Washington Insider Takes Over for Wilson

Call it an upgrade, not a shake-up. Call it, politely, a restructure. Call it what you will, Gov. Pete Wilson’s fledgling presidential campaign is under new management.

Titles get tricky. George Gorton, the governor’s longtime political strategist who orchestrated his near-flawless 1994 reelection victory, still is the campaign manager. But a new guy is in charge.

He is not a new guy to Washington insiders or presidential politics. Neither is he new to Wilson. But Craig Fuller is new to Wilson campaign leadership. His title is chairman, as in chairman of the board and CEO.

There was a sense by Wilson and his longtime chief of staff, Bob White, that the campaign needed more octane for the big race.

The program wasn’t quite ready for prime time; it required a wider dimension and a better performance.

Nothing wrong with Gorton, but he had never done this before. Managing a statewide campaign in California requires skills he has shown repeatedly, namely the ability to hone a candidate’s message and drive it home to voters with persuasive TV ads.

Running for President demands a broader game plan, especially in early contests like Iowa and New Hampshire’s. You need to get up close with local party leaders and hold some voters’ hands; maybe even help them feed their hogs at the crack of dawn.

Beyond that, Wilson’s opening act March 23 in announcing his “intention to form an exploratory committee”--there is no such committee and he’d already decided to run--drew mixed reviews. An Eastern tour was widely panned.

On a Sunday night, April 2, Fuller was invited to a small private dinner upstairs at Frank Fat’s, a political hangout near the state Capitol. The meeting was set up by lobbyist Jack Flanigan, a longtime, close friend of Fuller, White and Wilson. All four were there, and the governor asked Fuller to run his campaign.

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Backing way up, the last time Fuller worked in Sacramento he had mistakenly picked up the wrong form as a UCLA student and applied to run the summer intern program at the Capitol. He got the job and greatly impressed then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s top two aides, Edwin Meese III and Michael K. Deaver.

Then he met Flanigan through the Coro Foundation--where college graduates work in government--and, through him, became friends with White and then-Mayor Wilson. Fuller even flew Wilson a couple of times in his single-engine airplane during the 1978 gubernatorial campaign. “He just went to sleep on me,” Fuller recalls.

Deaver recruited Fuller into his public affairs firm and brought him, at age 30, into the White House when Reagan was elected. There, Fuller showed extraordinary talent as somebody who not only was astute, cool and organized, but could get along with all warring factions. And that was a White House with Machiavellian warring factions.

Within Reagan’s “troika” of top advisers, Deaver was aligned with James A. Baker III against Meese (and later fellow Californian William P. Clark). As presidential assistant for Cabinet affairs, Fuller reported to Meese--which suited Baker and Deaver just fine, because they regarded the young aide as their man. But Fuller didn’t play games. He’d walk out of a room when the plotting and sniping began. Everybody trusted him.

When Baker left the White House in 1985, he arranged for Fuller to become chief of staff to his old pal, then-Vice President George Bush. Immediately, Fuller and the late Lee Atwater, an alley fighter of opposite personality and style, began organizing Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign.

Bush’s mistake after he won was in passing up Fuller and naming abrasive New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a Washington neophyte, as his White House chief of staff. Fuller could have had a Cabinet post, but opted to make big money in the corporate world. When Wilson recruited him, he was playing another sensitive role as senior vice president, corporate affairs, for controversial Philip Morris.

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Fuller, 44, had kept close to Wilson over the years and advised him to run for President. “It didn’t make sense to wait four years,” he said.

As chairman, he’ll oversee the campaign organization, be an occasional Wilson surrogate at fund-raisers and tread the TV talk show circuit. Beyond that, he’ll give Wilson’s candidacy more credibility nationally.

Gorton will develop strategy--head up polling and ad-making--and still have direct access to Wilson. There also are some part-time gurus--”senior advisers”-- including veteran strategists Stu Spencer, Ken Khachigian, James Lake and Larry Thomas.

Fuller already has accomplished one important task. He has persuaded Wilson to stop talking until his vocal cords heal.