NEWS ANALYSIS : Candidates’ Styles Set Tone for Gubernatorial Race : Politics: Pete Wilson projects image of gritty fighter, Kathleen Brown seems methodical but tough, and John Garamendi shapes up as the bull in the china shop of government-as-usual.

Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and Democratic challengers Kathleen Brown and John Garamendi appear to have set the tone for the 1994 campaign for governor before any of them has formally announced as a candidate.

In an unusual three-way forum in Burlingame over the weekend, the three seemed to come across to an audience of schoolteacher union representatives in the same fashion they are known to political insiders. In a nutshell, each projected these political personae:

Wilson--The gritty fighter holding the line against big spenders and higher taxes.

Brown--Cool and tough, but smart, the developer of well-considered programs.

Garamendi--The risk-taker who wants California to get on with solving its problems. Now.

Wilson, 60, is tough--tight-lipped tough. He is the guy who has had to steer California through stormy waters, and the victim of circumstances: the recession, massive illegal immigration and a string of disasters that have compounded California’s fiscal woes.

Adversity has forced Wilson to put on hold his 1990 vision: preventive government programs such as early school health screening that cost money now but would save California millions down the road.

“I look forward to a second term when California has experienced the kind of economic recovery that will allow us to give the sort of resources that we have been unable to give in the past,” he told the governing body of the California Teachers Assn. on Saturday evening.

So for now, Wilson is tough: tough on budgets, tough on the idea of anymore new taxes, tough on illegal immigration, tough on criminals. Looking younger than his 60 years, he governs somewhat like he used to play as a 150-pound guard on his high school football team: head down, teeth clenched, plugging away.

State Treasurer Brown, 48, has become the candidate of position papers: a 13-point plan on education, 33 points on crime and, some say, more than 50 points in an economic program she is scheduled to unveil in a speech in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Last spring, when she was considered by many as the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the primary this June, and was raising massive amounts of money for her campaign, friends were concerned that Brown’s record was an empty slate, except for esoteric dealings with state bond issues and short-term notes.

Brown was polished. She acted gubernatorial, they said, and was adept at projecting a revival of the progressive vision of California put forth by her father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, when he was governor in the 1960s and ‘70s.

But these supporters said Brown needed to venture out and tell people what she stood for in terms of the major problems facing California. She has done that in-depth, at the risk of some ribbing and sniping from opponents that her position papers sound a little like high school term papers.

Indeed, Brown is a far more cerebral and controlled politician than Pat Brown, the Irish pol and doer from San Francisco. She likes to say her programs are tough, but smart, as demanded by the changed nature of the California dream in the 1990s.

Accustomed to dealing with bond brokers and financial wizards in her first term in state office, Brown sought to connect with teachers by expressing her frustration in dealing with the Los Angeles school board as a mother and would-be activist in the 1970s.

She had never planned to go into politics, she said, but in butting heads with the Board of Education, “I guess that sleeping giant woke up in me. I knew there was much to be done.” She ran for the school board and won.

And then there is John Garamendi, who will turn 49 on Saturday, the day he formally announces for governor. He is winding up a single term as the state’s first elected insurance commissioner, the man who has portrayed himself as the consumer’s advocate in dealing with giants such as State Farm.

Garamendi, a veteran of two decades in the Legislature, can discourse extemporaneously on virtually any state program enacted in that time, and often will volunteer that he had some hand in crafting it. He is a policy wonk turned populist who is campaigning around the state by working with “real people”--sawmill hands in Yreka and El Dorado County, cops in Crescent City, teachers in Modoc County and sulfur-breathing auto battery manufacturers in Los Angeles.

This is the sort of campaign tactic often undertaken by the underfunded, or the underdog who needs the free publicity, but Garamendi does it whether the cameras are there or not, and seems to enjoy himself.

Garamendi demonstrated Saturday that he is the risk-taker of the crowd, the challenger who promises--or threatens--to be the bull in the china shop of government-as-usual, or, for that matter, within the Brown-leaning Democratic Party Establishment. Ultimately he might come across to voters as the candidate of action. His opponents are likely to portray him as an ambitious grandstander who leaps without looking.

The Wilson and Brown staffs both passed around prepared handouts at the teachers union forum. Wilson listed his education accomplishments of his first three years in one packet and his proposals in another.

Brown gave out her 13-page, 13-point education plan. “I am the only candidate to set down an education plan on paper,” she said.

There were no handouts from Garamendi. He tends to wing it. Act now, he said. Californians should not wring their hands waiting for others to come in and help, should not beg the feds for earthquake aid before committing themselves to action.

Garamendi said: “The issue is today. If we fail today to find the leadership to rebuild, how can any one of us stand up here and tell you that tomorrow--that tomorrow--I will make the necessary proposals?”

“It doesn’t work,” he said. “It does not work.”

Neither Brown nor Wilson would buy that approach, involving new state sales or gasoline taxes, or both.

Premature, said Wilson.

Premature, said Brown.

The events of January may have little to do with how voters decide to cast their ballots in the primary in June, or the general election in November. Issues come and go. There almost always is some dramatic event in a campaign that can alter its nature.

But experts say that intangible factors such as style, character and trust often are as important as issues in determining how people vote. In that sense, the teachers in Burlingame on Saturday probably got a good sneak preview of the nature of the 1994 campaign.