Upbeat Pete Puts On a Happy Face

OAKLAND —  Gov. Pete Wilson was all over California last week, visiting factory, field and freeway off-ramp to herald what he calls the “Great California Comeback.” This was a new Pete Wilson. Gone was the gloomy governor who spent much of his first term poor-mouthing California. In his place stood Upbeat Pete, gung-ho cheerleader for the Golden Dream.

The old Pete Wilson, politicking for workers’ comp reform and similar regulatory changes, helped foster the impression that California workplaces were infested with crooks and frauds, all plotting to feign injury and ride insurance loopholes to a palace in Bel-Air. Upbeat Pete, pumping hands with hard hats from Fontana to West Oakland, sounded like the best friend a blue-collar worker ever had.

“Our workers and our employers are as good as any anywhere,” he said Thursday at a steel plant here in one of his many media events of the week. “I’ll put them up against anyone, anyplace, anytime.”

The old Pete Wilson would feed out-of-state reporters horror stories about firms that had fled his “bad product” for greener pastures. He even would slip them lists of defectors, attempting to document his dubious case that California had become an entrepreneurial evacuation zone. Upbeat Pete told different stories, stories of businesses that gutted out a recession, of cities that bounced back from quake, fire and flood. California, he said, was full of “success stories waiting to happen.” California, he said, was “back in business.”

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The emergence of Upbeat Pete might baffle the 10% of Californians still unemployed. Perhaps they wonder if they slept through the recovery. They did not. By most measurements, the state economy today is not much different than the economy of a year ago, when Wilson was the patron saint of pessimism. In fact, with newly announced military base closures, it might even be worse. The economists still don’t seem to agree on what is wrong--some call it a recession, some call it a restructuring, all call it bad--much less on how to fix it.

No matter. Upbeat Pete went out last week and said we were roaring back. Part of his message was that whatever ails the economy at least the business climate has improved. And certainly the politics have changed: Democrats in Sacramento sound an awful lot like Arthur Laffer these days, granting regulatory concessions and praying for trickle down. Wilson also boasted of an on-time state budget and workers’ comp legislation. Left unsaid was that timely passage of a budget is what Sacramento officials are paid to do, and that the workers’ comp package closely resembles one Wilson rejected last year as a ruse, hidden behind “a fig leaf” of reform.

What, then, prompted Wilson’s transformation? The skeptical might consider political timing. Now first, let me say I prefer to believe that Wilson’s earlier pessimism was well-intended--that he was convinced regulatory reform might somehow boost a crippled economy, and that only a general panic about “business flight” would prod the Legislature to act. This approach, however, had built-in pitfalls. For one thing, Wilson’s negativity was seized upon by competitor states wishing to woo California firms: If your own governor doesn’t believe in California, was their pitch, why should you? Also, it had a limited political shelf life.

Continually kicking around one’s own state is not a reliable strategy for reelection. And so, 15 months out from the election, his approval ratings down to about 15 points, the time came, inevitably, for Wilson to junk the bleak rhetoric, grab whatever victories the Legislature would grant him, and take what an aide described as a “greatest hits tour” on the road. In short, it was time for Upbeat Pete.

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What’s ironic is that throughout this bad patch there always have been success stories to tell, had Wilson wanted to tell them. And there always have been gritty Californians slugging through hard times, had Wilson wanted to celebrate them. A lot more people have stuck it out than fled for Utah; you just never hear about them much. For that matter, for every Californian out of work, there always have been nine more on the job, had Wilson wanted to visit them.

These, though, were photo ops he chose to bypass, stories he preferred not to tell, until now. Call it good politics and poor leadership, or poor politics and good leadership. It depends on viewpoint or simply party affiliation. The larger point, for now, is that we have a governor who at least appears to believe in California. Strange how uplifting, almost heartwarming, it was to stand with the hard hats in a drafty steel plant and watch Wilson stick out his chin and tell the rest of the nation, the world, and maybe even himself, that California was “back.” Well, welcome back yourself, Governor. Where you been?