Post-Watergate Politics in California

...About the only certainty at this point in California is that Jerry Brown would automatically begin his campaign for the Presidency on the day he was elected governor...

...firm for the nation at large its shaken faith in the underlying resilience of America's democratic institutions...

...This is but one measure of the disaffection and cynicism evident among California voters...

...As the brilliant morning sunlight floods the lush canyons, anonymous housewives phone a radio station to converse with a "swinging" couple—the day's attraction on a popular talk show...

...Harmer has a ready-made machine at his disposal: California's half-million or so Mormons who in the last decade have become increasingly active in politics...

...One of the more qualified gubernatorial candidates is Jerome Wal-die, a thoughtful Congressman from Antioch and a former majority leader of the State Assembly during the Pat Brown era...

...Alioto thinks he can defeat Brown by reminding enough people that he is running against Jerry and not Pat...

...A leading politician here who has known him since he was a teenager is not sure: "The trouble with Jerry is that he will walk into a party and right away ask, 'Who is there in this room that I ought to see?' He is always 'on.'" Some people see Brown as a throwback to those clean-cut Kennedy types of the early '60s, so full of unconscious arrogance and blatant ambition...

...The GOP elite has therefore shifted its support to Reinecke's sole rival for the party nomination, State Controller Houston I. Flournoy, a professorial type in his mid-40s who for many years was frozen out by the Reagan group for his supposed liberal leanings...

...He is regarded as a shoo-in for the nomination, even though his principal opponent, John Veneman, is one of Flournoy's closest allies...

...Pat Caddell, the young Cambridge-based pollster who worked for Senator George McGovern in 1972, has taken a survey (for a minor gubernatorial candidate) showing that 54 per cent of the people in the state think all incumbents should be defeated this year...

...Some members of the conservative elite fear that if Flournoy actually wins the governorship, he will double-cross them and join the effort to derail Reagan's Presidential drive...

...The traditional high-rollers are coming up with the money...

...They stress personal fulfillment, a goal for which they pay a fearful price in social as well as physical disorder, and still the prize most often appears to elude their grasp...

...Flournoy is one of those people— like John Gardner and Elliot Richardson—who seem to think they should be ushered into office by acclamation solely on the basis of their alleged inherent superiority...

...The essence of the case is that the former Attorney General is lying when he swears the tentative selection of San Diego as a convention site had absolutely nothing to do with a favorable settlement of antitrust actions pending against the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, which happens to own the biggest hotel in town...

...At 35, Jerry is concluding a four-year term as secretary of state—the only Democrat to be elected statewide in the Reagan sweep of 1970...

...Although Moretti has little drive for money (when not in Sacramento, he lives modestly in the suburb of Van Nuys), he is handicapped by the same Watergate image problems that are undermining Alioto...

...I'm for Cesar Chavez...

...To keep an eye on him, they have promoted one of their own, State Senator John Harmer, as the party's nominee for Lieutenant Governor...

...The elder Brown is known as "Pat" and the younger one as "Jerry...

...They laud the couple's frankness and, one after another, share with the listening audience their own sexual adventures, which sound all the more bizarre for being cast in the glow of seeming middle-class respectability...

...In striving to hold it together, Jerry has dodged debates with his major opponents...

...Obviously enjoying his unexpected political windfall, Flournoy is grooming himself as a latter-day Earl Warren Republican in hopes of beating the man he calls "Junior Brown" come November...

...But many remain prisoners of their past...

...To the average voter," a labor leader told me, "Moretti comes across like a 'hit man' for the Mafia, while Alioto comes across like the Big Boss who ordered the job done...

...Veneman served a tour in Washington as Undersecretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, but earned few brownie points at the White House...

...The current leader in this crowded field is Edmund G. Brown Jr., the zealous son of the aimable if bumbling figure who governed California for eight years before being ambushed by Ronald Reagan in 1966...

...he has put to rest the flamboyant rhetoric that marked his political adolescence...

...But, unfortunately for him, this is an art he has yet to master...

...Yet as a Northern Californian, he is not very well known in the Los Angeles area, nor does he have nearly enough money to become known and halt the Brown steamroller...

...But this has not prevented his father from soliciting campaign contributions from judges he appointed to the bench a decade ago...

...Joe Alioto is experienced, exuberant by nature, hardened by adversity, and suspicious of professional campaign advisers...

...Alioto carries so many scars from the political wars that even the California labor bosses, his most faithful allies, are not sure he is the right man for this season...

...The press in California has focused most of its attention on the Democratic candidates—a reflection of the fact that this isn't considered a Republican year here...

...Frank Lloyd Wright once said that if the country were to tilt sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose would fall...

...There are 18 contenders for the governorship on the Democratic ballot in the winner-take-all primary...

...It costs about $1.5 million to mount a respectable statewide primary race in California...

...So the coterie of money men who have bankrolled Nixon, Barry Gold-water and Reagan over the years is now trying to do something about that...

...The Governor is all wrapped up these days in the idea of being President and is in no mood to let the pesky Reinecke foul up his plans...

...Yet whatever the shortcomings of their existence, the residents of the Los Angeles basin are not prone to take responsibility for them...

...Yet, because of Nixon, even Flournoy's strategists regard their chances of victory as dim (one of his advisers, Stuart K. Spencer, privately thinks all GOP candidates will be engulfed in the anti-Watergate tide...

...As of now, there are precious few signs that the natives intend to make the kind of judicious decisions at the ballot box that would reaf-Andrew J. Glass, who regularly reports from Washington, recently returned from a trip to California...

...Denied all-out union backing, he has been airing television commercials featuring endorsements by such old friends as Hubert Humphrey and John Lindsay as well as cozy family scenes with his monastery-touring wife, Angelina...

...The common factor among the Brown constituency is its familiarity with his name...

...The biggest flaw in the scenario of Reagan and his friends is that quite a few rank-and-file Republicans like Ed Reinecke, despite his fall from grace in the eyes of special Watergate prosecutor Leon Ja-worski...

...Part of the bargain is that Flournoy will remain loyal to Reagan's cause and keep his hands in his pockets when Nelson Rockefeller and Chuck Percy come in search of support for the 1976 Presidential nomination...

...They settle amid the freeways, where the industrious and the lucky ones improve their patios and eventually sell their homes to move above the smog into the neighboring hills...

...Such people can never fathom why the voters at times may reach a contrary conclusion...

...I'm against the death penalty," says the son of the man who sent Caryl Chessman to his death in the San Quentin gas chamber 14 years ago...

...But with so many rivals sipping from the common bowl, he apparently has been left with too small a portion...

...Should Flournoy finally master the political art, he might be able to beat Brown by playing on the natural tendency of Californians to gravitate toward the center in general elections...

...One result of those negotiations was that on April 3 Reinecke was indicted on three counts of perjury by a Watergate grand jury in Washington...

...Given the post-Watergate climate, this is possibly a fatal defect...

...In the end, Flournoy's complaint may well be that Reagan's millionaire associates proved unable to swing a nomination that presumably would be worth a great deal more to him, because he at least stands something of a chance in November, than it would be to the hapless Reinecke...

...At times, he can also be disarmingly candid...

...Brown has adopted political reform as a major issue and is plugging strongly for public financing of elections...

...A goodly number of party professionals admire the ability and drive of a third candidate, Assembly Speaker Bob Moretti, who is only two years older than Brown...

...There is widespread support in California for the proposition that Reagan has done well after initially undergoing an on-the-job training course in government...

...And when its 5 million or so voters go to the polls in the June 4 primary to participate in the first statewide election since the Watergate scandals surfaced last year, one may be sure that the politicians in Washington will be closely watching the outcome...

...Few think he can be nominated, however, unless Alioto mauls Brown so badly that they both go down...

...Joseph Alioto, the millionaire mayor of San Francisco and Brown's principal rival in the coming election, looks, sounds and acts like an old-line politician...

...It is, for the most part, a generation without a memory and, as such, without a moral compass to steer by...

...THE FIRST STATE PREPARES TO VOTE Post-Watergate Politics in California BY ANDREW J. GLASS Los Angeles Rootless and restless, the people of Southern California pursue their special vision of the good life...

...Most recently, the public-service workers in San Francisco went after him and nearly precipitated a general strike...

...And what of the new generation spawned in the throes of this human tide...

...for them, the bitter memories still linger on...

...Moretti has hired two Washington-based media consultants, Robert and Jane Squire, in the hopes of adding spice to his faltering campaign, boosting his ratings in the polls and then using the results to raise more money for still more commercials...

...typically, they blame unseen sinister hands for their troubles...

...If these concepts bear no relation to what Moretti stands for or the kind of governor he would make, they are nonetheless a real burden...

...As it has turned out, his committee duties have mainly served to prevent him from devoting sufficient time to the race...

...As Reagan's hand-picked Lieutenant Governor, he had the bad fortune of having to deal with John Mitchell on the prospect of holding the 1972 Republican National Convention in San Diego, the site said to be preferred by Nixon...

...Clearly, he now takes a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to his task...

...The recipe for victory in a California Democratic primary must be brewed from roughly equal portions of unions, minorities, young people, liberals and blue-collar workers...

...Reinecke, it is charged, sustained Mitchell for a time in that alleged deceit...

...Under the circumstances, one would expect Flournoy to be busily stimulating the Republican conservatives...

...Their chief objective is to torpedo the gubernatorial bid of Ed Reinecke, a friendly if not overly bright meat-and-potatoes conservative, nominally cast in the Reagan mold...

...While eastern Democrats cheerfully talk of doing the same kind of hatchet job on Reagan that they once performed on Barry Goldwater, their counterparts in the far West are not so sure it would work...

...All the contenders, of course, are pondering just how deeply the Nixon saga has instilled in California Democrats an abiding interest in the character of their candidates...

...As the showdown at the polls draws near, Reagan may turn the screws and urge Reinecke to withdraw from the contest, in the hope that Flournoy will then get the nomination regardless of how many political mistakes he makes along the way...

...These circumstances impart a special flavor to the politics of California, where more than one in every ten Americans now resides...

...The state GOP establishment, quite conscious of what Richard Nixon has done to it, has apparently decided to cut its losses and stake its future hopes on wresting the Presidential nomination for Ronald Reagan in 1976...

...Nevertheless, a Democratic landslide in November would undoubtedly damage the incumbent Governor's national aspirations...

...I'm identified as having something to do with the Mafia," the mayor told me during a visit to his office in San Francisco, describing the problem the way another man might say he is identified with Harvard University...

...Waldie had hoped he could play a prominent role in the impeachment proceedings of the House Judiciary Committee, and that the resulting publicity would give his campaign a badly needed lift...

...Shaken free, the immigrants come here in hopes of surmounting the frozen oppression of the Eastern cities and the unrelieved boredom of the barren flatlands...

...The underlying question about Brown remains unanswered: Is he tough enough, smart enough and decent enough to lead the state through what undoubtedly will be a difficult four years...