Limping Brown Needs to Put Best Foot Forward

We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of the day Treasurer Kathleen Brown began her slow slide from election shoo-in to political question mark. And she hopes to use that occasion to regain her footing.

Brown stumbled in her trot to the governor’s office at last year’s Democratic state convention and since then she has tripped over herself many more times. She’s still the front-runner, but she’s been limping.

“The absolute truth is, Kathleen Brown should have knocked us out of the race long ago,” says Darry Sragow, campaign manager for Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, Brown’s main rival for the Democratic nomination. “She had millions in the bank and a substantial lead in the polls. She hasn’t knocked us out because she hasn’t justified why anybody should vote for her for governor.”

Although that’s a highly biased view, most political pros would agree with the basic point.

And next weekend in Los Angeles, this year’s party convention will offer Brown another forum to make her case in a new campaign “coming out.”

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Brown’s speech at last year’s convention was pretty pedestrian, but didn’t warrant the panning it got from reporters. They told each other and wrote--increasingly as the weeks went by--that she was not being specific about how she would put California back on track. However, her real problem was not the speech, but the law of expectations. She was a Brown and the anointed front-runner--and people expected a star performance.

Another principle also was at work: The system--especially the news media--is set up for a contest and demands one. Brown had been coasting on an easy track and now would be forced to jump through hoops. The media is cyclical; it’s a pussycat one day and a mountain lion the next.

Meanwhile, continually planting seeds of doubt about Brown were two skilled cultivators of the media: Sragow and Dan Schnur, Gov. Pete Wilson’s spokesman. They would turn any conversation with a reporter into a dissertation on Brown’s lack of specificity. “Spinning,” it’s called.

Wilson and Garamendi both know that to win, they must destroy Brown. That’s why Wilson’s first TV commercial, appearing now throughout California, is an attack piece on the Democratic front-runner.

Brown’s mistake was overreacting. In fact, she had been reasonably specific, especially on fiscal issues. Besides, as every politician knows, the media has this annoying habit of demanding specificity and then often giving short shrift to the details once they’re offered.

But in trying to prove that she did have specific ideas, Brown went overboard with catchall, multi-point plans for government action that, in turn, got panned as too broad and too shallow. She couldn’t win for losing. Brown read long laundry lists without passion and people still didn’t have a sense of who she was.

Finally, Brown last month sacked her chief strategist--a newcomer to California politics--and signed up the veteran Clint Reilly.

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Reilly now has Brown focused on a narrow message: California’s going downhill and it’s Wilson’s fault. He can’t turn around the state; she can.

“The issue in this campaign is the decline of California,” Brown repeatedly says. “That’s the responsibility of the person in charge. And he’s Pete Wilson.”

In the Reilly regime, Brown will attack Wilson’s leadership more aggressively. The governor clearly is vulnerable: A recent Times poll found that 64% of California’s voters still believe the state is “seriously off on the wrong track” and only 42% approve of Wilson’s job performance.

Beyond that, Reilly--managing a campaign with unlimited resources--intends to regionalize the contest by running distinctive races in each broadcast market. Each area has its own special dislike of Wilson, Reilly believes, and Brown will capitalize on this.

Among other things, there’ll be regional radio ads and household mailers citing the state bond money that Treasurer Brown has made available for, say, the local school district.

Reilly also wants to build a strong registration and get-out-the-vote effort in each county, even Wilson’s San Diego. “We’re going to be in his face in every corner of this state,” says a Brown adviser.

Brown will try to ignore Garamendi and go after Wilson, even if that means winning the nomination by fewer votes than she could by campaigning all-out among liberals and minorities. She’ll now be concentrating more on blue-collar workers and suburban whites.

But Brown still needs to declare, succinctly and passionately, just why she wants to be governor. Convention delegates and the media will be listening for that message.