Eminentoes /Mr. Not-So-Nice Guy
Ferguson, Tim W.
T hirty-one months into his term as governor of California, Pete Wilson decided to act against illegal immigration, which, he said, had put the state "under siege." Not act, really, but pronounce...
...But few other conservatives joined in the Hosannas...
...98 in various ways, some of which have won him the enmity of the California Teachers Association, and others of which—like promising to make up shortfalls in coming years—ought to concern taxpayers...
...Although he went beyond criticizing the perverse economic incentives of current policy and appeared to endorse forms of people control, the right should have been heartened by his basic thrust, as they should have rejoiced when he took a rhetorically hard fine on spending and tax increases...
...He is frustrated that his detractors on the right have not offered him a sure-fire alternative to the deals that he cut with Assembly Speaker Willie Brown's people in 1991 and 1993...
...That's like going to Miami and not talking about Cuba...
...For three years now, he and the right have debated whether other savings are possible politically or legally...
...It's fair to say that he doesn't have tax-cutting in his bones...
...and (the cynicism again) arranged to restore to a supposedly bare-bones budget some previously axed funding for several frill commissions (arts, energy, etc...
...Wilson still has scars from his 1992 budget-season attempt to brake public-sector growth, which sent his favorable ratings diving to 15 percent...
...As mayor of San Diego at the time, he opposed Prop...
...According to his version, some conservatives who postured against tax increases ran for the hills when faced with a need to curb public-school funding...
...maybe because he'd been quiet on the issue during his eight years as U.S...
...98 and the 1978 milestone Proposition 13—will be necessary when the year-to-year deficit spillovers can no longer be managed...
...It becomes especially onerous in recessions, forcing either inordinate cuts in other areas or higher taxes...
...maybe because there is less than fourteen months before his next and perhaps final reckoning with Election Day...
...Yet Wilson's ties to the conservative movement have never been strong...
...Talk of a presidential bid in 1996 has faded as California's difficulties have grown, but should Wilson somehow get re-elected, he would carry a significant delegate load to the next convention...
...When he stopped governing to please the Washington press corps and won his test of wills with Willie Brown in the 64-day budget standoff of 1992, the Wall Street Journal rallied to his defense with a long editorial ("The Buck Stopped...
...Tom Campbell and business mannequin Peter Ueberroth, who would like to muscle him out, though they share his basic worldview...
...Bernard Siegan, the University of San Diego law professor whose belief in property rights undid hisappellate court nomination under Reagan, recalls that Wilson was indeed fervent on the issue...
...to which he can appoint his supporters...
...Wilson's deep-seated belief in abortion rights and the whole birth-control, quality-of-life paradigm might have created differences with the social right too deep to be resolved...
...Too often as senator and governor, for instance, he has seemed more inclined to act on behalf .of existing companies or industries than to champion conditions favorable to dynamic capitalism and the poor who benefit most from it...
...Don't count Wilson out, though...
...Still, sympathizers would argue that Wilson likes to consider a position for some time before he adopts it as his own...
...He suggests that he was left to deal with Willie Brown and bear the cross of a tax hike so that suburban Republicans could keep peace with their local school establishments and parents...
...Wilson has tried to get around Prop...
...13 (although he likes to note that Howard Jarvis later praised him...
...During the 1990 campaign, when conservatives were dutifully supporting him, I wrote that he failed to mention the word "taxes" in an Orange County rally...
...Properly managed, as they had been under Wilson's Republican predecessor George Deukmejian, they can be effective shock brigades for a closeto-the-vest governor...
...Under equalization, poorly run urban districts eat up funds from the suburbs, which are left with lower per-pupil expenditures than those communities might prefer...
...Voter anger at Wilson, the collapse of Bush, the fact that feminists and government dependents were more fired up than tax-cutters—all contributed to a GOP debacle last fall...
...He even sent "late money" against like-minded Republicans who were simply outside his narrow circle...
...Anti-tax partisans are nervous about the idea of Wilson at the helm during such a period...
...His poll numbers jumped seven points after the immigration hubbub, and if he scares off a GOP rival with his still-substantial resources, he will face a foe liberal enough to win a California Democratic primary...
...Others dismissed it as just more gimmickry...
...Proposition 98, a constitutional amendment narrowly passed in 1988, insulates the school budgets from certain, budget cuts, by putting a mandatory spending floor under them, indexed to rise with inflation...
...If Wilson ever had a chance to get on top of California's fiscal problems, given the recession that accompanied him into office, it was during his first few months in office...
...So is a permanent extension of a "temporary" sales-tax increase, which Wilson originally opposed but now supports...
...By this year, the governor was resigned to buying off the teachers with a shift of funds from local government, which in turn triggered new criticism from the suburbs and their Republican legislators...
...Now, doubtless, he will blame Washington for the recessionary drag that remains, targeting the Clinton tax plan and the mandated care and feeding of illegal immigrants...
...He has proved masterful at framing opponents throughout his twenty-seven-year political career, and there is no discounting his timing...
...In a state that warms to true believers, Wilson's bloodlessapproach to policy tends to leave voters perpetually unsatisfied...
...But, come primary time, Wilson foolishly picked fights even with Assembly members whose conservatism rests on budget and environmental issues...
...In neither instance will he get much argument from conservatives, although they will wonder about all the many things that could still be done about California's self-created impediments to prosperity...
...Eventually, some revamping of California's budget laws—including Prop...
...B ut another factor in the election, and in Wilson's ongoing difficulties in Sacramento, was the governor's coyness with party candidates outside of his moderate circle...
...Instead he plunged.into the Big Tax Compromise of 1991 that has undermined his later bids to take on the mantle of frugality...
...But the governor eventually gave ground on a sales tax increase (as he had given in to higher income tax rates in 1991, after saying he wouldn't...
...Wilson has consistently spurned party activists on the right, particularly those in the Assembly...
...More important, Brown's Democratic Assembly candidates stifled the big gains that Republicans had hoped to reap out of a skillful reapportionment strategy Wilson had been pursuing patiently for two years...
...And the speaker had the last laugh: For one, he defeated a Wilson-sponsored initiative that fall to rein in welfare spending—subsequent budget cuts would have to come largely out of more popular items, leaving voters ever more furious at the governor...
...Some of them are querulous, to be sure, but Wilson has antagonized them needlessly...
...Assembly GOP leaders maintained that Wilson wastrying to force them to back higher taxes and school cuts because he wouldn't cut expenditures elsewhere...
...senator...
...Not act, really, but pronounce the need for mostly federal laws to be changed to reduce the drawing power of government benefits and services...
...In that respect, it is noteworthy that the most immediate intraparty threat to him at home may come from former Rep...
...But, unless his subsequent "kiss my rear end" taunt to Democrats is more than a one-time sally, he will have difficulty rallying the troops...
...Conservative Republicans in California have been clamoring for an end to federally mandated programs for illegals, including their U.S.-born children, and now their pragmatist governor has taken up the cause in full-throated fashion...
...Adding to the school finance burden are "equalization" requirements such as are becoming common across the U.S...
...It's the governor's responsibility to make sure that the state government runs, they seemed to say, no matter what the legislature's game—and by the way, don't raise our taxes and don't cut any broad-based programs...
...Like much that Wilson has done in office, this, flurry seemed to combine admirable gumption and cynical opportunism: maybe because the "siege" had existed for so long—in fact, the influx of illegals has abated somewhat—with only sporadic attention by the governor...
...Wilson traces his estrangement from Assembly Republicans to the first year's budget haggling...
...Some of Wilson's political advisers, such as Spencer Roberts and Ken Khachigian, have had associations with Reaganism, and his sturdy hawkishness helps account for the personal ties he formed in Washington with Dan Quayle, Kenneth Adelman, and Judge Laurence Silberman...
...In this summer's budget session, gubernatorial fortitude yielded more gain: even Arthur Laffer, a longtime Wilson critic, conceded that overall state spending finally had been cut...
...I got the dry wit and manner that other visitors have noted in this publicly austere man, but, after nearly an hour, little sense that a looming electoral hanging had concentrated his mind on any ideological imperatives...
...I went to hear Wilson out as that budget wrangling was going on, implicitly offering the chance for some heartfelt expression of philosophical commitment to limiting government...
...Indeed, the slipperiness of the administration's financial ploys and the inaccuracy of its estimates have earned it steady bipartisan criticism...
...The stare-'em-down approach was all the governor was left with in 1992, and the voters took it out on him in November...
...He also has long favored removing a two-thirds supermajority requirement for some local taxes, which is on this November's ballot...
...agreed to a deliberate carryover of deficit spending between fiscal years...
...At one point in the resulting tiff, the governor, an ex-Marine with a salty tongue in private, referred to some right-wing legislators as "f---ing irrelevants," a reference that still stings...
...For the most part he has staffed his administration with well-groomed careerists, and even some of them have despaired at Wilson's lack of ideology...
...Occasionally, he surprises and delights the free-market right—e.g., with his avid opposition to rent control while mayor of San Diego...
Vol. 26 • October 1993 • No. 10
