CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : For Republican Faithful: Same Place, Same Hopes

When California Republicans gathered this past weekend at the Town and Country Hotel on Interstate 8, the venerable, sprawling resort complex looked much as it did when it was the venue for a similar meeting 24 years ago.

On Sept. 11, 1970, Republicans were riding high. Richard Nixon was in the White House. Ronald Reagan was governor of California and a virtual shoo-in for reelection. Two future governors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, were rising moderate politicians in the state Legislature.

Two other well-liked moderates, Bob Monagan and Howard Way, were speaker of the Assembly and president pro tem of the state Senate. The old movie hoofer George Murphy was one of California’s two U.S. senators.

On that Saturday--sunny and balmy as usual--Vice President Spiro T. Agnew came to town to address the convention, which in effect was a giant pep rally to inspire the political foot soldiers for the crucial stretch drive of the campaign.

The silver-haired Agnew gave a snarly little speech best remembered for one of his barbed alliterative gems: He lashed the media and the eastern liberal elitists as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

But the real message of Agnew’s oration was a stern warning that the Nixon White House, on a zealous crusade against crime and civil dissent, would not tolerate any candidate who asked for, or accepted, support from “radical elements.”

The great question to be decided that Nov. 3, Agnew said in his droning speaking style, was whether the nation would be led by a popularly elected President or “will we be intimidated and blackmailed . . . by a disruptive radical and militant minority, the pampered proteges of the radical liberals in the U.S. Senate.”

Agnew was not just railing at Democrats. He also meant any moderate Republican who dared criticize the Administration.

California Republicans expected a resounding victory that year--and probably should have--thus building on the watershed gains of 1966 that brought Reagan to office and ended the political career of Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr.

But they did not foresee the dampening effect in California of a nationwide loss brought about in part by the negative style of the Nixon-Agnew campaign. Across the country, it was a debacle. Democrats swept scores of congressional seats and governorships. Many of the victims were GOP moderates.

It was not quite so bad in California. Reagan did win, but he defeated the onetime “Big Daddy” speaker of the Assembly, Jesse M. Unruh, by only 500,000 votes, half his margin of victory over Brown. Murphy lost the Senate seat to Democrat John V. Tunney. Democrats won back control of the Legislature. Reagan subsequently allowed himself to be cornered into a legislative redistricting plan that resulted in 20 years of uninterrupted Democratic control, to this day.

Four years later, Nixon and Agnew were both gone from the scene in disgrace. Reagan opted not to run for a third term. The Republican mantle in California fell to state Controller Houston I. Flournoy, another of the moderate GOP “Young Turks” in the Legislature who had hewed a fine line between the conservative Reagan and Democrats in the Legislature to continue the tradition of moderate-progressive programs.

The 1974 campaign matched Flournoy against Democrat Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., the secretary of state. Brown won. The aspirations of a generation of bright, problem-solving GOP moderates in California were virtually eliminated.

There were many reasons for the Democratic resurgence in California. Watergate was a major one. But the seeds were planted in the 1970 campaigning of Nixon and Agnew, and its effect on California.

National midterm elections are often referred to as “off-year” elections. The euphoria of a President’s first two years in office has begun to pale. The warts begin to show. Traditionally, first-term Presidents lose support in Congress in these elections as members who were swept into office on his coattails fail to win reelection, even if he has done a good job.

It was this phenomenon Nixon and Agnew were trying to counteract in 1970 with a negative campaign that sought to crack down on both crime and civil dissent. In 1974, Watergate greatly amplified the expectable GOP losses.

The term off-year implies that these elections are not as critical as those in presidential election years. Nationally, they are not. But in California, the off-year elections are big ones.

At stake is the governorship, all other statewide offices and most of the Legislature. The conventional wisdom of political analysts has been that California is so big and so independent of national politics that the Golden State is largely immune from national political trends.

That is something of a jingoistic fallacy, though, as state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, the current Democratic gubernatorial nominee, may be finding out. National trends do count. And in the 1990s, they can shift rapidly.

Republicans meeting at the Town and Country this past weekend bubbled with the anticipation that anti-Clinton sentiment will sweep them back into office in a big way, bigger perhaps than in any year since 1966.

There was a dramatic contrast with the 1992 convention. By September two years ago, George Bush--never very popular in California--had all but conceded the state to Democrat Bill Clinton. California Republicans knew that. What mattered to them was the effect on the state ticket of the absence of a vigorous GOP presidential effort.

The impact was dramatic. Behind Clinton, Democrats won both U.S. Senate seats. They thwarted GOP hopes of significant gains in the Legislature and congressional delegation under the favorable redistricting plan hammered out by Gov. Pete Wilson.

Now, the trend appears to be sharply reversed. Wilson’s popularity has rebounded dramatically from the dreary budget battles of 1991. Clinton’s is heading downward. GOP hopes are soaring.

Clinton was going to come to Los Angeles on Sunday to help Brown raise 1.5 million badly needed campaign dollars at one of those big, glitzy California fund-raising events. He had to cancel because of the Haiti crisis, sending First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton instead.

Wilson hopes he comes back, because he’d love to tie Kathleen Brown to Bill Clinton whenever possible.

At lunch on Saturday, an unusually perky Wilson joked: “In fact, if he will come before the election, then I will pay for his air fare.”

Brown’s fortunes do not rest entirely with Clinton’s. But the “nationalization” of the California election, as the GOP strategists are calling it, could cost her the margin of victory in a close contest.

Footnote: For the first time in years, crime was not an issue of hot debate at this convention. Republicans are confident they have won the battle with tough sentencing laws pushed to election-year passage by Wilson’s get-tough rhetoric. He has done what Nixon and Agnew failed to do in 1970.