No More Mr. Moderate : One Part of Wilson is a Consensus-Building Preppy from Yale. The Other Is a Tough-Talking Ex-Marine. California Voters Chose the Yalie for Governor in 1990. Now the Marine Is Seeking a Second Term.

It is nearly dark on a late winter afternoon, and Pete Wilson is out to prove he is ready to rumble.

California’s chief executive is concluding a two-day swing that has taken him through half the state he adopted more than 35 years ago, a state that, despite electing him twice to the U.S. Senate and once to the governor’s office, has never quite adopted him. Wilson, despised by his own party’s true believers and merely tolerated by most of the rest of his constituents, is recharging his batteries for what he says will be his final campaign. On this tour he has stopped at a Fontana steel mill, the Los Angeles County Central Jail and an Orange County police station. He has partied with old friends in San Diego, talked business with Fresno employers and chatted on-line with future-minded voters in the Silicon Valley. Now he is back in Sacramento to unveil his reelection campaign with a rally at a nightclub tucked into a newly renovated downtown shopping mall. Lest anybody miss the message, he will deliver his speech from the center of a boxing ring.

The room, decorated with blue and gold balloons and banners, is packed with Wilson supporters, many of them fresh from their jobs at the Capitol down the street. Even at day’s end, their white shirts remain crisp--like the enthusiasm they exude for their boss. They roar in approval when Wilson enters and strides toward the ring through an honor guard of supporters; as he passes, he slaps awkward high-fives at outstretched palms. Still clad in a dark suit and red tie more appropriate for the formal venues from which he has come, Wilson steps into the red, white and blue ring, shadow boxes for a moment, then grabs the microphone to address the faithful.

With his wife, Gayle, standing beside him, the governor who rode into office four years ago as a different sort of Republican concerned about children, schools and the environment, who billed himself as a champion of women’s rights, who openly courted the gay vote, delivers a speech to drive home his latest theme--that guiding the nation’s largest state is not a job for the weak of heart. He sums up his new message with these words:

“California,” Wilson says, “is not for sissies.”

This from a man who complains that the public misunderstands him. How could the public not?

Reinventing government may be all the rage at the moment, but sometimes it seems as if Peter Barton Wilson has been reinventing himself throughout his 28 years in public office. Once the advocate of a “no bust” policy for marijuana possession, now he talks up zero tolerance for drug use. Despite having signed the biggest tax increase in state history, he portrays himself as a tight-fisted fiscal manager. And though he is a onetime Senate champion of cheap migrant labor for his friends in the farm lobby, he now blames immigrants for many of his state’s mounting problems. The self-described compassionate conservative has become California’s chief tough guy.

The transformation strikes some as hypocritical. Gentler analysts might see it as evidence of how the man split his political personality to react to changing times. One part of Wilson is a consensus-building, compromising preppy from Yale who understands the limits of ideology and knows how to cut a deal. The other is a tough-talking, power-craving ex-Marine. California voters were offered the Yalie for governor in 1990, but watched him respond to the tempering force of the state’s deepening recession with a public metamorphosis into a swaggering, take-no-prisoners autocrat. Now the Marine is seeking a second term. If Wilson wins, no one can be sure which side of him will govern the state--if it can be governed--for the next four years.

By any conventional reasoning, Wilson has no business even being in this race, much less leading it, which is where some polls placed him as summer headed toward fall. Since he took office, more than half a million Californians have lost their jobs. Those who still are working pay higher taxes, while the ones who depend on government benefits have seen their stipends slashed. With the acquiescence of the Democratic Legislature, Wilson has raided state workers’ pension funds, raised college fees by more than half, grabbed local property taxes and let school funding be eroded by inflation. He has run a string of budget deficits unrivaled since the Depression, and it was his brinkmanship that forced the state to pay its bills with IOUs during a long budget stalemate in 1992. A year later, Financial World magazine rated the state’s management the worst in the nation. Wall Street has downgraded the state’s credit three times in three years, forcing taxpayers to pay higher interest on the government’s burgeoning debt.

While no major scandal has rocked the Wilson Administration, on his watch the Department of Motor Vehicles spent millions on a new computer system that does not work, and the state lottery was found to have used slipshod procedures in awarding a $600-million contract without competitive bidding. The California National Guard, when called upon to quell the Los Angeles riots, had to cool its heels for half a day because the soldiers were ready but the ammunition was not. It is no wonder that seven in 10 voters believe the state is headed off down the “wrong track.”

There has been enough misery in Wilson’s 3 1/2 years as governor to bury most politicians. Yet this is no conventional pol.

Since 1966--when Lyndon B. Johnson was in the White House and student radicals were in the streets--Wilson has succeeded like no other California leader by distilling and then reflecting back the heartfelt impulses of the state’s voters. The vision he has articulated for his state may be a narrow one, but Wilson is unparalleled at reading the public’s will, and his instincts are remarkably in sync with a majority of the electorate, still dominated by the aging white middle class. From time to time he takes those impulses to extremes, and his poll ratings plummet. But he learns, refines the message and trudges on, for politics is his life. He has been a legislator, a mayor and a U.S. senator. Wilson, 61, has been elected nine times to public office and lost just once--an ill-fated bid for governor in 1978. He doesn’t mean to lose again.

“I am a real pain in the ass,” Wilson says when asked to describe the trait that serves him best as governor. “I just stay with what I believe in until I get it done.”

Though Wilson claims no interest in national office, a comeback victory this year would put him on every pundit’s A-list of Republican presidential prospects. Standing in his way is Democrat Kathleen Brown, the state treasurer and former Los Angeles school board member. Luck has given him a popular opponent whose campaign has repeatedly stumbled, plagued by management difficulties and a lack of focus. And he’s seized the opportunity her missteps have presented by hammering at a tough man’s triad of issues: crime, immigration and welfare.

His longtime campaign manager, George Gorton, conceded after scanning the polls earlier this year that Wilson would have a hard time winning if the campaign were focused on softer issues like education and the environment, issues on which voters believe the governor has performed poorly. But Gorton, recalling Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s 1990 slogan (“tough but caring”), says that in this mean season there is not even a need to make such a gesture of compassion. “This is a year,” Gorton said, “for tough and tough.”

DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS HAD another agenda in mind when they welcomed Wilson to Sacramento four years ago with almost open arms.

After eight years of George Deukmejian, who took great pride in saying “No” to legislative initiatives, most Democrats were happy to see a self-described activist grab the reins, even if he was a Republican. Wilson’s first address to the Legislature, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown recalled, might just as well have been delivered by Feinstein. The liberal chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, Democrat John Vasconcellos, was accused of helping write Wilson’s inaugural address, and he says he would have been proud had the assertion been correct. In those early speeches, Wilson denounced partisanship, called for consensus and outlined his view that prevention--in the form of expanded health and social programs for the poor--was far more humane, and less costly to taxpayers, than remediation.

Not only was Wilson saying the right things, as far as most Democrats were concerned, he also was stroking them personally, something most of them had rarely seen from a chief executive. In his first days in office, the new governor invited lawmakers to a lavish Washington-style dinner that featured political comic Mark Russell, and in the weeks that followed, Wilson proved to be far more accessible than his predecessor. His chief of staff, Bob White, took to playing racquetball weekly with the prickly Vasconcellos, a gesture that did not go unnoticed among Democrats weary of Deukmejian’s taciturn ways.

Yet there were hints of another side. Only days into his first term, Wilson and his wife toured a nursery ward for premature babies at a Sacramento hospital, showing genuine concern as they chatted with the medical staff and peered at the preemies struggling for life behind glass. Afterward, the governor used the setting as a backdrop to make a pitch for expanding prenatal care for poor working mothers. But to fund his new program, Wilson said, he would need to cut $61 from the monthly welfare grants for poor women with children, whose stipend already was below the cost of housing in some metropolitan areas.

“I am convinced they will be able to pay the rent,” Wilson said of the welfare mothers, “but they will have less for a six-pack of beer. I don’t begrudge them a six-pack of beer, but it is not an urgent necessity.”

Although the remark, which sounded rehearsed, stunned advocates for the poor, many of them shrugged it off as a bit of cheap demagoguery from an otherwise sensitive man. Liberals were willing to overlook such comments as long as Wilson was willing to raise taxes to avoid deeper cuts in the state’s threatened social services. While he had never urged voters to read his lips along the lines of George Bush’s infamous pledge, Wilson did portray Feinstein as too eager to tax and had promised not to raise personal income tax rates. But faced with a $14-billion deficit in his first six months in office, Wilson and the Legislature raised the sales tax and expanded its reach, increased levies on alcohol, boosted motor vehicle registration fees and, breaking his pledge, raised income tax rates, though only on the state’s wealthiest residents. The total tab came to roughly $250 for every man, woman and child in the state, or $1,000 for a family of four. When Republicans in the Legislature balked, the governor said he would not stop at twisting arms to get the votes he needed. If necessary, Wilson said, he’d break them.

If he sounded like a fierce advocate for his position at the time, now Wilson says he raised taxes only with great reluctance, and only to win Democratic votes for an unprecedented reduction in welfare grants and a five-year freeze on the automatic cost-of-living increases that had been part of the welfare program since Ronald Reagan was governor.

“I hated it,” Wilson says of the tax increase. But he adds: “That was the only way I was going to secure the agreement of the Democratic majority in both houses to the kind of spending cuts that I knew we had to get if we were to have any remote hope of containing the hemorrhage.”

This kind of horse trading, while often obscured by Wilson’s pointed rhetoric, has characterized his Administration. “He’s an ex-legislator,” notes state Sen. Patrick Johnston of Stockton, one of Wilson’s Democratic admirers. “He understands the mind-set of writing a bill that has to appeal to a variety of people and having to figure out what motivates legislators to vote.”

Wilson’s conservative critics, of course, take a different view of his deal-making, particularly the grand compromise on taxes. They believe the rookie governor missed a historic opportunity to stand tough and reshape government. That episode early in his term, they say, exposed Wilson for what he is--the ultimate pragmatist.

“He had a terrible budget situation and he chose the solution he could get, rather than the answer that was right,” says economist Arthur Laffer, the former USC professor and supply-side theorist. Laffer’s rather unconventional explanation for Wilson’s economic policy, or lack of one: the leadership training instilled by his alma mater, Yale University. Like the three Republican Presidents from that school--William H. Taft, Gerald R. Ford and Bush--Wilson lacks ideological moorings, Laffer argues.

“Yalies immerse themselves in the topic,” says Laffer, a fourth-generation graduate of the New Haven, Conn., institution. “They learn the subject from the inside out. They put themselves in the other guy’s shoes. The only thing they have to sacrifice is all their own personal values. They are like ships in the ocean with all the equipment in the world--but no compass.”

Such criticism might be easier for Wilson to stomach had his prescription cured the budget’s ills. But, of course, neither the taxes nor the cuts stanched the fiscal bleeding, and the budget, along with California’s economy, remained in the tank. The public soon turned irritable, and Wilson was their logical target. His public approval rating plunged in September, 1992, to the lowest level ever recorded for a California governor: Just 19% of the voters surveyed by the Field poll said he was doing a good job.

As Wilson was absorbing these blows, he also was mourning the loss of a longtime friend and adviser, Otto Bos. The governor’s eternally optimistic communications director had died suddenly of a heart attack in June of 1991. Bos, an immigrant with humble roots who learned English as a teen-ager, was a decorated veteran of Vietnam who later protested the war while a student at San Francisco State. After covering Wilson as a reporter for the San Diego Union, Bos joined the then-mayor’s staff in 1977. He was, some said, the only man in Wilson’s tight inner circle who had ever changed a diaper. Although his job was to communicate Wilson’s message to the public, Bos probably was more valuable for his ability to communicate the public’s message to Wilson. His passing left a void that no one else close to the governor was able to fill.

“Otto just came at it from a different perspective than Pete did,” says Gayle Wilson. “Whether it was being an immigrant, or having been at San Francisco State in the ‘60s, he would see things differently from a man raised in St. Louis who went to Yale and was in the Marine Corps.”

Assemblyman Vasconcellos still describes the first six months of Wilson’s term as the “period of enlightenment.” He is not alone in citing Bos’ death as a turning point in Wilson’s governorship. Education lobbyists, children’s advocates and environmentalists all saw Bos as their bridge to Wilson. “Otto was so public and so accessible and so buoyant,” Vasconcellos says. “When he was there in difficult times, Pete was magnanimous. Without him Pete has been mean. He has been in the hands of people so cynical and so dark and so hidden that it’s been pretty horrible.”

Wilson is typically dismissive of such analysis, deriding it as “pop psychology worth about what you paid for it.” The governor considers himself a rationalist to the core. To suggest that a personal loss--even a huge one--might color his decisions on policy is to insult him in the basest way. Ask him about emotions and more often than not Wilson responds with facts. Prod him, and he will acknowledge that he loved Bos like the younger brother he never had. But he insists that Bos, while a friendly sort, was no political pushover.

“Otto was a thoroughly decent, warm guy,” Wilson says. “But he was tough-minded. And I don’t know that his decisions would have been very different from my own.”

Wilson, in fact, did not need Bos’ death to darken his world view toward the end of his first year in office. The state he was elected to govern, after all, was crumbling around him. In a thin but jolting report from his Department of Finance, the governor learned that even if the economy recovered, serious demographic trends would keep budget deficits piling up for years to come. Welfare caseloads were growing, immigration was rising unabated, prison populations were soaring and school enrollment was climbing inexorably. Meanwhile, the number of people in their peak taxpaying years was shrinking relative to the population of older and younger, more dependent residents. While some of its more Malthusian projections turned out to be exaggerated, this gloomy missive--titled “California’s Taxpayer Squeeze”--confirmed for Wilson what he had already begun to sense: that the huge amount of political capital he had expended trying to balance his first budget represented no more than a down payment.

WITH HIS STATE’S FUTURE LOOKING GRIMMER, WILSON’S TONE BECAME more severe toward the end of 1991, and his Administration’s policies took a noticeable lurch to the right. In an interview for a November, 1991, Time magazine cover story about the decline of California, Wilson for the first time as governor cited the influx of illegal immigrants as a source of the state’s problems. California’s generous benefits also were luring the poor here from other states, he warned. “There is a limit to what we can absorb,” Wilson said, reflecting the frustration so many of his state’s residents were feeling. A few weeks later, he unveiled a proposed ballot initiative that would have slashed welfare grants and shifted the balance of budget powers from the Legislature to the governor. For Wilson, the state’s sorry plight--and perhaps his own increasingly desperate political standing--had crystallized thoughts he’d long harbored about personal and parental responsibility.

His strong feelings on parenting come despite not having had children of his own, though he did help rear the teen-age children of his two wives. When pressed on a subject he almost never discusses in public, he jokes that his childless status is “not for want of effort.”

“I was hoping I was going to be the father of my own,” he says with disappointment, unwinding over beers in early June at a Century City hotel. “That never happened . . . I think I missed a lot of fun. And also, I will concede, missed what I think is the heavy responsibility.”

But Wilson seems to have absorbed through the military many of the life experiences others pick up rearing young children. A disciplined man himself, he admires that trait in others, going back to when he first tasted executive life as a lieutenant leading a rifle company in the Marine Corps after the end of the Korean War.

“When you really have to look out for somebody else, when their well-being is in your hands and you have to make sure they’re fed before you’re fed, that they are billeted before you are . . . that’s the kind of responsibility I think has a maturing effect,” he says. “I saw guys who I thought were absolute lightweights, suddenly when they had the responsibility of running a platoon or running a company, become very different people.”

This theme, Wilson says, runs through every major issue he has dealt with as governor. And you can see it in his actions. The governor, after all, was talking about personal responsibility before Bill Clinton made it fashionable and even before Dan Quayle took on the nation’s most famous single mother--television character Murphy Brown.

When Wilson was confronted with his first chance to spare a man’s life or send him to death, he sided with death. He denied clemency for two-time killer Robert Alton Harris even after acknowledging that Harris, the victim of monstrous abuse, suffered a childhood that was a “living nightmare.” Wilson sent to the gas chamber a man who could have been a poster child for the governor’s argument that prenatal care, early childhood counseling and intervention in dysfunctional families are needed to prevent California kids from going bad.

He will concede that the killer’s backers presented a solid case for clemency. But the governor, discussing the case in an after-hours interview in July, betrays no regrets about the decision. Like a Marine storming the beach, Wilson answers questions as if he fears that any sign of doubt could get him killed.

“I have, I think, a pretty strict standard,” he says, recalling the Harris case. “I don’t think it is enough that you yourself have suffered abuse. You may very well have been brutalized. But if you are capable of discerning right from wrong, and capable of exercising a choice, an intelligent choice, and you choose to take a life, then I think you have forfeited your own.”

Wilson’s view of the Los Angeles riots is similar. Though he has spoken eloquently on the problems of low self-esteem among the underclass, he had no interest in joining those who blamed the riots on widespread poverty and the sense of helplessness it can breed in its victims.

“I don’t think you can ever condone violence,” he says. “That’s just not acceptable. And it’s not inevitable either. I mean look at the Great Depression of the 1930s. If there’s been a tougher economic time in this century for the people of this country than the current time or the time just passed, it was the ‘30s. What was the crime rate then? And what was the violent crime rate? Negligible. “At that point we still had families, and we had people who were disciplined. And there was a code of conduct. You were raised to respect the rights of other people. You were raised to respect yourself, other family members. You didn’t just do as you damn pleased and bash somebody because the mood was on you.”

It was in those gloomy late spring days of 1992, fresh from the execution and the riots, that Wilson turned his attention to the Legislature, and his approach was no less harsh.

In a budget deadlock that accomplished little, the governor stared down the Democrats for 63 days and forced the state to pay its bills with IOUs. Although widely viewed as the victor in the confrontation, Wilson, to break the impasse, gave up on deep cuts in health and welfare programs and agreed to a disguised form of deficit spending. And by making education funding the major issue, Wilson picked a fight with an opponent, the California Teachers Assn., that was more than his match. In the end, the schools got enough money to stay afloat in hard times, and the teachers union got enough ammunition to paint Wilson as the anti-education governor. Democrats were more than happy to let Wilson claim a tactical victory. They knew it would be Pyrrhic.

But the governor wasn’t through. With the November elections looming, he called the Legislature back into special session to fix the fraud-ridden and inefficient worker’s compensation system. He argued persuasively that the system was costing employers too much while paying employees too little: the middlemen, mostly doctors and lawyers, were eating up the difference. But Wilson clearly wanted to use the issue as a wedge to drive voters away from Democrats in key legislative districts. When the special session convened, the governor demanded that lawmakers pass his bill. Instead, they recessed after one day and went home.

A month later, Wilson suffered such a shellacking at the polls that Republicans began talking openly about dumping him as the party’s nominee in 1994. With his ally, President Bush, pulling down the entire Republican ticket, Wilson lost big: voters rejected his ballot initiative to slash welfare grants, defeated his hand-picked successor for the U.S. Senate, and strengthened Democrat Willie Brown’s grip on the state Assembly, which Wilson had hoped to put in Republican hands. The results amounted to a stinging vote of no confidence that threatened to make him the state’s first governor in half a century to be forced out after just one term.

FEW THINGS FRUSTRATE Pete Wilson more than someone who disagrees with him because they don’t understand his argument. Supremely confident in the strength of his own reasoning, he usually concludes that anybody who opposes him must not have heard, or comprehended, his point of view. This is a governor who watches legislative floor debates--a usually meaningless theatrical exercise that occurs only after all the votes have been decided in private--on closed-circuit TV in his office and grows angry when his allies fail to present his position forcefully enough, as if doing so would change some minds. So when the voters rejected everything Wilson stood for in the midterm elections, it was natural for him to discern that they did so because they were ignorant.

Taking stock after that electoral drubbing, Wilson resolved to redouble his efforts to educate the masses. “People are deluged with information, most of which they’re not seeking, and if it’s a choice between what they would like to know and what I would like them to know, they’re going to choose what they’d like,” Wilson said recently after a day of campaigning across Southern California. “And it gets worse, ironically, as we succeed in affording them greater range of viewing choice, a greater range of information sources. That’s highly desirable in most respects. Except I’m not sure people have really learned how to manage their time and whether they’ve really learned how to manage gathering the information they need.”

Wilson once described the voters as “intellectual shut-ins,” and clearly he would like to help these poor souls gather the facts they need to judge him fairly. “When the whole village had the same information from a handbill slapped up on the side of the Pony Express office,” he says, “for better or for worse, whatever the quality of the information, at least they all had the same information. Now we’ve got channel surfing. And it’s very difficult to develop a sense of community in a community that’s channel surfing.”

To compete for attention with Roseanne, Seinfeld and MTV, Wilson concluded that he would need to focus on a few simple goals while relegating other issues to the back burner. He chose economic growth, immigration, crime and welfare reform. Everything else that he earlier had advocated got short shrift, including water and timber policy, growth management, low-cost housing, and yes, prevention programs. He made peace with the Democrats who controlled the fate of his proposals in the Legislature, stopped battling the education establishment and developed an uneasy truce with the public employee unions. Illegal immigrants, criminals and Congress took the brunt of his firepower.

In a sense, Wilson realized that the two personas that had failed him so badly in his first two years could, if combined, be his salvation. In 1991, Wilson’s penchant for cutting deals got him labeled weak. The following year he turned confrontational, only to find himself perceived as ineffective. But if pursued in tandem, these elements could produce everybody’s ideal leader: tough yet reasonable. In Sacramento, he would once again engage in the kind of messy give-and-take that is central to building a record of accomplishment within the legislative process. But on the hustings, where his words would draw more attention than his deeds, Wilson could use his bully pulpit to the fullest and be more strident than ever. Much as his mentor, Richard M. Nixon, was remade for his 1968 run at the presidency, Wilson got a political make-over for his long trek back from public scorn. And like the “New Nixon,” the new Wilson was a lot like the old one. Only the packaging was different.

When he cut the necessary bargains last year to enact the state’s first on-time budget in seven years, he found the political press, and the public, more enamored with his punctuality than concerned about his product. The governor then compromised on worker’s compensation reform, accepting a package that he might have won a year earlier had he negotiated with lawmakers rather than browbeat them. He OK’d business tax breaks that, while dwarfed by tax increases he had signed, were hailed as a signal that California was serious about keeping jobs in the state. And he began to win passage of some of the same welfare reforms that lawmakers and the voters had rejected the year before.

With just enough progress under his belt to declare an end to gridlock, Wilson hit the road to sell himself as the comeback kid. Having concluded rightly that television news crews would not come to the Capitol to cover him, he went and offered himself to them. No plant opening was too small for this governor, no ribbon-cutting too inconsequential. The man who preached personal responsibility was taking none for the state’s economic woes, blaming most of the mess on someone else. With a Democrat now in the White House, Wilson toured the state, and the country, bashing the federal government at every opportunity--for cutting the defense budget, for closing military bases, for declaring California critters endangered while ignoring the state’s economic needs, and, especially, for failing to control the borders.

On immigration alone, Wilson became a perpetual motion machine, traveling to El Paso, Tex., to draw attention to a border crackdown he says shows that the federal government could do more to stop illegal immigration in California; filing lawsuits seeking reimbursement from Congress for the state’s cost of educating, jailing and providing emergency health care to illegal immigrants; touring hospitals and police stations to discuss the effects of illegal immigration; appearing at the border again to question President Clinton’s decision to send troops to stop the Cuban boat people while doing little, in the governor’s view, to help California. All this leaf-beating has had only a marginal effect on public policy, but a huge impact on how the public views Wilson: A wide range of voters see him as a fighter on the right side of the immigration issue.

Wilson also helped his image with his response to two Southern California disasters: the fires that stretched from Thousand Oaks to Laguna Beach, and the Northridge earthquake. Aboard a plane for Los Angeles only hours after the Jan. 17 quake jolted the region, the governor spent most of the following two weeks in the city, viewing damage, meeting with everyone from the President to local City Council members, and convening his Cabinet for a rare session outside the Capitol. He signed a wave of executive orders to cut regulations and laid the groundwork for a rapid government response to the disaster, including the early reopening of two Los Angeles freeways that collapsed.

At times like this, Wilson was more chief executive than chief comforter. At a shelter in Glendale, he walked briskly without pausing past rows of cots filled with the newly homeless so he could keep a date with local officials and the National Guard. At a downed freeway bridge, he spoke at length with Caltrans engineers about the damage before offering little hope to citizens pressing against the police lines.

“There is a symbolic value to being here,” Wilson said between briefings, “to make clear to people, whether they be Caltrans workers or National Guard or CHP, that you really value what they’re doing.” But what of the victims? “You can’t say very much to the parents of a child who has been killed or the children of the parent. It’s pretty difficult to comfort people who have lost their homes and their life’s belongings.”

AFTER ALMOST THREE DECades in public office, Pete Wilson knows that politicians and sporting events rarely mix well. So it was with some trepidation, but a sense of gubernatorial duty, that he took a break from budget deliberations on a Saturday in June to welcome the World Cup soccer tournament to California. The Rose Bowl was filled with 90,000-plus fans, a huge number of them Latinos there to cheer on Colombia in its game against the Romanian national team. As Wilson walked to the center of the field, the booing and hissing began. The chorus soon rose to a crescendo, drowning out his short speech. As he left the field, the governor waved to the crowd, and many returned his friendly gesture with an obscene one of their own.

The rude reception, naturally, was a reflection of the Latino community’s irritation with Wilson’s heated rhetoric on the issue of illegal immigration. The governor says he expected some hostility, and he dismisses its importance by suggesting that maybe 10 people in the vast audience were registered to vote. But talking to him, you can’t help but think he’d like to meet with those 10 voters and try to win them over.

“It’s a very sad thing when a lot of people who are perfectly decent people are misled, have been deceived, and entertain a false notion,” he says when asked if the animosity bothered him. “I think people are laboring under a misapprehension when they believe a big lie and think that the chief executive of their state is somehow a racist or anti-Latino. The sad thing about that is that it’s untrue and it’s ugly. And yeah, that bothered me.”

Yet Wilson is the one who helped turn illegal immigration into an “us against them” proposition. From his campaign commercial showing hordes of Latinos swarming across the border while the narrator intones “They keep coming,” to his full-page advertisements in the New York Times, Wilson has been nothing short of shrill. Exaggerating for effect his positions on health care and education for illegal immigrants, he gives the impression that he wants these services curtailed when he really is advocating instead that the federal government pay the tab. His commercial might just as easily have shown an excerpt of a Wilson speech in which he says illegal immigrants most hurt recent legal immigrants who have played by the rules. But Wilson says that kind of message is too complicated to convey in a 30-second spot. Others say these are thoughts the governor would just as soon not get across.

“He’s got to have an enemy,” says state Sen. David A. Roberti, the former Senate leader. “I don’t like that, but maybe that’s how you win in California. That’s how Republicans have traditionally won. . . . Fortunately for Gov. Wilson, he’s got some very visible enemies who upset the public--immigrants, welfare recipients being the old standbys, and criminals for sure--that he can gravitate to.”

For most of Wilson’s term, the Democrats who control the Legislature checked the governor’s impulses, rejecting or watering down his most extreme proposals on welfare, immigration, education and crime. Wilson, in fact, appeared comfortable with the relationship, which allowed him to portray himself as tougher than thou, blame the Democrats for blocking change and ultimately enact proposals in line with the centrist leanings that have characterized his career. Then came Polly Klaas.

Kidnaped from a slumber party in her Petaluma home last year, and later found murdered, the 12-year-old girl became a vehicle for a state’s fear of random crime, especially after an ex-convict confessed to the crime. The long search for Polly’s body galvanized the public’s anger and focused attention on the Legislature’s failure to pass many of the anti-crime measures Wilson had long advocated.

Wilson immediately endorsed the “three strikes” sentencing measure, which requires prison terms of 25 years to life for two-time losers convicted of a third felony. When some prosecutors and judges fretted that the measure was so broad it would clog the courts and fill the prisons with aging, nonviolent criminals, many in the Legislature expected Wilson to follow his usual pattern and agree to a compromise.

Like Nixon going to China or Reagan cutting an arms deal with the Soviet Union, Wilson, insulated by his immense store of credibility on the crime issue, could have taken a stand against the biggest crime bill of them all. Instead, he insisted that the bill be passed into law exactly as written by its sponsor, Fresno photographer Mike Reynolds, whose daughter was murdered two years ago by a repeat felon. Less than a year after failing to advance past its first committee test, the bill sailed through on landslide votes in both houses of the Legislature.

Wilson signed the historic legislation on a rain-swept March morning in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood division, chosen because it had one of the city’s highest rates of violent crime a year ago. With television cameras whirring, Wilson sat at a simple metal desk surrounded by uniformed cops, the leaders of several victims’ groups and a handful of politicians. “We’re going to start turning career criminals,” he said, “into career inmates.”

The governor’s signature on the three-strikes bills spoke more about his vision than volumes of speeches on the power of prevention ever could. The new law is expected to produce a prison-building boom that will dwarf the past decade’s explosion, which already has made California home to one of the world’s largest penal colonies. The bill, according to Wilson’s Corrections Department, will force the state to build an additional 20 prisons in the next six years--at a time when the University of California and the California State University systems will be lucky to add one new campus each. The $2-billion annual cost of operating the new prisons--at more than $21,000 per inmate--is roughly seven times the amount Wilson will spend this year on his entire agenda of prevention programs.

To lead is to choose, Wilson said in that first address to the Legislature, when he urged lawmakers to invest in programs that would prevent human failure rather than warehouse it. Now he asserts--with significant public backing--that the best prevention that money can buy is to lock up the thugs before they steal again.

Wilson acknowledges that every dollar he spends on prisons is a dollar he does not have for the kind of schools, drug treatment or job training that he has said can reduce crime over the long haul. He says he regrets that the state cannot do more to help children born to abusive parents. But that compassion so much on display four years ago has faded, overtaken, at least for now, by the cold reality of limited dollars and the voters’ priorities, at least as he sees them.

Wilson’s predecessors--his opponent’s father among them--built legacies of universities, parks and college campuses, but this governor describes his prisons as an investment in California’s future. “You can’t have people living in fear,” he says, “and still have what I call a civilized society.” While others may judge a society by the quality of its schools or the way it treats its poor, Wilson has subordinated those standards to something more fundamental--a message that can be articulated clearly, and toughly, in a 30-second commercial, today’s equivalent of those 19th-Century handbills.