A Confusing and Confused Performance

Sundays should be a day of rest, reserved for sleeping in and recharging. Gov. Pete Wilson should have slept in last Sunday. Instead, he got up and laid an egg on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

It may have been his worst TV performance ever.

His voice--still not recovered from the April throat surgery--was in a perpetual, distracting crackle. He couldn’t help that. But he also flashed nervous smiles, sometimes sneers, that revealed his own discomfort and undoubtedly transferred it to viewers.

Worse, he often seemed confused and was, in turn, confusing. That’s putting it charitably. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen simply called his answers “a fog of fibs.”

This was 180 degrees from Wilson’s virtuoso performance two weeks earlier on ABC-TV’s David Brinkley show. Then, he was paired with a handy foil, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The governor does best with a foil.

Last Sunday, Wilson was all alone with three reporters, querying him about such political embarrassments as his broken promises not to run for President and not to raise state income taxes, and his inconsistencies on affirmative action and abortion funding.

Just Wilson, the reporters and an estimated 6 million viewers.

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On affirmative action, Wilson candidly admitted: “I have changed” positions over the years. That should have been the model for all his replies.

Instead, the governor’s “explanation” of why he broke his promise not to run for President again was convoluted. Something about his “boss”--presumably California--telling him, “You know, I think maybe we should renegotiate your contract.”

Even more disingenuous was Wilson’s flat denial that if elected President, the governor’s office would be turned over to a Democrat, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis. “We won’t [turn it over],” he asserted. In tortured language, Wilson then described his proposed ballot initiative for gubernatorial succession as if it were a done deal. The proposal would require a special election to fill a vacancy. But voters first must approve the idea, and so far there has been little effort even to qualify it for the 1996 ballot.

What particularly caught my ear, however, was Wilson’s distortion of why he broke a campaign promise and raised upper-level income taxes as part of a record $7.5-billion, 1991 tax hike. The Legislature’s “liberal Democratic majority” forced him into it as their price “for the deepest spending cuts in American history,” he said.

In reality, Wilson was talked into the income tax hike by manufacturing interests that objected to a proposed tax on utility bills. And those “deep cuts” were pretty shallow. Half a $14.3-billion revenue gap was filled with tax hikes, perhaps a fourth by spending cuts and the rest by bookkeeping gimmicks.

As for a Wilson claim that the state now is spending a bit less than when he became governor, the reason is that he forced local governments to transfer roughly $4 billion in property taxes to schools. This then allowed the state to reduce its education spending by an equal amount. It was just a shell game.

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Wilson’s comments on abortion funding created the most controversy. Although he supports abortion rights, the governor said, “I don’t think the taxpayers should necessarily be asked to pay for it.” Abortions for poor women should be funded “from private sources.”

So he opposes Medicaid funding of abortions? “Yes.” But a reporter noted that in California, Medicaid does pay for abortions through Medi-Cal. “Yes, because it is the [state] law,” the governor answered. Had he tried to change the law? “No, [that] would require a vote of the people. I am not a scofflaw. I don’t think that we should do it, but we’re doing it.”

Come again!

Ballot initiatives to change the law are among Wilson’s favorite political weapons--not only for gubernatorial succession, but for cutting taxes, denying services to illegal immigrants, stiffening criminal penalties. . . .

What’s more, when some legislators the previous week had threatened to block the state budget because it contained $40 million in Medi-Cal money for abortions, Wilson pressured them out of it. Also, the governor is a selective scofflaw who refuses to obey the new federal “motor voter law.”

On Monday, campaign spokesman Dan Schnur “clarified” Wilson’s position by saying, “He’s always drawn a distinction between public funding at the state level and the federal level. . . . He has consistently supported each state’s ability to decide for themselves.”

Of course. Now we understand.

Wilson can only hope that many of those estimated 6 million viewers actually slept in last Sunday and missed the show.