CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : Brown Rolls Through State and Looks to November

On Kathleen Brown’s rolling campaign for governor Thursday, the death penalty competed for time with a make-believe rabbit.

As Brown’s senior adviser, Michael Reese, briefed reporters on her campaign bus about the candidate’s new TV commercial, the candidate sat next to him, reading “Peekaboo Bunny” to her towheaded grandson Brandon.

Campaign bus rides frequently allow candidates the luxury of living in their own sacrosanct environs, sheltered from the election’s harsh realities, and no more so than Thursday. As the campaign commercial warfare between Brown and the other gubernatorial candidates escalated wildly, she spent a relatively leisurely day in meandering stops from San Diego to the Inland Empire.

For major portions of the day, the lushly appointed Brown bus doubled as a rolling photo opportunity for Brown and her grandchildren, Brandon and Katherine, the twins born two years ago to her elder daughter, Hilary.

These are the sorts of occasions that Brown--the target of photographers when her father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. was governor--admits she used to decry--until she became a candidate with photogenic offspring. It makes for good pictures, and occasionally jarring moments.

At one point, Brown asked her granddaughter’s opinion on an issue that Gov. Pete Wilson has sought to press among California voters.

“Am I tough enough? Tough enough to be governor?” the candidate asked jokingly.

Straight-faced, Katherine answered:

“Take my bib off, please.”

Four days before the primary election, Brown is fighting the general election against her presumed November opponent--Wilson. One can tell by the territory--she was traveling in areas that could go to either party in the fall.

And the grandchildren? They are part of the tableau, meant to personalize Brown to voters as much as their presence serves to relax a candidate in the last throes of the primary campaign.

From Brown’s demeanor Thursday, one would hardly know that primary day was coming. She never so much as mentioned Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi--who has launched a series of ads hitting Brown’s stance on the death penalty--until reporters asked about him. She left details of her response ads for her aides to explain.

At Riverside Community College’s Moreno Valley campus, her sentiments were clear. “I believe I will do just fine on Tuesday,” she said in her only reference to Election Day. “I can’t wait to face one opponent--Pete Wilson.”

The bus tours are meant to call attention to the failings of Wilson’s economic policies by highlighting struggling businesses and homeowners at risk of losing their jobs and their homes.

But the treasurer believes the road trips serve another purpose--introducing California voters to her and her to California voters before November.

“I can’t win this race just on TV,” she said over a chicken salad at a coffee shop in Escondido. “I’ve got to get my voters out. . . . Traveling through the state helps me do that, and the primary offers the opportunity to do the dry run.”

On Thursday, the road provided her with a litany of the woes facing some Californians. There was the man in Chula Vista who had lost his job, and with it his insurance, as his wife lay in the hospital with heart problems. There was the woman in Moreno Valley whose husband lost his job and whose house is up for foreclosure on June 20. As Brown acknowledged, there is not a lot she can do about their difficulties.

But even if the answers are not apparent, contact with rank-and-file voters plays to Brown’s ability to connect with people, born of her political lineage.

At a fruit stand in Beaumont, where Brown and her entourage disembarked long enough to pick up fresh fruit and snacks, she stuck her hand out to all potential voters and surprised one woman by insisting that the two have a picture taken together.

“There you go,” she said. “That’ll be valuable some day, as my daddy would say.”

Later, she asked the stand’s owner, Francis Dowling, for his vote.

“Ever heard of my dad?” she asked. “Pretty good guy. My brother was too, in his way. Listen, I’m running for governor.”

Perhaps because of her self-professed joy at riding the bus, Brown seemed fully at ease Thursday, shedding her notorious caution to expound forcefully on several pending issues.

She told reporters aboard the bus that she favors the bill by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) that would legalize domestic partnerships, and she said that she favors allowing local agencies to provide clean needles to drug addicts, which experts say could slow the pace of AIDS infection.

She also expressed concern that the so-called Save Our State initiative expected to be on the November ballot would be harshly divisive. The initiative would bar state services to illegal immigrants and require state agencies to report suspected illegal immigrants.

“People are so scared today,” she said, ticking off immigration and crime as two issues that are nourished by fear. “People are so easily able to blame other people and find scapegoats in this.”

Brown said she will campaign against the initiative in the fall. “I will address it and won’t walk away from it,” she said.