CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR PETE WILSON made a splash at last year’s Republican convention in San Diego by noisily agitating for removal of pro-life language from the party’s platform. That earned him scorn from anti-abortion groups like the Christian Coalition. But times have changed. When Wilson spoke to the group’s California convention on November 8, he was interrupted by applause 30 times and received a standing ovation.
The speech was only the most striking instance of Wilson’s effort to win friends among conservatives. With a reputation as a greenish, pro-choice, tax- raising moderate, the governor has an uphill struggle to gain conservative acceptance. He’s beginning to make headway, but why would he want to mend fences with many of his ideological opponents when he’s approaching the last year of his term and can’t run for reelection?
There’s a simple answer: Wilson wants to run for president again. “I still have interest in it,” he told me at the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Miami in late November. “Interest is not a decision to do it,” he says, adding, “I’d love to [be president] if they’d appoint me.” Wilson, in other words, isn’t salivating at the prospect of jumping into a contest where his moderate credentials would be tested in conservative- dominated primaries. But he understands that he doesn’t stand a chance of winning the Republican nomination as long as the right wing continues to distrust him.
Thus the Christian Coalition speech, in which he sounded like a summa cum laude graduate of Ralph Reed University. Wilson touched on a number of hotbutton issues, including “the shocking twin tragedies of abortion and out- of-wedlock births.” He boasted of vetoing a bill to create a state registry of domestic partners (gays strongly supported the bill) and proclaimed that ” we are all God’s children.” The best kind of leader, said Wilson, is “someone with Joseph’s political skills, Solomon’s wisdom, and Job’s endurance and faith. Seven years into this office, 1 now realize that the quest for leadership doesn’t end with the Book of Job, . . . it begins with the last book in the New Testament, the book of Revelation.” Sara DiVito Hardman, the Christian Coalition’s California chairman, came away impressed. “The governor has been agreeing with us on more and more issues. There’s been a gradual trend toward conservatism.”
Wilson’s outreach extends well beyond social conservatives. He is honorary chairman of a statewide “paycheck protection” initiative being voted on next year that would give union members the option of stopping their dues from being used in political campaigns. “Whether you’re going to spend money, or how you spend money, on politics ought to be your decision as a union member and not the decision of union bosses,” says Wilson, who persuaded Republican governors to pass a resolution endorsing the measure at their recent meeting.
Wilson is also expected to endorse a statewide initiative to phase out bilingual education, which he says “does a terrible disservice to the people whom it is supposed to help.” And Wilson supports the Republican campaign to have Congress buy Ronald Reagan’s southern California ranch and to rename Washington’s National Airport “Ronald Reagan Airport.”
Wilson has greatly improved his relations with the conservative Republicans who dominate the California legislature. They’ve liked the governor’s vocal support for issues like Proposition 187, which ended state benefits for illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which outlawed state-sponsored race and sex preferences. After sparring with conservatives in his first years in office, the governor is now more likely to tangle with liberals. He’s helped defund the state bar association, overhauled workers’ compensation, pushed school reforms opposed by the education lobby, and tightened up the criminal justice system by passing a three-strikes law and increasing penalties for people who use guns when committing crimes. Enjoying a budget surplus, he also passed a $ 1 billion tax cut a few months ago, California’s largest tax cut in 50 years.
These achievements notwithstanding, many Republican legislators remain skeptical. They criticized Wilson’s recent children’s-health package, claiming it enshrined Hillary Clinton-style ideas in law. And they say only pressure from conservatives forced him to embrace the tax cut and scrap a plan to spend the extra revenue. Wilson’s GOP critics also note that his appointees to the state Republican party’s central committee have been moderates.
Much of the wariness of Wilson stems from the 1991 budget battle. Shortly after being elected governor in 1990, Wilson found that he faced a $ 14 billion revenue shortfall, equivalent to one-third of the state’s budget. He resisted calls from the GOP not to raise taxes, settling on a plan that included $ 7 billion in spending cuts and $ 7 billion in tax hikes. Republicans went berserk, and Wilson was forced to work primarily with Democrats to pass the budget. It didn’t help matters that early in the negotiations with Republicans, he dismissed the tax foes as “f–g irrelevant,” prompting them and their allies to start wearing buttons identifying themselves as “FI.”
Skepticism also stems from Wilson’s stance on gay rights. He campaigned for gay votes in 1990 and signaled he would sign a bill extending anti- discrimination protections to homosexuals. Under great pressure from conservatives, he vetoed the bill, but first he denounced “the tiny minority of mean-spirited, gay-bashing bigots.” When presented with a watered-down bill the next year, he signed it.
But more recently he’s vetoed legislation extending many of the same benefits to domestic partners that are given to spouses, and a few weeks ago he went to great lengths to stop the University of California from extending health benefits to the same-sex partners of its employees. Few could have predicted Wilson’s involvement in these issues, but he says the logic is simple:
“It is, to put it charitably, naive if not utterly irresponsible to assume that if the state treats unmarried domestic partners in the same fashion that it treats those who are married that it does not devalue marriage, and that is a very serious mistake.”
One area where there’s been no discernible policy shift is abortion. Wilson has always been pro-choice, and as governor he’s done nothing to restrict access to abortion, has resisted efforts to curtail its coverage by the state health-care agency, and has elevated a supporter of abortion rights to be chief justice of the state supreme court. But he’s reached out rhetorically to pro-lifers, as Steve Forbes has done. Says Wilson, “If you want to reduce the number of abortions in America, the way you can do it is not by wishing for an amendment to the Constitution. . . . To make a difference we really have to change the culture.”
But unlike Forbes, Wilson fumbles when asked about partial-birth abortion. He told me he hadn’t taken a position on the congressional legislation, though he probably would have supported the proposed ban — the procedure was “right at the door of infanticide” — yet it was important to be concerned with “the health of the mother.”
Because of his stance on abortion and a few other issues, Wilson has never been a conservative pin-up. But he rejects the notion that he’s lacked support from the right. “In all my prior statewide campaigns,” says Wilson, ” the base has always been the people who identify themselves as conservative Republicans.” That’s partly true. During his eight years in the U.S. Senate, his average score from the American Conservative Union was 75 percent, putting him to the left of Phil Gramm and to the right of Arlen Specter. He consistently supported the Reagan administration on foreign and defense policy, while breaking with the Gipper on many social issues.
Republicans of all stripes urged Wilson to run for governor after George Deukmejian announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in 1990, but conservatives’ chief concern was a desire to put forward an electable candidate who as governor could influence an important reapportionment. After all the turmoil of Wilson’s first term, a wealthy libertarian Republican with no political experience, Ron Unz, won 34 percent of the vote in the 1994 GOP primary by exploiting disenchantment with the tax hike. And conservatives with long memories still bring up what they say are Wilson’s two greatest heresies: his support for Gerald Ford over Reagan in the 1976 presidential primary and his opposition to the anti-tax Proposition 13 two years later.
So while doubts remain about whether Wilson is really a conservative, it’s clear that if he runs for president in 2000 he’ll wage a smarter campaign than two years ago. He has a formidable fund-raising machine and presumably has learned from his mistakes. Shortly before his death, Richard Nixon predicted Wilson would win the 1996 GOP presidential nomination. We’ll see whether that prediction was plain wrong or just four years premature.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
