CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Brown Criticizes Wilson for Madonna Joke

You knew it had to happen, some time in this weird, roller coaster of a governor’s race. Pete Wilson and Kathleen Brown have clashed over all manner of things, from crime to immigration to welfare to education to government spending. And now the bickering has centered on an unlikely subject: Madonna.

Yes, that Madonna, the bellybutton-piercing, body part-baring singer in the sexual vanguard of American culture, who found herself Tuesday plunged into the increasingly testy back-and-forth between the two major candidates for governor.

It began when Wilson, speaking at the Long Beach convention of the League of California Cities, renewed his attacks on Brown for what he terms her failure to campaign for 1993’s Proposition 172. That proposition extended a half-cent state sales tax and earmarked the money for local police and public safety needs.

Wilson has often used that effort as a symbol of what he says is Brown’s history of sitting on the sidelines during tough battles. This time, however, he added a zinger:

“When we were campaigning for Proposition 172, to put more cops on the streets in cities and unincorporated areas, to ensure that you had the resources necessary to protect public safety, Kathleen Brown was harder to find than a nun at a Madonna concert,” he said. “Come to think of it, she was even harder to find than Madonna at a nunnery.”

The audience, several hundred mayors and city council members, laughed. Brown most certainly did not. Instead, she issued a heated statement through a spokeswoman.

“As a woman and as a Catholic, I’m deeply offended by Pete Wilson’s latest smear,” Brown said. “I ask him to retract his statement immediately and to apologize to California women and Catholics.

“Pete Wilson is a 27-year career politician but apparently he hasn’t learned that making off-color remarks about gender or religion during a political campaign is totally unacceptable.”

After his initial response to Brown’s remarks--”Huh?”--Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur said that the governor had no plans to retract his statement as Brown had requested.

“No offense was intended to either Madonna or nuns,” he added, barely swallowing a laugh.

Brown had no response to--or was not aware of--the governor’s other punch line of the day, when he compared Brown’s campaign to the venerable Queen Mary, docked within view of the convention center in which he was speaking.

Both, he said, are “firmly anchored--and not goin’ anywhere.”

All joking aside, Wilson continued Tuesday to cast Brown as essentially a newcomer to the rough-and-tumble world of gubernatorial-level decision-making. He cast himself as the key figure in the trenches, who had worked with the Democrat-controlled state Legislature to help yank California from its recessionary days back toward an upcoming “California Renaissance.”

“We not only got through tough times, we produced change, real and important change,” said Wilson, a former league member when he was mayor of San Diego. “We broke partisan gridlock, we junked the job-killing machine, and we created reforms sufficient to turn California instead into a job-creating machine. In just the past 18 months, we’ve added 150,000 new jobs, and they are good, high-paying jobs.”

He castigated Brown for supporting compulsory binding arbitration on contracts with municipal employees, a position that he said could destroy the finances of many cities.

“Of course,” he added acidly, “she has never had to balance a budget, as you have, as I have. I balanced 11 as mayor and four as governor of California.”

Brown has argued throughout the campaign that Wilson has in fact botched the state budget in the past four years, spending more than was coming in and seizing revenues that formerly went to the cities.