Ballots Hold Words to Wise for Politicians

It doesn’t take much wisdom to grasp the inner meaning of Tuesday’s election results here and across the nation. The voters sent a few explicit messages that California politicians should frame and tack up in their 1994 campaign war rooms.

The voters said:

* Get serious about crime.

* Don’t spend tax dollars on private schools, but make the public schools better and safer.

* Stop trying to raise the property tax.

* Don’t ask us to approve something unless you can explain it. Everything is suspect. Especially if it requires a tax increase.

These are difficult orders. But, hey, these are difficult times. Stop whining and do it. That’s the final message.

*

Nobody will be trying harder to heed these voter edicts than the 1994 gubernatorial candidates. Gov. Pete Wilson seems in the best position to gain, although he has much ground to make up before catching either of his potential Democratic rivals, Treasurer Kathleen Brown and Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi.

Wilson stands to benefit because--as every pollster or consultant knows--voters tend to favor Republicans and men over Democrats and women on the issues of crime and taxes. It’s the old “soft on crime” and “tax and spend” tags that Republicans have pinned on Democrats, often justifiably. There’s also a stereotype of women being softer than men, period, although it’s a gender image not borne out by fact. (Example: Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.)

On taxes, Wilson is vulnerable for readily hiking levies a record $8 billion during his first year in office. But although the right wing of his own party keeps yelping about this, Democrats may not sound credible trying to make it an issue. They eagerly pushed that tax increase through the Legislature.

Many will compare Wilson to New Jersey Gov. James J. Florio, who also angered voters with a huge tax increase and then narrowly was denied reelection on Tuesday. But Florio is a Democrat and his female opponent, Christine Todd Whitman, is a Republican who proposed a 30% income-tax cut . Neither Brown nor Garamendi can do that.

The louder message from out of state that is applicable to California is “control crime.” Republican Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, was elected mayor of New York after running a strong anti-crime campaign. In Virginia, Republican George F. Allen was elected governor on an anti-crime plank, beating a Democratic woman, Atty. Gen. Mary Sue Terry.

In Washington state, voters overwhelmingly passed one of the nation’s toughest anti-crime measures: “Three Strikes and You’re Out”--the third conviction for a violent crime will mean life in prison without parole. A California group is trying to qualify a similar measure for the 1994 ballot, and it may become a litmus-test issue.

Wilson had planned to hold a news conference Wednesday in the vote-rich San Fernando Valley to announce his sponsorship of a “crime summit” in January. He postponed it because of the Malibu fire, which was getting him on television all day anyway.

The governor jumped out on education reform Tuesday by sketching a vague five-point plan as voters emphatically were rejecting school vouchers. The timing in part was intended to preempt Brown, who had scheduled her major education speech for today.

Stereotypes favor women candidates on education issues. But Wilson, unlike the treasurer, will have the gubernatorial power to compromise with legislators and enact “reform” before the November, 1994, election.

*

California voters view crime as the state’s second most important problem, ranking it behind the recession, according to a pre-election Times poll. The electorate showed this concern by lopsidedly approving Proposition 172, retaining a half-cent sales tax to ward off cuts in law enforcement and fire protection.

But Californians reiterated their passion for Proposition 13 by solidly rejecting Proposition 170, which would have reduced the vote requirement for school bond issues financed with the property tax. The electorate probably rejected other ballot measures because it didn’t understand them. Sponsors never ran a campaign.

“Voters were saying: ‘Make your case or don’t expect my vote,’ ” observes veteran consultant Bob Nelson, chief strategist for the anti-voucher campaign. He also says Tuesday’s election may have been “the first electoral indicator that a public groundswell is building nationally against crime.”

To amend a sign that hung in the campaign war room of candidate Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid--and crime and education. Forget property taxes.”