CAPITOL JOURNAL : Bloom Is Off the Governorship, Wilson Admits

SACRAMENTO —  New streaks of gray are showing in Gov. Pete Wilson’s hair and he is looking a bit frazzled. His voice even is cracking more than usual.

“He’s been working late,” explains spokesman Bill Livingstone, pointing out that the governor is battling a Monday deadline for signing or vetoing hundreds of bills.

But clearly Wilson is weary from more than night work and his anxieties go beyond pieces of legislation. Nine months in office have taken the bloom off his governorship and he knows it.

“I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t concerned about plummeting polls,” he told reporters the other day.

It was easy early on for Wilson to talk expansively about being both pro-environment and pro-job development, for schools and against taxes, supportive of gay rights and also small business. But it has become difficult to act in a way that will match the rhetoric and please the people whose expectations were raised.

It has been hard at times for Wilson to measure up to his self-description of a new age “compassionate conservative.” The descriptive words can be in conflict and then the governor must choose--as he did when he sided with conservatives, in the name of protecting small businesses from lawsuits, and vetoed the bill that would have protected homosexuals from job discrimination.

“He has committed the one sin that if you’re a politician you can never do. And that is to make people think you’re insincere,” says a veteran Republican strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If he’s going to be for gay rights, as he said he was all through the (1990) campaign, then be for gay rights. . . . But if he’s going to veto the bill, don’t bash the right wing in doing it.”

In his veto message, Wilson denounced a “tiny minority of mean-spirited, gay-bashing bigots” who opposed the legislation--comments that many Republicans considered unnecessary and incendiary.

The new governor has been getting phenomenal press nationally: “The most interesting and important American politician outside the White House today”--David Broder of the Washington Post. “Mr. Wilson may emerge as a model for governors across the country”--David Shribman of the Wall Street Journal. “Some see Wilson as the GOP’s best (presidential) hope in 1996”--Debbie Howlett in USA Today.

But in California, the public seems to have lost its enthusiasm. Its opinion of Wilson has dropped dramatically since last spring, according to statewide surveys conducted by both the Los Angeles Times Poll and Mervin Field’s California Poll.

More people now disapprove than approve of the governor’s job performance--46% to 39%--The Times Poll found. Further, most believe that his veto of the gay rights bill was politically motivated rather than based on the merits. However, the main reason for their disenchantment with the governor is the combination of big tax hikes and spending cuts he approved last July in order to resolve a $14.3-billion deficit--”a budget that has something for everyone to hate,” he quipped prophetically.

Wilson’s summer strategy was to move quickly away from the budget flap and promote a more positive agenda, such as job development, a business partnership with education, “preventive government” and crime-fighting. But he got bogged down in a political insiders game of chicken with the Legislature over redistricting, an issue that holds little interest for most of the public. Now he is hoping that the state Supreme Court will break the stalemate by redrawing legislative and congressional districts in a way that will allow him to claim credit for “reapportionment reform.”

Meanwhile, his advisers plan to take the governor on the road for a series of major speeches and media events as soon as he acts on all the bills--”to talk about the things that are good about California,” an aide said.

But another damaging budget brawl may be building. Because the California economy is not rebounding, there are fears of a new deficit with red ink ranging up to $6 billion. In the next battle over spending and taxes, the Legislature--still smarting from Wilson’s campaign endorsement of Proposition 140 and its term limits--likely will be even tougher in negotiations.

Senate Leader David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) says legislators have learned that Wilson “plays hardball and bears his resentments very intensely. . . . He doesn’t give an inch until he sees there’s a confrontational downside. It’s part of the governor’s modus operandi we’re just going to have to get used to. . . . The skirmishing’s going to be a lot more ideological and a lot more intense.”

But whatever Wilson agrees to, says a prominent supporter, “if he raises taxes again next year, it’s all over for him.”

A longtime adviser, noting that a chief executive’s popularity can rise and fall with the economy, observes philosophically: “When a recession hits, there’s nothing a governor can do about it. You pay the price if you’re in power.

“Pete just has to hope and pray the economy comes back next year. If it does, his (poll) numbers will go back up.”