Waiting To Catch The Primary Wave

By STEVE LOPEZ

If they were actors, which isn't an entirely mind-bending stretch, you could say George W. Bush has come to California to audition for a role as a moderate and John McCain is here to prove he can be a convincing conservative. And if there is any doubt about what's at stake on March 7, McCain flack Dan Schnur can clear it up in one sentence: "The winner of the California primary is going to be the Republican nominee for President."

This reality had not yet dawned on what locals call the Southland last week. Trolling Orange and Riverside counties one day, I spotted only one piece of presidential paraphernalia--a Bush poster stapled to a telephone pole. At some point, one of these candidates is going to wise up and get involved in a car chase, which guarantees live coverage by every TV camera in L.A. and the rapt attention of the entire electorate.

During my sinking search for anyone acutely tuned in to the presidential primary, I put out an SOS to the district's Congressman, Ed Royce. "Ed, I'm on the streets of Fullerton and can't find anything but YES ON PROP. 22 signs." The only passion in California politics right now is wrapped up in a proposition that wants to make sure gays don't walk the aisle. "Go to the Brea Community Center," advised Royce, a Bush supporter. Republican women were gathering for their monthly meeting, he said, and they would definitely be plugged in.

Indeed. Some were even taking home campaign posters. But of the 70 women there, only a handful intended to vote for McCain. Upon hearing this, I committed a faux pas by suggesting McCain was in trouble if he couldn't draw more support in such a working-class Republican community. "Don't insult us," snapped Manon Crow, a Bush supporter. "Brea isn't working class." So much for the Bush spirit of reaching out to hoi polloi.

"Some of the ladies believed it was cast in stone," Judy Semless, a McCain supporter, said of the Bush nomination. She excused herself to find a woman she had converted to her side, but returned with a face as long as a tire iron. "Can you believe it? She says she's not voting for McCain now because Democrats are voting for him."

Privately, McCain insiders concede that Bush has already won strongly conservative communities such as Brea. They also admit that while McCain is a charmer in person, he's a bit of a stiff on television, and in an ad-campaign state like California, that's a problem.

But they still think they can whip Bush by taking San Francisco and San Diego as well as working-class areas like the Inland Empire of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, where you've got more Costco Republicans than country-club Republicans. "It gets back to the one thing I learned at the feet of Nixon," says McCain strategist Ken Kachigian. "It's not the prose, it's the poetry."

Meaning that you lay out a haiku of middle-class tax cuts, military glory, a promise to turn Animal House back into the White House and a guarantee to overthrow the government. Will it play? Yes, says Riverside assemblyman Rod Pacheco, a Republican, and he's a Bush supporter.

"We're very independent-minded out here, where we've got a majority of Republicans but elected a Democrat for Governor and U.S. Senator. That plays right to McCain," says Pacheco, whose wife Becky is nullifying his vote. She's for McCain.

By week's end there were signs the primary had begun to hit the radar screen. Bush was running an ad in Spanish, perhaps hoping the entire Latino community had missed his dance with the right-wing fringe in South Carolina. And the Senator was applying for conservative credentials with an ad in which he claims, "I'm a proud Reagan Republican."

Garry South, an Al Gore operative, was eating it up, predicting that while Bush would win the Republican delegates, McCain would draw enough independents and crossovers to finish ahead of Bush in the popular vote and take a symbolic victory. "If that happens, it is an unmitigated disaster for the Republicans because it exposes the Republican nominee as a paper tiger. In my most devious imagination, I couldn't have foreseen this."

Before getting too giddy, Garry, check the polls. If McCain beats long odds and wins the nomination, the paper tiger could be Al Gore.