Two Petes, and One Presidency

Question: With speculation that you might be a national candidate in 1996, can you assure the voters tonight that you will complete your term if you are reelected?

Answer: Yes.

--Pete Wilson responding to a reporter at a gubernatorial debate last fall

This is being written on Presidents Day, that grand national holiday in which Americans honor famous Presidents with the purchase of bedsheets at discount prices. And on this day, in California anyway, the focus is less on the Lincolns and Washingtons of the past than it is on the Wilson of our immediate future.

Pete Wilson, it is said, has a decision to make. He can run for President of the United States, the Main Prize for a career politician like himself and, incidentally, about the only elected position that Wilson--former mayor, former state legislator, former U.S. senator, current governor--has yet to hold. Or, he can hang around dysfunctional Sacramento with Willie Brown and Bernie Richter and the rest, trying to balance an unbalanceable state budget and dickering over where to build the next prison. Tough call.

Campaign promises and subsequent non-denial denials to the contrary, Wilson has left subtle clues he intends to run. For instance, last month he dragged his poor wife to a tedious news conference on the state budget. “Now that’s family values,” a sister reporter whispered, having received accurately the intended symbolic message. Next, he journeyed to Portugal for a vacation. Trips to faraway places, of course, are one way governors can demonstrate a, well, presidential interest in foreign affairs. Finally, Wilson has kept close by his top political advisers, and it’s whispered that many meetings have been taken on The Question.

“Oh, he’s running,” Jerry Brown, who as governor took his vacations in Africa, assured me. “He’s got the fever. I can recognize it; I’ve had it myself. He’s in the race.”

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That settled, a trickier question arises: Ask not whether Pete Wilson will run for President in the next election. Ask which Pete will run.

Will it be the shy, well-heeled Ivy Leaguer, the “preventive government” moderate who became mayor of San Diego by calling for better growth management . . . who campaigned against Ronald Reagan in 1976 . . . who courted the gay vote, befriended environmentalists and opposed, good Lord, Proposition 13 . . . who consistently, and blandly, won campaigns by turning them into referendums on his opponents, not himself . . . who as U.S. senator fought to bring up more field hands from Mexico . . . who as governor twisted Republican arms to push through $7 billion in added taxes . . . who of abortion once said, sensibly enough:

“I don’t think it’s a smart thing, a wise or a good thing, or one that encourages respect for the law to require a 16- or 17-year-old girl who does not want to carry a pregnancy to term to seek back-alley treatment or to abort herself with a coat hanger.”

In other words, the old Pete Wilson.

Or will it be new Pete Wilson, the gruff-talking, anti-government, ex-Marine who calls Congress a pack of “whores” . . . who responds to crime by building prisons willy-nilly, and prevention be damned . . . who campaigns for reelection as a proponent of dispatching said field hands back to Mexico, where they belong . . . who can’t wait to kick around welfare moms and--why not?--welfare dads . . . who, with state government as broke as ever, emerges as a latter-day trickle-down theorist, calling for--ah, the symmetry, the symmetry--$7 billion in tax cuts?

*

Count to 10 before answering. Yes, it would seem initially that--given the age of Newt and all--a viable Republican candidate must court voters who don’t just sleep on bedsheets, but who, on certain nights, wear them. To paraphrase the New Pete, this is no time “for sissies.”

And yet, Wilson would stand little chance of outflanking his primary opponents on the meanness frontier. Most have been singing the anti-tax, anti-abortion, white man’s blues their entire careers, not for just one campaign. They also have access to newspaper clippings, and thus stand prepared to remind Pete of his sweet old self.

Instead, the Scourge of the Southwest Border might want to revert to what, in truth, he always has been: a smart, progressive Republican, hard on crime but moderate on social issues, a bland but earnest believer in the ability of government to do more than make life miserable for the governed.

Should he survive the primaries, the Old Bland Pete would be less likely to command center stage--and all its attendant scrutiny--in the general election. And that would help make the race, in the classic Wilson style, a referendum on his opponent, one Bill Clinton. Need more be said?