NEWS ANALYSIS : State’s Woes Not Expected to Hurt Wilson’s Campaign : Politics: Analysts say presidential candidate alone can’t be blamed. And California’s clout still counts.

You’ve heard it all before. California, where the dream has turned into a nightmare. The place where serial murderers come to murder, gangs to rampage, flakes to flake, nature to vent its rage with earthquakes, floods and fires. Where housing prices plummet, the economy founders and counties stand in line at Bankruptcy Court.

So why would anyone from this sun-kissed Sodom have a chance to be elected President, much less a guy on whose watch California has suffered $26 billion worth of disasters?

Because, political analysts say, the state’s political importance has survived intact despite its slide toward the abyss.

As Gov. Pete Wilson today formally announces his bid for the presidency, most political analysts believe California’s turn for the worse will have little impact on the governor because it will be difficult to blame him alone for every hit the state has taken.

The bottom line, it seems, is still the numbers. California was home to almost 11% of those who cast ballots in the 1992 presidential election, more than any other state. Ditto its role in campaign finance: Californians donated 12% of the contributions of $200 or larger made to candidates in the 1992 primaries, according to federal records.

It is still the state with the mostest, at least as far as electoral votes--54--are concerned. And, to put it bluntly, there is not a politician alive who thinks President Clinton can win a second term without California’s support unless the race is drastically redrawn.

So even if Wilson cannot count on winning California--and recent polls have him losing here in prospective primary and general election matchups--he still comes into the race bearing a presumption of some clout.

Political Benefits

The biblical nature of the state’s recent disasters have not changed that. Indeed, California’s troubles have become Exhibit A in Wilson’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. As he joked recently in New Hampshire and repeats most places he campaigns:

“A friend of mine says I understand very well why you’re running for President. Having presided over 22 natural disasters in California, it’s the logical next step on a career of masochism.”

If he cannot be blamed for most of the disasters, Wilson is trying to reap their political benefit by persuading voters that anyone who can govern a state with this many problems, man-made and natural, has the necessary experience and will to run the nation. That sense of, well, pride in California’s recent chaos also has infected other members of the governor’s staff.

One pointed out, when asked, that since Wilson became governor 4 1/2 years ago, “every single county” has been declared to be in a state of emergency at one time or another, some of them more than once.

“A pretty amazing record, certainly unequaled in any state in the union,” the aide offered somewhat boastfully.

Sally Novetzke, a Wilson volunteer and political veteran from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, says voters in that first-caucus state are surprisingly well-informed about the governor’s tenure in California. (Though few of them thought enough of Wilson to trek to the recent straw poll in Ames, where he placed a dismal eighth). She suggested that, overall, the challenges he has faced in California help his candidacy.

“Most of us look at California as a mini-United States. Geographically and demographically, you have everything the other 49 states have,” she said. “If you’re going to elect a governor, please let it be from a state large enough to handle the problems the U.S. has experienced.”

While Novetzke is charmingly polite, that last comment could reasonably be taken as a slam against former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who is running against Wilson for the GOP nomination. It also resurrects the often-heard insult leveled by Republicans against then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992: “The failed governor of a small state.”

Poles Apart

There is evidence, however, to bolster Novetzke’s contention: Two of the nation’s last six presidents--Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan--have come from California. They are the only presidents since the 1950s to be elected to two terms. The former governor of a smaller state, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, lost his reelection bid, and the jury is still out on a second term for Clinton.

But Nixon and Reagan were poles apart when it came to political and personal appeal. Which raises the question: Just what is a Californian, in the minds of presidential voters?

If recent candidates are any gauge, there is no one answer.

In Nixon, voters saw a political persona so starched that he walked the San Clemente beach during his presidency wearing spit-shined black wingtips. And while he began and ended his public life in California, great blocks of time in the middle were spent in New York, New Jersey and Washington, making him as much a national figure as a Californian.

The quintessential California President was Ronald Reagan, who came to embody the West despite his Midwestern birthplace--right down to the jeans and boots, the cowboy belt buckles, the movie star pals and the ranch in the hills overlooking tony Santa Barbara.

The only California candidate to suffer an enduringly bad rap is former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., who in his repeated runs for the presidency came to define flakiness in some quarters--and prescience in others. He did, after all, champion things such as recycling and classroom computers 20 years before they became suburban staples. And he spent the 1992 campaign arguing for a flat income tax--which Republican candidates are championing this time around.

Whatever Brown’s idiosyncrasies, Wilson is cut from another bolt of cloth entirely, neither Moonbeam nor Moondoggie. Like Nixon, he leans toward a studious formality--posing recently for a magazine picture on a bluff overlooking La Jolla Cove, wearing a dark suit and shiny loafers, his red patterned tie ruffled slightly by the sea breeze.

Even if he has loosened up enough to wear pricey Windbreakers and khakis to commiserate with victims during the state’s disasters, it is hard to imagine Wilson enjoying a Reaganesque day splitting firewood and clearing brush. Befitting his own Midwestern roots, the governor favors Scotch and cigars over Chardonnay and Brie, and with his congenital, occasionally brittle reserve comes off as the antithesis of the let-it-all-hang-out Californian.

“He doesn’t walk in the door and exude California,” said Teresa Rosenberger, an uncommitted health care consultant who hosted a gathering for Wilson recently in New Hampshire. She then laughed:

“He didn’t have blond hair and a surfboard.”

Playing Against Type

Indeed, one reason that Wilson may avoid being contaminated by California’s messier images is that he plays against type, political analyst William Schneider said.

“As far as I know, the words ‘Pete Wilson’ and ‘flaky’ have never been used in the same sentence,” Schneider said. “The notion of California as a flaky and unserious place with off-the-wall politicians can’t be used to disqualify Pete Wilson, like it could be used against Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan the movie actor.”

If opponents cannot castigate Wilson as a goofy Californian, they at least will use his tenure as California governor to paint him as a man who has flip-flopped on many issues, from reneging on a promise not to raise income taxes to turning aside his vow to serve out his current term.

For his part, however, Wilson is trying to take advantage of another California stereotype--that this is the place where groundbreaking political movements get their start.

He argues in his presidential campaign that he is the only candidate to take steps to curb illegal immigration--with his support of last year’s Proposition 187--and slice affirmative action programs through executive orders, a lawsuit against the state and his support of a constitutional amendment barring the use of racial preferences in hiring and education.

The image of California as the place where things happen is, the state’s partisans believe, still present despite the succession of disasters that have tarnished its once-golden aura.

“With earthquakes and riots and all, we’re still California,” said GOP political consultant Ron Smith, exhibiting the sort of engaging boosterism that has ballooned the state’s population past 31 million.

“We’re the movies and the O.J. trial. We’re where it’s at, whether you’re talking about government policy or trials or prominent earthquakes. It’s here--and I think there is a glamour to California.”