GOP Gubernatorial Rivals Represent 3 Wings of Party

As they gather in San Jose this weekend to debate the future of their party, California Republicans will get a look at three gubernatorial candidates who embody distinct strands of the GOP’s past--and its possible future.

To date, the primary contest has been dominated by questions of political ideology, namely whether California’s Republicans will break with recent history and choose a candidate who charts a less conservative course than the party has followed in recent years.

Beneath that is a test of worldviews, one that pits a small-town populist against a big-time deal-maker and a conservative idea man.

Richard Riordan, the multimillionaire lawyer, venture capitalist and former mayor of Los Angeles, represents the wing that has long bankrolled the party. Secretary of State Bill Jones, whose family still owns a farm in Fresno, is a rural-based career politician of the sort that now dominates the small group of elected Republicans in Sacramento. And Pacific Palisades businessman Bill Simon Jr., a political novice, covers the intellectual turf by dropping the names of the right-wing think tanks and taxpayer groups that provided the brainpower for the Reagan revolution.

“The three guys are almost wholly different,” said veteran GOP strategist Ken Khachigian, who is sitting out the primary. “It is the beauty of our system--you get to pick from column A, column B and column C.”

The semiannual party convention in San Jose, expected to draw about 1,200 people, will be a chance for the GOP candidates to stoke support among the party’s most faithful followers. An hourlong debate is set for today, and delegates will have an opportunity to show their preference in a straw poll to be conducted over the weekend.

The candidates draw their base of support from the three wings. Riordan has raised the most money and is backed by the party’s financial establishment, including President Bush’s top California lieutenant, attorney Gerald Parsky. Simon has drawn endorsements from most of the conservative ideological groups and snapped up several of Bush’s grass-roots operatives. And Jones has the backing of former Gov. George Deukmejian and Central Valley farmers.

For each candidate, there are contrasts between the wing of the party he represents and his own record or performance on the trail. Riordan portrays himself as a pragmatist but has been criticized by some for doing a poor job of running Los Angeles. Though Simon bills himself as the candidate of ideas, he is long on broad proposals and short on specifics. Jones’ career--from farmer to Assembly leader to campaign finance reform advocate--is filled with contradictions.

Still, the candidates’ origins in the party have helped shape their messages. They also may be a guide to how they would challenge Gov. Gray Davis in November and, if victorious, how they would govern.

Stakes Are High for California Republicans

The stakes for the Republican Party are profound. After holding the governor’s office through most of the 1990s, the GOP was routed four years ago. The only Republican to hold statewide office, Jones, is termed out this year. Many analysts say the party has moved too far to the right on social issues in the last few years to mesh with the state’s moderate electorate, and has been too slow to react to the state’s demographic changes.

But this year also holds encouraging signs for Republicans, too. Bush is popular in California, where he lost roundly in 2000. Gov. Gray Davis, on the other hand, is considered vulnerable for his handling of the energy crisis and the state’s economic difficulties. That gives party leaders hope that they can reverse their fortunes this year.

Not surprisingly, each candidate says he is the man for the job, but none has been as vocal about the GOP’s electoral dilemma as Riordan. His solution: Jettison ideology to get the job done.

At last month’s debate in San Jose, Riordan proposed dropping the plank of the party platform that calls for abortion to be outlawed. “We need a platform that is going to respect differences of opinion if we’re going to get Republicans elected,” he said.

It was classic Riordan, a man who touts himself as a “nonpartisan problem-solver” similar to the pitch he made when he first won elective office in 1993.

Riordan’s approach to government was shaped by his years as an attorney and leveraged buyout specialist--and only later, as a political power in Los Angeles.

Riordan moved into elective politics in 1993 by running for the Los Angeles mayor’s office as a can-do businessman, becoming the first in a series of big-city 1990s mayors who were largely non-ideological. If Riordan becomes the next governor of California, he will break similarly new ground.

“You get less of a tendency to get candidates from that [business] wing. That tends to be the wing that provides the money,” said Jack Pitney, who once worked for the Republican National Committee and now teaches politics at Claremont McKenna College. “That’s probably because we have a much stronger ideological tradition in this state than elsewhere, probably a much more active ... conservative wing.”

That is the wing represented by Bill Simon.

On the surface, Riordan and Simon, who are friends, seem similar. Both are millionaires who pledge to bring their business acumen to elected office.

But Simon’s appeals in the primary have been threaded with a far more conservative ideology, in both the intellectual and partisan sense of the word. Not only does he call himself “a proud, conservative Republican,” Simon also likes to refer to himself “the candidate of ideas.”

Simon’s initial experience with government, too, was different than Riordan’s. His father was a financier who was appointed U.S. secretary of the treasury by President Nixon. He views politics through economic policy and the law--and that is reflected in his emphases in the campaign.

Courting the Party’s Intellectual Wing

Since he announced his run for governor last year, Simon, who has lived in California since 1990, has courted the GOP’s intellectual wing. A former board member of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., he cites support from members of conservative California think tanks, including the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles.

On Thursday, he announced the endorsement of former U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, a darling of the party’s intellectuals.

Although he agrees with much of the state’s conservative base on emotional issues such as abortion, gun control and crime, Simon has chosen to focus on the drier topics of infrastructure, water and budgets in his campaign stops. He pushes key planks of Republican orthodoxy, such as a capital gains tax cut, and was the first to vow to never raise taxes.

Occupying the space between the business and ideological wings is Jones, the small-town farmer turned career politician.

Jones grew up surrounded by a different aspect of politics than his two multimillionaire challengers. His initiation was into the practical, workaday world of local and state elective politics.

Jones--as the candidate proudly tells GOP audiences--was the Fresno County chairman of Young Republicans for Nixon. Over time, Jones worked his way up from freshman assemblyman to majority leader to secretary of state. It is the sort of resume that has dominated the Republicans in Sacramento in the past, including the party’s last two gubernatorial candidates--Dan Lungren and Pete Wilson.

Despite his career in the corridors of power, however, Jones retains a populist edge. He reminds people that he still spends time on his family farm, and punctuates his campaign speeches with the words, “Now, folks....” He jumps on Sacramento scandals, especially those that he alleges show the influence of special interest money on the Davis administration. He prides himself as being plain-spoken: “When you are straight with the people, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,” he told a group of community college administrators this week, in a standard line.

And Jones is one of the state’s most vocal elected champions of campaign finance reform, a factor in the meager fund-raising in his gubernatorial bid. In that manner, Pitney says, Jones continues the populist GOP tradition in California embodied by past governors such as Earl Warren.

But Jones has been fairly quiet about his campaign reform stance. That leaves him running on his long career of service to the party and knowledge of how to get things done in Sacramento. The danger is that those qualifications--the foundations of Republican candidacies for the last decade--may not be enough to win the nomination this time around.