THE JAUNDICED EYE : If at First You Don’t Succeed--Pull a Wilson! Napoleon Did!

Napoleon Bonaparte saw the wheels fall off the juggernaut of his once unstoppable emperorship and was exiled to Elba for his pains.

End of the line for Boney? Perish the thought. Napoleon promptly did what savvy losers and flops have been emulating ever since. He pulled a Wilson. Storming back to France from Elba and calling a press conference, he announced himself a candidate for emperor--and got the job.

That Napoleon was soon enough back on the Exile Express, this time to St. Helena and this time for good, is neither here nor there; he demonstrated, in gaudy fashion, that pulling a Wilson can, overnight, reverse, retrieve and redeem even the most lost of causes.

Pulling a Wilson--so-called after California Gov. Pete Wilson, who recently announced his presidential candidacy as if he hadn’t already announced his presidential candidacy a few months before--has not only been employed to erase false starts and bungled first tries. With the flick of a press release, it can make the old, the tried, the boringly familiar seem bright and new again.

What did President Gerald R. Ford do when President Richard M. Nixon’s war on drugs floundered? He pulled a Wilson and announced: a war on drugs. Five following Presidents have pulled five more Wilsons to announce five more wars on drugs--each as dramatic and urgent as if it were a new idea.

President Bill Clinton, with his Bosnia pronouncements, pulls a Wilson almost daily, certain in the belief that yesterday’s dud pronouncement will be forgotten if he makes today’s revised version seem to be the first he’s ever made.

With the American public’s attention

span shrinking almost hourly, while its apathy quotient hits all-time highs, pull ing a Wilson is becoming not only ever easier to do but ever more effective. “For most Americans today, when history is

what they had for breakfast,” observes one veteran Wilson-pulling expert, “who remembers what Pete Wilson or anybody except maybe Roseanne said yesterday? And with things like the O. J. Simpson trial and Hugh Grant to deal with, who cares?”

Just so. When yesterday never happened or doesn’t matter, the canny operative has carte blanche to start all over today with a clean slate. Elizabeth Taylor, for example, has pulled seven Wilsons, counting on her adoring fans to greet each wedding announcement as if she had not trotted dewy-eyed down the aisle six times before.

With its volatile ups and downs, showbiz, perhaps more than politics, uniquely depends on pulling Wilsons to blot out the past and restart flagging careers. “Cher pulled a lulu of a Wilson when she materialized as a Method actress,” marvels a Hollywood flack. “Diana Ross--one minute a chick in the Supremes, next minute a diva. And, of course, the all-time champ: Ronald Reagan. No wonder his middle name is Wilson!”

Not that Wilson-pulling is an exclusively showbiz or even American technique. Chairman Mao Tse-Tung announced--admittedly, without the slightest fear of contradiction--the same new millennium with every Five-Year Plan, as if the last Five-Year Plan and the Five-Year Plan before that hadn’t existed and hadn’t nose-dived, big time.

Advertising, meanwhile, depends almost entirely on Wilson-pulling. Every detergent and mouthwash is born anew every year with a new slogan and a new package--as if it just landed from Mars and weren’t the same old stuff inside. And baseball star Darryl Strawberry not only pulls a Wilson every time he signs with a new team--he pulls the same Wilson: A clean-living religious zealot has just arrived to save the franchise.

And that’s the scoop on pulling a Wilson. Next time: “Pulling a Wilson--the anatomy of a tried-and-true scam, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Darryl Strawberry.”*