CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Candidates Unleash TV Ads Aimed at Regions

The governor’s race hit the airwaves in earnest this week, with three new television ads from Democrat Kathleen Brown and two from Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. The recent crop of commercials shifts the debate from the summer’s hot issue--crime--to the economy and education, and both campaigns are trying something unusual: spots targeted at a particular region.

On Wednesday, Wilson began airing an ad in Los Angeles that features two local businesses--Fox Studios and California Steel--that have retained or created jobs during Wilson’s tenure. “The only way you get out of a bad economy is by putting people back to work,” Wilson says in the ad, which lauds Wilson for enacting tax incentives and cutting regulations.

Today, San Diegans will see virtually the same Wilson ad, featuring two flourishing San Diego-area businesses: Legoland and Solar Turbine. But they will also see a new Brown ad, airing only in San Diego, that blames Wilson for that city’s troubles.

“San Diego lost 46,000 jobs in four years. And unemployment is climbing,” the Brown ad says. “Instead of helping San Diego, Wilson stalled defense conversion, raised middle-class taxes and took away $158 million from San Diego County.”

This attempt to talk to voters about their own back yards--which can be expensive--is not without precedent. Brown, the state treasurer, has already targeted Los Angeles voters with an ad that focused on the local economy. And her campaign chairman, Clint Reilly, has made no secret of his belief that it doesn’t pay to “talk vanilla politics to people who want strawberry or rocky road.”

But Wilson has never localized his commercials. At a news conference Wednesday to unveil the incumbent’s new ads, campaign manager George Gorton said he thought that the inclusion of local examples would give the ads more credibility. But he emphasized that Wilson’s ads were unified by a single message.

“The ads don’t pretend to say that Pete Wilson is responsible for the comeback of the economy any more than he was responsible for the recession,” Gorton said. “But it says that he is fighting every day to do something to make the economy in California as good as possible.”

Brown campaign spokesman John Whitehurst, who attended Gorton’s news conference, countered that Wilson’s ads were “an admission that they’re weak on the economy. George (Gorton) is sitting here saying he’s confident about winning the election and that he’s ahead in all of the polls. Then why are they back on our issue?”

Suddenly, like dueling spin doctors, Whitehurst and Gorton were sparring face-to-face. “There are five main issues in the race,” Gorton said. “You can’t talk about one of them all the time. You’ve got to talk about crime, immigration, jobs, education and welfare reform. We’ll be there on all of them.”

Whitehurst interrupted Gorton. “The Brown campaign continues to believe there’s one issue in this race--that is, Pete Wilson’s effectiveness as governor,” he said. “Does he deserve four more years and do Californians want four more years of the same?”

Gorton smiled, warming to the debate. “I will stipulate that that’s what they think the issue is,” he said. “They think crime is a so-what issue. That’s why we’ve gone from 23 points behind to 9 points ahead. Because they think the issue is something other than what it is.”

For much of the summer, Brown and Wilson have wrangled over crime--a topic that has often favored Wilson, in part because of Brown’s personal opposition to the death penalty. (Brown has said that if elected governor, she will uphold the law and carry out executions). Brown’s latest TV ads, which bring her total since the primary election to 20, are part of an effort to redirect the campaign agenda toward issues that she believes do not flatter Wilson.

In addition to her ad aimed at San Diegans, two other ads released this week paint Brown as a candidate whose top priority is education. In these ads, airing statewide, the 48-year-old candidate promises to fight for better primary schools and put a college education within everyone’s reach.

“As governor, I’ll freeze tuition hikes, provide low-interest loans and make college affordable. Not just for the lucky and the rich, but for every California family,” Brown says in one ad.

On Tuesday, when these ads were released, the Wilson campaign immediately attacked Brown’s record on public education, faxing out an old news clipping that notes that she enrolled her children in private schools in New York City. Dan Schnur, Wilson’s campaign spokesman, also critiqued Brown’s five years on the Los Angeles Board of Education, blaming her for everything from plummeting reading scores to the district’s soaring overhead costs.

“Kathleen Brown can blow smoke on almost any issue under the sun,” Schnur said in a statement. “But she’s got a record on education that ought to make every parent in California flinch.”

Times staff writer Dan Morain contributed to this article.