Lying Low, Aiming High?

The state budget is as good as signed. The governor’s race has yet to ignite. There is a vacuum of sorts, and politics abhors a vacuum.

So into the gap rushes California’s quadrennial exercise in salving its neurotic insecurity. You might know it by its more common name--the debate over the early primary.

Let us reminisce: Not since 1972 has California helped choose a major party’s presidential nominee. Every four years, presidential candidates--fueled by money from, big surprise, California--skedaddle from living room to parlor in Iowa and New Hampshire, attending every third voter’s wedding or bar mitzvah.

Every four years, by the time they reach the California primary, candidates are out of money or out of the running or both.

Its ego at stake, California challenged this dismal scenario in 1996. The Legislature moved the primary from June to March 26, ignoring warnings by the early primary’s architect, state Sen. Jim Costa, that even that was too late.

Predictably, other states leapfrogged ahead. Again, the nominees were decided before California. So Costa is at it again. A bill to hold California’s primary on the first Tuesday in March--March 7 in the next presidential year, 2000--will be heard in committee this week.

Perhaps no one will be watching more closely than the man who would have to sign it into law: Pete Wilson, who as much as anyone could reap its benefit.

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Wilson’s 1996 campaign for president was historic, but not in the way he had hoped. Badgered by Republicans angry that he had flouted a promise not to run, buffeted by poor fund-raising and bereft of voice because of a throat operation, the governor’s campaign officially began and ended within a month’s time.

It was the shortest presidential bid in memory. Many of Wilson’s longtime supporters consider a second bid folly, unsure he could even carry California. But others believe he has a shot.

Essentially, his 2000 strategy would echo what he could not pull off in 1996: survive the year’s first real contest, the Iowa caucuses, and move on to the New Hampshire primary. There, push for a pass into the next batch of primaries--which would include, if Costa’s bill wins Wilson’s signature, none other than California’s.

In a nice coincidence, to some Wilson supporters, the March 7 lineup also tentatively includes a host of Yankee states they feel are simpatico with the governor--Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts. According to the secretary of state’s office, political behemoth New York also plans to move its primary to March 7--raising the prospect of a hyper-expensive bicoastal struggle.

Wilson spokesman Sean Walsh says this is all premature. “When he gets out of office . . . he’ll make an assessment about whether there is money out there to make a go of it,” Walsh said. “Money, and obviously popular sentiment.”

But politicos love reading tea leaves, and there are a few being read. Wilson is close to paying off his prodigious 1996 campaign debt, having quietly held fund-raisers as recently as last week. His popularity up, he is traveling a bit to other states. His looming unemployment will free him to hang out in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.

A supporter, UC Regent Ward Connerly, who ran the 1996 initiative outlawing most state-sponsored affirmative action programs, is now chief fund-raiser for the state Republican Party. Rumors have circulated that he might run for chairman, the better to assist a Wilson presidential campaign. Connerly doesn’t quite put that speculation to rest.

“I am being a little cagey here because I do not want to slam the door on anything--I really have no intention at all of trying to carve out a role in the party,” Connerly said. He added: “The governor is a dear friend. . . . If he said, ‘Put your money where your mouth is and come aboard as chairman of the party,’ I’d have to think twice if I wanted to allocate the time.”

The blunt Connerly believes Wilson must decide soon.

“If you’re a governor whose term ends on Dec. 31, or whatever it is, of 1998 and you’re not going to have the base of operation you’ve had, you’d better start sending signals over the mountain,” he said.

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Sending signals over the mountain is precisely what Wilson does not want to do right now. The early primary bill has coasted more smoothly through the legislative maze this time in part because the governor has laid low. Neither Costa, a Democrat from Fresno, nor the other strong backer of the bill, Republican Secretary of State Bill Jones, has talked to Wilson about it.

Wilson has not firmly committed to signing the bill, although he approves of the March 7 date “in concept,” his spokesman said. Nor has he thrown his weight publicly behind another Jones idea, a West Coast primary that would unite California, Oregon and Washington on that same day. But there is no mistaking the governor’s silence for lack of interest. “The lower the profile he keeps on this issue, the better off he is,” said one Wilson backer.