Brown Predicts Wilson Primary Win : Politics: The Assembly Speaker, lobbying in Washington, advises GOP presidential hopefuls to avoid state, save money for other races.

California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, convinced that Pete Wilson will run for President, advises other prominent Republican hopefuls to cede the state to the two-term governor and spend their precious campaign funds elsewhere.

“I think (Wilson) wins the Republican primary in California, and I don’t think that (Texas Sen.) Phil Gramm and the merry band of conservatives who embraced him at the (California GOP) convention will be able to beat (Wilson),” Brown said at a Monday luncheon with Times editors and reporters. “They would be well-advised to stay out of California and leave it to Wilson as a favorite son.”

Brown said the costs of running in California are so exorbitant that other well-known GOP candidates will decide that challenging Wilson in his own back yard would not be worth it.

“You would have to spend more than Michael Huffington spent against Dianne Feinstein in a shorter period of time, and there isn’t $25 million available,” Brown said.

The outspoken Speaker, leading an annual bipartisan delegation to lobby federal officials on behalf of the state, also said that the strong support for a proposed state initiative to abolish affirmative action laws will begin to erode once white women mobilize to fight the proposal.

“Republicans are pushing a black face (on the proposition),” Brown said. “When the dust clears over the debate over affirmative action, (it will become clear) that white women are 80% to 90% the beneficiaries.”

Brown, who has been one of Wilson’s most energetic political foes, said he had assumed for some time that the governor would be on the Republican ticket. After a friendly dinner last week at the governor’s mansion with Wilson and his wife, Gayle, Brown said, “I now believe he will be pursuing the top of the ticket.”

Brown downplayed a Times poll Monday that indicated that 59% of state Republicans say Wilson should abandon any presidential aspirations.

Borrowing a line from Ken Maddy, Republican minority leader in the state Senate, Brown said: “(Wilson) always does bad in public opinion polls; he just wins elections.”

Brown also dismissed the theory that Wilson would eschew a run for the White House out of fear of leaving the state in the hands of a Democrat, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis.

“I don’t think the governor is going to let the existence of Gray Davis--or Willie Brown--interfere with any presidential plan,” Brown said. “Gray . . . is so into this image and responsibility thing” that he would not upset any of Wilson’s fundamental policies. “(Davis is) a decent and nice man; he wouldn’t do that.”

Brown humorously outlined a different approach if he were left running the state: “Every vacancy would be filled, no questions asked, and every executive order I disagreed with would be revoked.”

On the proposed ballot initiative to abolish laws giving minorities preferential treatment in hiring and awarding of contracts, Brown warned fellow Democrats to “take a principled stand”--or suffer the political consequences.

“I believe that Mr. Clinton or any other Democrat who walks away from a commitment to equal opportunity as expressed in a small remedy called affirmative action will ensure his or her defeat by that action. African Americans in wholesale numbers will either vote for someone else or not vote at all.”

The Speaker said he did not interpret Clinton’s call for affirmative action laws to be reviewed as a backing away from the issue.

“You should be mature enough and confident enough in your own principles that if there is something that doesn’t work, you should correct it,” Brown said.

Corporations, which have developed successful diversity programs, and white women, who have benefited from such programs, should be the ones to organize against the proposition, Brown said.

“Criticisms of affirmative action should be leveled not at racial minorities for allegedly taking the old white guy’s slot,” Brown said. “It should be leveled, appropriately, at the white women who got the old white guy’s slot.”

Brown made these other points:

* He said he could be more easily elected mayor of San Francisco than to the state Senate from a Marin County and San Francisco district--two possibilities he is mulling as the term limits law prevents him from running again for the Assembly. “I think I would have a lot more difficulty convincing folks that I’m not a demon in Marin County. . . . To be demonized in San Francisco is to be a cult figure.”

* He accused Republicans of playing political games by canceling his session with the California Task Force, a group of Republican House members that will focus on state issues.

Brown started his day at the White House in a session with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and several Cabinet officials.