SUBURBAN EVERYMAN

By Jordan Bonfante/Sacramento

Pestilence, quakes and freeze ... Please, no more catastrophes! --Duet by Pete and Gayle Wilson, 1995

He is probably the least flamboyant of the Republican contenders. But there he was in a bright vaudeville spotlight, one hand clasping a hand mike to his crooning lips and the other around the waist of his blond song-and-dance partner, Astaire and Rogers-style. "Spotted owl, Kathleen Brown/ Endangered species of renown," they harmonized lustily. "We beat the California blue-hoos ... Yeah!"

Governor Pete Wilson and his wife Gayle, who performed the musical number at their inaugural gala in a Sacramento sports palace last month, not surprisingly brought down the house. But the striking thing was not that this most buttoned-up of Governors should let his hair down. It was the realization that just a year ago, any such whoop-de-do would have been unheard of: California's woes were nothing to make fun of. The state was still dazed by natural calamities and demoralized by an eco-nomic slump. Since last summer, though, the surfing state has been riding a wave of sustained recovery. And the buoyancy has helped carry Wilson into the front rank of potential contenders for the Republican ticket. Finally he has something to sing about. Says political consultant Joseph Cerell, a Democrat: "Wilson pulled off the biggest upset of the '94 election because Kathleen Brown was considered a slam-dunk winner, and that comeback-of-the-year award has raised him to presidential status."

Wilson has been sweating since January over whether to run. The Governor, who has telephoned a number of friends among the other Republican Governors for their counsel and has met privately with Washington fund raisers and Republican high rollers, could reach a final decision later this month. One of the first to nudge Wilson toward a '96 run was an old mentor, Richard Nixon. Wilson entered politics as a 28-year-old advance man for Nixon. In April 1993, Wilson and Nixon met privately in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. It was a clap on the back for the Governor, who at the time was trailing Brown in the polls by 20 points. Over Diet Cokes, Nixon reminded Wilson that as the Governor of California, he was automatically presidential timber. Nixon thought the moderate side of Wilson-his pro-choice stand, for instance-would be attractive to Democratic voters. And Wilson? "He was the would-be Jedi knight," recalls Ken Kachigian, a close Nixon adviser who was there, "kneeling at the foot of the master, as Yoda spouted wisdom."

His current job as Governor may also be his impediment. Wilson is a prodigious fund raiser, but as ally Kachigian points out, "having just raised $26 million for the Governor's race, can he really go back to the well all over again and say, 'Oh, now I have to raise more money to run for President'?" Most important, powerful Republicans in Sacramento are pressuring Wilson not to relinquish the governorship to the capable but liberal Democratic Lieutenant Governor, Gray Davis. Wilson, however, has a history of overcoming tactical ob-stacles with the grit of a Marine platoon leader showing recruits how to scale a roped wall, which he once did. In 28 years of elective politics, Wilson has lost just one election, the gubernatorial primary in 1978. He has won nine: two for state assemblyman in the '60s, three for mayor of San Diego in the '70s, two for U.S. Senator in the '80s and two for Governor in '90 and '94.

His record as Governor, supporters claim, foreshadowed a lion's share of the "Contract with America," from welfare reform, which Wilson has applied incrementally every year, to tax cuts, which he proposed in his current budget. On crime, Wilson was a leader of the three-strikes-you're-out movement. On immigration, he earned more points with conservatives by spearheading Proposition 187, which, if upheld by the courts, will deny schooling and other state services to illegals. But Wilson's biggest achievement as Governor has been the fiscal stabilization of California with a budget ax that year after year has held spending to 1991 levels. It has pulled the state back from near financial ruin in spite of recession-reduced revenues and successive natural disasters. But stabilization came at painfully high cost. Successive cuts in California's higher-education system have been so onerous that state-university fees have had to be raised 69%.

The re-election victory over Brown was a stunning display of a Wilson forte: big-bucks, no-frills, keep-it-simple campaigning. His campaign team of longtime loyalists is led by strategist George Gorton, a onetime youth activist for Nixon with a talent for framing issues and a fondness for Eastern spirituality. The machine is so well oiled that its media desk in Sacramento was able to monitor and systematically infiltrate call-in talk shows. "I have absolute respect for the Wilson team," groans Democratic strategist Darry Sragow. "I've lost to them three times."

Wilson himself has a lackluster media presence. This has not always hurt him in California, where hard-plugging, middle-class suburbanites feel he is one of them. Wilson, in fact, lives in a shake-roof ranch house in suburban east Sacramento. He barbecues, plays the piano, exercises on a StairMaster in the spare bedroom, shops for videos at the Arden Fair mall and travels economy class on commercial flights. He is the suburban Everyman.

Wilson says he identifies with suburbia, and he rhapsodizes about the warmth of his middle-class upbringing outside St. Louis. He still worships his father, who was an adman. "I think the best thing about this country," he says, "is that it has always in the best times supplied hope and opportunity and encouraged the plausible belief that by working hard you could improve life for yourself and your family."

Yet Wilson's moderate stand on many family and social issues places him left of center in the Republican Party. Wilson has been progressive on the environment and has signed legislation against gay discrimination and for gun control. More important, his pro-choice stand on abortion rights, immutable since he was a mayor, puts him in a vexing political bind. For while it is increasingly difficult to be elected to statewide office in California today if you are not pro-choice, it may be well-nigh impossible to be nominated by the national Republican Party if you are.

Although he currently emphasizes deregulation, Wilson has traditionally upheld moderately active government. That too goes back to San Diego, where he halted runaway development and im- posed what became a widely imitated blueprint for "managed growth." "I have come to realize that my gut instincts as a young man were pretty valid, that there is a real role for government to do things for the public which they cannot do themselves," Wilson says. "However, I have grown increasingly skeptical of the kind of misfired good intentions that have led to huge increases in enrollment in entitlement programs."

Some admiring pros believe that even right-wing Republicans may come to realize that Wilson's moderateness could be marketed not as a handicap but as a winning card that could attract Democratic voters in the general election. If Republicans do decide that Wilson is their man, he would have an ideal location for his coronation. The Republican Convention is scheduled for July 1996 in San Diego, the true capital of Pete Wilson country.