Brown Stakes Out Position for Campaign : Politics: Treasurer has been the most active candidate for governor, speaking often and raising $6.5 million. She hopes to collect $18 million more to run against Wilson.

In a final round of major speeches this year, Democrat Kathleen Brown sharpened her attack on Gov. Pete Wilson and promised a governorship of her own that would lead a resurgent California into the 21st Century.

The state treasurer told a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner in Beverly Hills on Wednesday night that the priorities of a Brown Administration would be to restore public safety, revive the economy and educate California’s young people to cope with the job challenges of a new economic era.

Brown has been the most active campaigner of the three best-known candidates for governor in the waning days of 1993, delivering three major policy addresses and holding three fund-raising events that her aides said netted an estimated $1.2 million.

About 900 attended the Wednesday night dinner at which Brown said she had raised more than $6.5 million in campaign funds during 1993, but would need another $18 million to pursue the governorship through next November.

The 48-year-old Brown, seeking to become the third member of her family to occupy the executive suite in Sacramento, will deliver a major economic policy address in January and then formally declare her candidacy.

Her father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., and her brother, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., each served two full terms as governor.

In the Democratic primary next June, Kathleen Brown is expected to face state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, who plans to launch his campaign in mid-January. Garamendi has attacked Brown’s relative lack of electoral experience in periodic appearances, but generally has remained out of the spotlight this fall.

Wilson, the former San Diego mayor and U.S. senator, will officially declare for a second term in February, an aide said Thursday. He is not expected to have any substantial opposition in seeking renomination in the Republican primary in June.

Although not yet an official candidate, Wilson spent much of the summer and fall in a campaign mode, promoting proposals to crack down on illegal immigration and violent crime.

Brown’s dinner at the Beverly Hilton hotel, where she shared the stage with Hollywood personalities Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, was her third fund-raising event in three nights. The first two were in Sacramento and San Francisco.

In her address, she labeled Wilson a politician of bluster but little substance who had presided over the decline of the California economy and education system.

On crime, she said, Wilson has talked tough but allowed conditions to deteriorate to the point that she knows of women who put their babies to bed in bathtubs to shield them from stray bullets.

“The current governor of California has failed, not because he has failed to rally us to his cause, but because he has no cause to rally us to,” Brown said.

“He is a politician who passes as a tough-minded, flak-jacket Republican while his record of fighting crime and taxes is one of bluster, not forceful and imaginative policy and leadership.”

“He is a politician who methodically bleeds our schools and then, dithering in the face of public outrage over his abandonment of our children, steals from local government to make up for the budget siphoned off from the classroom,” she said.

In response, Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur said Brown is ready with accusations but has no alternatives.

“It’s these kinds of statements that epitomize what Brown is all about--all rhetoric and no substance,” Schnur said.

Schnur argued that Brown’s deficit reduction plan, released last May, would have cut the level of state support for education below the amount that Wilson achieved.

The Brown plan proposed a one-time waiver of finance levels required by Proposition 98, but would not have cut the state’s per-pupil financing commitment, according to the Brown statement of last May. The Brown plan would have involved a one-time, $973-million off-budget loan to schools and an extension of the temporary half-cent sales tax surcharge.

Wilson met public school finance requirements in part by shifting several billion dollars in property tax revenues from local government. He supported an extension of the sales tax, but earmarked it for local public safety programs to help make up for the shift in local funds to the schools. California voters approved the half-cent tax extension in a special statewide election in November.

Brown said the economic program she reveals next month “will get us ready for (a) new economic age by jump-starting job creation, tax credits, regulatory relief and job training.”

“It is a strategy that will focus in, and find, local markets, and a strategy that will help promote our products at home and abroad. It will be a plan to buy California, to sell California and to build California for the 21st Century,” she said.

But business cannot compete in “a war zone,” Brown added, reiterating some of the 33 points in her Monday address on crime and public safety.

“We need leadership that is going to move California forward into the 21st Century that is based on vision, values and commitment--something more than just clever words strung together,” the treasurer said.