<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Why Create a New Slogan When a Rival’s Will Do?

Most campaigns borrow in the home stretch, but usually money, not words, and usually not from each other.

Kathleen Brown’s slogan “Enough Is Enough”--criticized here and there as lame and long in the tooth--turned up on the lips of Gov. Pete Wilson in one of his television commercials.

The difference: Wilson was talking about illegal immigration, and Brown was talking about Wilson.

Count it unlikely that Wilson will also adopt Brown’s neologism from the Democratic gubernatorial candidates’ second debate: “. . . with great fervence. “ Hey--in the heat of campaigning, we all get a little excitated.

California’s Veterans

The state is home to more than 2.9 million veterans, 2.2 million of whom served during wartime. Here is a breakdown of wartime veterans by sex and by the conflicts in which they served, as of July, 1992:

WAR TOTAL MEN WOMEN Persian Gulf 50,300 43,200 7,100 Vietnam 872,000 843,700 28,300 Korea 411,900 399,300 12,600 World War II 868,200 825,400 42,800 World War I 3,700 3,500 200

Source: California Department of Veterans Affairs

Compiled by Times researcher TRACY THOMAS

Why not? Their constituents certainly do: Prayer is experiencing a revival at two city council meetings--in Stockton, and in the Stanislaus County town of Newman.

Stockton switched from spoken to silent prayer four years ago, but voted to go back to oral prayers after the city attorney said it would be legal if they kept it short and didn’t proselytize for one faith or dump on others. The Newman City Council wanted spoken prayer but almost had to settle for silent--no pastor was available on council night. The new man of God in town, Orestimba Presbyterian’s Ken Gardner, agreed to do the honors.

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Bee-lated: Remember when they were advancing on us like some six-legged Luftwaffe? Half a dozen colonies of Africanized killer bees are now apparently stalled like a storm on the other side of the California state line, over Yuma, Ariz.

What slowed them down? Anti-immigrant rhetoric? The state of the California economy?

It’s a natural wonder, says Bill Routhier, the Southern California area manager of the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.

He lists the Mojave Desert, for starters--dry and barren, inhospitable to tropical bees, and already a natural barrier for a lot of other pests; a parasite, the varroa mite, that the bee never ran into in South or Central America; the competition from domestic bees, and something called the Egyptian bee--a regular desert rat of a bee.

So maybe they aren’t so tough.

“We don’t know where this Maginot Line is gonna be drawn for the bee . . . but maybe they’re reaching some kind of biological barrier.”

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Voter mortis: In Chicago, the dead vote. In Martinez, the dead run for office.

Gus Kramer’s only rival for Contra Costa County assessor expired of a heart attack April 10, too late to be taken off the ballot. But the present assessor wants the late Dan Hallissy--once his chief deputy--elected anyway, because he believes that Kramer is “completely unqualified to take this job.” A Hallissy win in the June 7 primary would force a special election in March, and a whole new batch of people could run.

Kramer considers himself eminently qualified and calls this posthumous campaigning “classic . . . cronyism.” For one thing, “his signs have been plastered all over the county and they don’t say R.I.P. on them.”

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The microchip republic: Who would have guessed that the information superhighway is California 99? Merced’s City Council is laying plans to send its agendas and actions out over the Prodigy computer network--reportedly the first in the nation to put itself on-line. Will they change the city motto to “Upload to Merced”?

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Jumping the gun? The Dannemeyer for Senate campaign held a Sacramento news conference, not where it had originally planned to--in the governor’s pressroom--but out on the west steps of the Capitol. The “special alert” notice characterized the move from the inner sanctum of power to its front porch as a “slight revision of location.”

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Linotype Lucifer: The San Jose City Council member recalled from office after using slighting words and gestures about Latinos, homosexuals and Asians gave a lengthy farewell interview to the Mercury News, saying the newspaper had it in for her in part because she is a Christian. “Satan worked through the paper,” Kathy Cole remarked. “The paper will have to answer.”

EXIT LINE

“Gentlemen, surprise--I’ve been elected governor of California.”

--State Sen. Tom Hayden, during the second Democratic gubernatorial debate, on how he would greet the lords of the Legislature if the electorally unlikely came to pass.