Garamendi Assails His Opponents : Election: He implies that Wilson has catered to racism with immigration plan and that Brown failed to act while school crime rose. Rivals decry his remarks.

Escalating his assaults on his major opponents for the governorship, Democrat John Garamendi implied Wednesday that incumbent Republican Pete Wilson catered to racism and hatred with his immigration proposals. He also suggested that his Democratic primary opponent, Kathleen Brown, was responsible for failing to halt increases in school crime during her tenure on the Los Angeles school board.

Garamendi tailored his remarks to his broad campaign theme--that he is “a leader who has convictions and is not afraid to speak up,” as he told the several hundred members of Town Hall, a nonpartisan civic group meeting in Los Angeles. And his attacks on his political foes were unmistakably sharp.

His speech sparked a brief moment of unanimity between spokesmen for Wilson and Brown, who decried Garamendi’s remarks as factually wrong and out of line.

Garamendi’s comments covered a host of issues expected to maintain high profiles for the duration of the governor’s race--crime, immigration, education and social programs for children.

His most incendiary salvo at Wilson was on the issue of illegal immigration, which the governor brought to the fore last summer and has been promoting ever since. Wilson has taken hard-line positions against allowing illegal immigrants access to government services.

“Illegal immigration is a problem in California and it has to be dealt with firmly,” Garamendi said. “But in solving one problem, our governor must be very careful not to create another.

“A politician who says we should amend the Constitution of the United State to deny citizenship to certain children born here is catering to racism. A politician who says that we should deny lifesaving medical treatment to somebody who is injured, perhaps as a result of an earthquake, is catering to hatred.”

Wilson has proposed that the Constitution be amended to deny citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants. He has not advocated denying emergency medical treatment to illegal immigrants, but he says the federal government should pick up the tab.

Garamendi’s campaign manager, Darry Sragow, denied after the speech that the Democratic candidate was accusing Wilson of catering to hatred and racism. “He did not say that Wilson said that,” Sragow said. The campaign manager said the reference was a generic one aimed at any politician with similar views.

Elsewhere in his speech, however, Garamendi renewed his criticism of Wilson.

“Pete Wilson likes to tell you he’s getting tough on illegal immigrants. . . ,” Garamendi said. “But what Pete Wilson doesn’t want to talk about most of all is the fact that under his leadership and his predecessors, the economy has faltered, crime has increased and our confidence in our future has hit rock bottom.

“So Pete will do the time-honored this that all politicians do. He’ll point his finger at the most convenient target. Take on the Democrats in the Legislature. Blame the Democratic President. Blame illegal immigrants, but blame somebody and never look to himself.”

Wilson’s campaign press secretary, Dan Schnur, said that raising the specter of racism in a discussion about immigration was “about as cowardly and inflammatory as it gets.”

“John Garamendi can cry racism all he wants but until he comes up with a solution to a situation that causes us to spend billions a year on services for people who are here illegally, he’s just blowing smoke,” Schnur said.

On the subject of Brown, his Democratic primary opponent, Garamendi was reacting to a television ad being run by the Brown campaign in which the state treasurer laments the rise in school violence, saying that when her children were in school, she worried only that they would be hurt in recess. Brown’s ad does not mention that she had been a school board member.

“What her ad doesn’t say is that she has the rare distinction of having been sued by the attorney general of the state of California for failing to protect students from a rising tide of violence in the Los Angeles school system back in the mid ‘70s and of being publicly criticized on television by her husband for the very same failure,” Garamendi said.

The suit to which Garamendi alluded was filed against the entire school board, and the remarks by her husband, Van Gordon Sauter, stemmed from a television editorial that Sauter delivered before the couple met.

Garamendi insisted that Brown failed in attempts to stem school violence. After the speech, Garamendi said he did not suggest that Brown was personally to blame for rising school crime, saying, “She was there on the school board at a time when it happened and they didn’t deal with it.”

He denied that the same criticism could be thrown back at him. Garamendi served in the state Legislature from 1975 to 1991 at a time when crime levels rose.

“The role that I played as a policy maker--I gave a very strong record and consistent record for 20 years of being tough on all of those issues,” he said.