question, he will crash through the chain of command, calling people deep in the state’s bureaucracy in search of the answer. He will phone an old friend or associate outside of government when he needs a “real person” with whom to kick around an idea.

“He will talk to the person or people who have the information or perspective or experience he is seeking,” said Dan Schnur, the governor’s top spokesman. “Their ability to assist him is a lot more important than their job title or their place in the pecking order.”

This way of operating can cause frustrating delays. It sometimes allows issues to slip through the cracks. And it can confound anyone who thinks that Wilson will endorse his view simply because the governor solicits his opinion and understands his arguments.

But it is Wilson’s way, one that has worked for him through 27 years in elective office. It also is the method Wilson is expected to stick with as he struggles in coming the months to restore a dismal job approval rating that threatens to make him the state’s first one-term governor in more than 30 years.

Oddly, Wilson’s decision-making in some ways more resembles the wide-open style of one of his political archrivals--former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.--than that of his two more regimented Republican predecessors, George Deukmejian and Ronald Reagan.

Deukmejian and Reagan relied on a strong chief of staff who ran the daily operation while the governor set broad policy and acted as the final arbiter to settle disputes among advisers. These governors often held formal meetings with their Cabinet officers and department directors. Information flowed along a predictable path before being collected and checked by the chief of staff and sent to the governor’s office.

Wilson, like Brown, has a looser operation, where information and aides bounce in and out of the governor’s inner office. Wilson prefers frequent phone chats or conversations on the go rather than sit-down sessions with the Cabinet. Decisions rarely travel a well-ordered route to a conclusion. Instead, they tend to evolve in fits and starts.

And like President Bill Clinton, Wilson has the stamina for long, detailed discussions about government and a belief that he can delve into any issue and emerge with as good an understanding of the problem as the experts he hires to advise him.

This style means that the roles of Wilson’s aides differ from the pattern set by other governors. His chief of staff, Bob White, acts as more of a sounding board for him than as the state’s chief operating officer. White and Wilson declined to be interviewed for this article. But associates describe White as more interested in the big picture than the details of every issue, which makes him a good complement to the man he has worked for since 1968.

“Pete Wilson is a hands-on administrator,” said Ward Connerly, a Sacramento businessman who has known Wilson for 20 years and who gets an occasional call from the governor seeking advice. “He really does try to make sure that if his fingerprints are on an issue, he has done his own homework. I think he’s gotten better in recent years about delegating, letting people do things. But he’s still pretty much his own chief of staff.”

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One of Wilson’s most momentous decisions came a little more than a year ago, when he was asked to spare the life of convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris.

To help him decide the issue, the governor scheduled back-to-back sessions with Harris’ supporters and the prosecutors, and then spent days preparing for the meetings.

He consulted legal experts, child psychologists and medical authorities as he weighed whether to grant Harris mercy on the grounds that his mother’s abuse of alcohol while she was pregnant had left Harris unable to render rational judgments. Wilson even reread a book on fetal alcohol syndrome.

At the hearings, Wilson delved into such details as the circumference of Harris’ head and the results of psychological tests given to him in prison. Harris’ defenders reported afterward that the governor displayed a solid grasp of the subject and took copious notes. Nevertheless, Wilson decided to send the convict to his death.

The method Wilson used to decide the Harris case is typical, but the speed with which he made the decision was not. When he can, Wilson will take months to reach a conclusion.

Simple procrastination may account for part of these delays. But there is another cause: Wilson often is not comfortable embracing proposals advanced by others. In a sense, he must become almost a co-owner of those ideas, fully vested in them, before he can be secure and confident defending his stand.

To get there, Wilson employs an intense information-gathering system that usually starts with a brief written report by his staff describing the problem, laying out options for dealing with it, and making a recommendation.

“One thing he doesn’t want is for you to tell him there’s a huge problem out there and here’s why it’s a huge problem and then just ask him what he wants to do about it,” one Wilson aide said. “He wants to know what you think.”

Such a recommendation, however, often is the beginning rather than the end of Wilson’s inquiry.

Typically, he will want to talk about the history of the issue and the possible consequences of the action he is about to take. He usually wants to know the political context of any decision. If a court case is referred to, he will want to read the opinion himself.

As these discussions ensue, Wilson encourages internal debate, often keeping his views to himself as advisers joust around a large conference table in the Ronald Reagan Cabinet Room. Less often, he will stake out a position and invite his staff to challenge it, sometimes in formal sessions, sometimes in a late-night chat as he smokes a cigar in the open-air courtyard inside his office suite.

Wilson does not suffer fools lightly. He expects an adviser to be prepared and to know all sides of an argument, not just the adviser’s position. If the adviser does not know the answer, aides say, he should not pretend that he does because the governor will see through the act.

He has a remarkable memory--some say photographic--and a penchant for interrupting a presentation to complain that something an adviser has said contradicts a position the same person took in a conversation months before.

He will peer over his glasses and ask question after question until, inevitably, he gets to one his adviser cannot answer.

“Is it the Delta smelt or the Chinook salmon that is anadromous?” Wilson asked an aide during a recent discussion of the state’s water policy. (The answer: It’s the salmon, which swims from salt water to fresh water to spawn.)

The governor works longer hours than anyone on his staff and will call on his aides late at night or early in the morning if he has a question he needs answered.

Larry Goldzband, a former longtime aide, recalls that he was awakened, but not bothered, when Wilson called him at 2:05 one morning and talked for an hour about state water policy before he delivered a major speech on the issue. “It is his prerogative to get the information in the best way he can figure out to get it,” Goldzband said.

Wilson does not mind being the only one holding to a particular point of view. One joke in his U.S. Senate office was that the best way to get Wilson to vote yes was to beg him to vote no. When he does disagree, he does not mind saying so--especially when he is among people he knows and respects.

If Wilson is well steeped in an issue, he may consult widely but then advocate a position not advanced by any of the experts whose opinions he has solicited.

That is what he did during last summer’s budget battle, when he agreed with county governments that they needed more flexibility in the way they provide health and welfare services to the poor. After initially siding with the counties, Wilson proposed a far more radical solution than his allies had recommended, suggesting that the state repeal a law that makes counties the caretaker of last resort for the sick and the poor. His rationale: free each county to make these decisions according to local standards.

“We were confused,” said Karen Coker, a lobbyist for the California State Assn. of Counties, which ultimately prevailed on the issue. “We could never understand why the governor would hold out for something that provided more flexibility than we thought was necessary or wise. His position didn’t reflect the advice he was getting from his senior staff or what we were advocating.”

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On subjects ranging from forestry to workers’ compensation, the results of Wilson’s decision-making process have earned him a reputation as a take-it-or-leave-it governor who likes to issue orders to the Legislature. But more typically throughout his long political career, and even in Sacramento, Wilson has been a moderate consensus builder.

In this mode, Wilson often will synthesize competing points of view into an entirely new product that bears his stamp. Many make the mistake of trying too hard to sell him their ideas. A soft sales job works much better, aides say.

Consider the evolution of Wilson’s position on deficit spending.

A year ago, when Democrats proposed stretching out repayment of the state’s bulging budget deficit over more than one year, Wilson denounced the idea as a looming disaster for the state. When two of his senior advisers privately suggested something similar, he flatly rejected their advice as well.

But last month, the governor dropped his opposition and endorsed the concept. He came around not because of relentless pressure from aides or adversaries, but because he was presented with alternatives he considered unpalatable: either raise taxes, which he believes would hurt the economy, or cut programs so deeply that the state would have to deny eyeglasses, hearing aids and wheelchairs to the infirm poor.

Some chief executives might portray such a turnaround as a statesmanlike concession to achieve compromise. But not Wilson. The governor insists that what he is proposing is different from the “Washington-style” deficit spending he derided a year ago.

If this makes Wilson appear more stubborn than he is, there is a reason for it, aides say. Unlike many politicians, Wilson hates to concede a point merely to placate an opponent. Before he agrees to anything, he has to be persuaded that it is something he wants to do. More often than not, his solution will differ in some key respect from the positions of others. Finding that Wilsonian twist and laying it out for him to seize may be the single best way to win him over.

The governor’s handling of the gay rights issue is an example. In 1991, he vetoed Assemblyman Terry Friedman’s bill to prohibit discrimination against homosexuals in employment, prompting an uproar among gay rights activists and touching off violent protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But as the bill’s supporters protested, Friedman, a Brentwood Democrat, set to work finding a way to turn Wilson around.

He found it in the governor’s veto message, which Wilson wrote himself. In it, the governor commented favorably on an opinion by the state attorney general that said employment discrimination against gays and lesbians was a violation of the State Labor Code. But the opinion Wilson cited was purely advisory. So Friedman decided to write a bill placing it into law.

As the legislation moved through the process, the lawmaker kept it narrowly focused, avoided confrontation with the governor and, through a series of letters, kept Wilson constantly informed of his intent. The result: A year after Wilson vetoed Friedman’s first bill, he signed the second. Friedman accomplished his ends, but he did it by using Wilson’s means.

“My whole strategy was to turn his veto message into a road map for new legislation,” Friedman said. “It worked.”

The governor’s aides say that Friedman bowed to the rationalist in Wilson, a man who favors logic over emotion and likes to think that every step he takes is based on fact and that every decision he makes is his own. One reason he gave up his U.S. Senate seat to become governor is that Wilson thrives on the chief executive’s role in the center of things, rather than being just one member out of 100 in a legislative body.

“Pete Wilson will listen to an awful lot of people and ask a lot of hard questions,” said Goldzband, who has worked for Wilson off and on since he was mayor of San Diego. “But ultimately the decision is his, and he will make that decision. It’s very important to him.”

The Inner Circle

These are some of the people who play key roles in Gov. Pete Wilson’s decisions.

BOB WHITE, chief of staff

* Background: White, 51, has been at Wilson’s side since 1968, when the then-assemblyman named him to be his administrative assistant.

* Role: White shuns policy detail, preferring to keep his eye on the big picture, and serves as a sounding board for Wilson. The one area in which White involves himself deeply is appointments. Nearly everyone named to any position by the governor must first pass muster with White.

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PATRICIA CLAREY, deputy chief of staff

* Background: Clarey, 39, is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush administrations and has worked as an oil industry lobbyist.

* Role: As the main manager of Wilson’s time, Clarey decides who will be allowed to see the governor. Clarey also tries to keep track of whom Wilson is speaking to on his own, which can be a daunting task because of the governor’s penchant for calling anyone he thinks can provide him the information he needs at the moment.

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WILLIAM HAUCK, deputy chief of staff

* Background: A longtime fan of the governor who has worked in four Wilson campaigns, Hauck, 52, is a Democrat who joined the governor’s office one year into Wilson’s term.

* Role: Hauck is a key Wilson adviser on fiscal, health and social issues. He has worked with Wilson’s Finance Department on budget proposals and with the Health and Welfare Agency to fashion the proposed overhaul of the state welfare program.

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GEORGE DUNN, deputy chief of staff

* Background: A former political science lecturer, Dunn, 44, joined Wilson’s staff after a decade as government relations manager for Atlantic Richfield Co.

* Role: Dunn helped the governor shape his economic package--which features regulatory relief and tax breaks for business--and serves as a trouble-shooter when firms complain to Wilson about their treatment at the hands of the state bureaucracy.

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THOMAS HAYES, finance director

* Background: A former auditor general who was appointed state treasurer, Hayes, 47, joined Wilson’s staff after his unsuccessful 1990 bid to win the treasurer’s job in his own right.

* Role: Hayes is the governor’s principal adviser on budget issues and gives Wilson an evaluation of the fiscal impact of every bill passed by the Legislature.

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JOE SHUMATE, deputy chief of staff

* Background: Shumate, 52, a veteran Northern California-based political consultant, has an affable manner that helps camouflage a cutthroat political style.

* Role: Shumate was a primary architect of Wilson’s take-no-prisoners approach to the Legislature last year. That strategy failed, and Shumate now serves as the governor’s main legislative handholder, seeing lawmakers from both parties who cannot get time on Wilson’s schedule.

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GEORGE GORTON, political consultant

* Background: Gorton, 46, has dedicated his long-honed political campaign skills to advancing Wilson’s career.

* Role: Wilson calls on Gorton whenever he has a question about a decision’s political fallout. Gorton helped conceive Proposition 165--Wilson’s 1992 welfare and budget initiative--and managed the unsuccessful campaign. Wilson is expected to lean on Gorton at reelection time.