Pay Attention When Wilson Picks Fights

Pete Wilson demands your attention. Here’s how you can tell: He’s picking fights.

There’s his fight with the state bar; the governor would like to cut off funding because of what he sees as the bar’s excessive political correctness and opposition to his efforts to end affirmative action. That will lead to compromise.

Then there’s his more consequential fight with organized labor, never an official Wilson favorite, though he’s played unacknowledged footsie with them more often than he’d like to let on. No compromise in the offing there.

California is leading the Republican effort to stop the taking of union dues for union political action groups, and Wilson has placed himself at the forefront. Undeterred by labor threats of retaliation against corporate interests, Wilson is leading an initiative drive to require that unions obtain specific permission from individual union members before using their dues in political campaigns.

There is widespread concern among ranking labor and Democratic figures that the measure cannot be defeated if it qualifies for the ballot. The anti-labor forces have hired two signature-gathering firms for the ballot drive and mailed out 1.4 million petitions to conservatives around the state.

Why the fights? Simple. The 64-year-old governor is a lame duck with a feeble grip on public attention. And despite his expensive fiasco in the last presidential race--a $6-million campaign that ended five months before the first primary--he wants to run again in 2000.

Taking on “lefty” lawyers and a resurgent labor movement could make Wilson a national Republican hero. Of course, that was the theory behind his earlier crusades against illegal immigrants and affirmative action.

While it would be unfair to say that the governor is Freddie Krueger-like in his persistence and political viciousness, it is true that he is uncommonly persistent, even for an overachieving office seeker. And it also is true that there is a distinct pattern to his areas of intense focus.

With the exception of the visionary pragmatism of his so-called preventive government program of 1990 and 1991--largely the product of his late public relations master, Otto Bos--for which many credulous analysts showered him with praise, Wilson has focused his energies principally on policies inimical to the interests of those who struggle to make ends meet and those without white skin.

Since this is politics and not a horror movie, viciousness is in the eye of the beholder. But it is undeniable that, in this land marked by some of the grossest disparities in wealth and power in the advanced industrial world, the tough guy governor invariably selects the weakest among us as the targets of his not inconsiderable energy and wrath.

Here the governor’s staunch partisans will leap to their feet, protesting that Wilson has long taken on the state’s most powerful union, the California Teachers Assn. Well, not really.

When he ran for reelection in 1994, Wilson’s aides privately hoped that the CTA would remain neutral in the general election. Appearing at the union’s convention, Wilson praised the union repeatedly. And today he has cast himself as champion of its top priority, class size reduction, which of course would add more members to its ranks.

Promoters of the initiative against union political action funds have stacked the deck by pairing it with an undeniably popular and not especially related idea: Banning foreign contributions to state campaigns.

Wilson has come to rely on such gimmicks because he has never demonstrated much appeal on his own hook. The only outstanding figure he’s actually beaten is Jerry Brown, catching him in a 1982 Senate race coming off his determinedly marginal 1980 presidential campaign, at the tail end of a tumultuous eight years as governor, in his fifth appearance on as many statewide ballots. With all that, Wilson eked out a mere 5-point victory.

Running for reelection in 1988, Wilson easily bested Leo McCarthy. In 1990, he won the governorship in a narrow victory over Dianne Feinstein. Then in 1994, he blew away a self-destructing Kathleen Brown.

Now he casts his gaze skyward once again, his characteristic smallness of purpose and largeness of ambition joined together to further roil the waters and rub raw the resentments of our tarnished Golden State. May we at last be delivered from a politics of such angry emptiness.