Wilson Regrets Nothing--Well, Almost Nothing

SACRAMENTO — Like him or loathe him, when Californians think of Gov. Pete Wilson there are two things that probably cross their minds:

* He ran for president after promising that he wouldn’t, stumbling badly.

* He championed two divisive initiatives--Proposition 187 to cut off public services for illegal immigrants and Proposition 209 to end racial preferences in government affirmative action.

Wilson now admits that running for president was a mistake; he’s convinced no sitting California governor should seek the Oval Office.

But he hasn’t backed down one inch on the ballot props. It was his adversaries who played the race card, Wilson contends, and he and Latinos were the victims.

The humiliating presidential bid and the controversial initiatives will be two cornerstones of this governor’s legacy when he leaves office in one year. Sure, when pundits tote up the score he’ll be credited with class-size reduction. They’ll also factor in that he led the state through its worst economic times since the Great Depression and that he tossed away the key on career criminals.

In fact, Californians have tended to agree with Wilson’s policies. There’s just something about the guy’s personality that makes them uncomfortable--perhaps because Wilson himself looks uncomfortable on TV.

The reason the presidential race and the initiatives are so dominating is that they exacerbated the personality weakness. One made him look opportunistic. The other invited charges that he’s mean-spirited.

Myself, I’ve always found Wilson in person to be engaging and relatively candid. On Christmas Eve, we sat in his office and talked about these things while sipping holiday cheer.

*

“Clearly it was a mistake,” Wilson said of his brief presidential run, chuckling. It was the first time I’d heard this concession.

Wilson said people convinced him that he’d make a better Republican candidate than Bob Dole. But throat surgery left him virtually speechless for three months, and “the false, but effective, rumors that I had throat cancer” dried up campaign donations.

“The other thing was--and it troubled me at the time--I had been very clear that I wasn’t going to run. That bothered me. But I was persuaded that, ‘Well, people will forgive you for changing your mind if, in fact, you’re providing an alternative to Clinton.’ ”

Californians weren’t about to forgive him.

Wilson has this advice for any gubernatorial candidate when a reporter asks about some future presidential race: “Never say never”--but think never.

The responsibilities of office are too big and the distances between California and the early primary states too great for a governor to run for president, he said.

“Being a candidate is pretty much a full-time job. God knows this [governorship] is a full-time job. . . . I could feel that I was not on top of everything as I like to be. . . . It’s very difficult to do the [state] job that you need to do and be able to adequately campaign.”

Wilson said a governor shouldn’t run for president until he has left office--as he’d like to do in 2000. But does he see a realistic chance of winning? “If I had the money to make the race, I think I could,” he said. “But that’s an enormous ‘if.’ ”

*

By contrast, Wilson is in no mea culpa mood on the ballot props.

He angrily accuses liberals of waging a “flatly dishonest campaign of disinformation to deliberately confuse legal and illegal immigration.” This is unfair to him and the GOP, he says, but “more tragically, it is really terribly unfair to Latinos who have been given such a totally false picture of this state--that Californians are anti-immigrant and racist.

“It was done for a political reason. It was well poisoning, and I can think of nothing more vicious, more dishonest or more destructive than deliberately dividing people on the basis of race.”

As for the charge he “scapegoated” immigrants, “that is utter crap,” the governor asserted.

“I have challenged everybody to find a single word that can fairly be interpreted as either anti-immigrant or racist. And they cannot. The nearest they have come up with is the voice-over on our [TV] spot: ‘They keep coming.’ Well, that happens to be a statement of fact. They keep coming [illegally], because the federal government has failed to do its job. . . . That’s what 187 was all about.”

What about contentions that his aggressive campaigns for 187 and 209 alienated Latinos from the GOP?

“If you trim your sails and make decisions based on expediency, it will come back to bite you in the rear. You ought to do what’s right. You may pay a short-term price, but at least you’ll be able to sleep at night, and in the long term, I think people will understand.”

Indeed, Wilson’s legacy hinges on it.