Governors: Battling for the Big States

The first major upset of the political season occurred in New York last week. That result meant soft-spoken liberals will be the Democratic candidates for two important vacant governorships. In two heated House races, the candidates' family ties and their economic ideologies are likely to be decisive factors in November.

Upset personality

The favorite was the feisty mayor of New York City, colorful and combative, immensely popular in the city he seemed to symbolize, and endorsed by the retiring Governor and most of the state's political leaders. His challenger was the man he had beaten in a mayoralty race, the principled but somewhat colorless Lieutenant Governor, who had never won an election in his own right and was being outspent 2 to 1 in the current contest. But confounding both the polls and the pols, Mario Cuomo last week convincingly beat Edward Koch in New York's Democratic gubernatorial primary.

The race lent itself less to analysis than to psychoanalysis. Many polls showed the mayor leading by about 20 points. But the surveys were obviously unable to fathom the electorate's ambivalent feelings about Koch, who is charming one moment, grating the next.

The results turned more on complex personality considerations than on substantive issues. On his way to winning re-election as mayor with 75% of the vote last year, Koch pledged at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall that he would not abandon his beloved boroughs to run for higher office. But when Governor Hugh Carey decided not to seek a third term, Koch, 57, set his sights on Albany. Some city voters seemed determined to keep Koch home: he ended up only splitting the city vote with Cuomo. (In the 1977 mayor's race, Koch topped Cuomo by a 55%-to-45% margin.) Upstaters turned out in heavy numbers to vote 2 to 1 for Cuomo. They were rankled by Koch's ill-advised interview with Playboy magazine earlier this year, in which he called rural life "a joke," and put off by his wisecracking city style.

Cuomo, 50, was smoother and less controversial, a philosophical and soft-spoken campaigner who put together a coalition of labor unions, minorities, liberals and upstaters. At a time when Koch and other fiscally conservative Democrats are thought to be the vanguard of a new wave of neoliberalism, Cuomo spoke of restoring the "soul of the Democratic Party" with values "that have been shared by a generation." Among them: "Government has an aggressive role to play that's deeper than preparing us for war or simply taking care of the rich."

These ideals will make the November general election an ideological clash. Cuomo's opponent is Lewis Lehrman, 44, a drugstore-chain heir who pumped $3.7 million of his own into a record-setting $7 million primary campaign. Lehrman, a supply-side conservative who backed Ronald Reagan, champions the gold standard and, unlike Cuomo, believes strongly in capital punishment. Said Lehrman after last Thursday's primaries: "Now it will be a choice between two points of view, two ways of looking at the world."

California dreaming

When 4,600 Los Angeles bus drivers walked off the job two weeks ago, stranding 600,000 commuters, Mayor Tom Bradley, the Democratic candidate for California Governor, canceled campaign appearances so he could sit in on the contract talks. Five days later the drivers were back at work. As he has many times in the past, Bradley emerged from the dustup as a soft-spoken conciliator who knows how to keep the wheels of government turning. His Republican rival, California Attorney General George Deukmejian, promptly accused Bradley's labor allies of arranging the walkout for the mayor's benefit, a charge that a Deukmejian aide later admitted was groundless. The outburst was a measure of the frustration overtaking Deukmejian as Bradley steadily widened his lead in the polls. A survey last week put him 14 points ahead.

Bradley, 64, who spent 21 years on the Los Angeles police force while getting his law degree at night, is trying to become the first black elected Governor in the U.S. His campaign slogan is typically low key: "He doesn't make a lot of noise. He just gets a lot done." Now he is spending some $100,000 a week on TV and radio ads "to get the people to understand Tom Bradley." With unemployment at 10.3% in the state, Bradley says, the only issue that counts is "jobs and education. Jobs and housing. Jobs and agriculture. Jobs and the business climate. And jobs."

His rival, who served 16 years as a California assemblyman and state senator before his 1978 election as attorney general, insists that crime is the issue that voters care most about, despite opinion polls ranking unemployment first. Deukmejian, 54, portrays himself as the law-and-order candidate and reminds voters that he wrote the state's tough "use a gun: go to prison" statute. He has tried, with little success, to identify his opponent with the noteworthy outgoing Governor. Charges Deukmejian: "Tom Bradley endorses the same policies, has the same friends and would follow the same tactics in Sacramento as Jerry Brown."

Deukmejian, with fund-raising assists from President Reagan and Gerald Ford, is spending about $7.5 million on his election effort. This is about the same as Bradley's budget, but the Republican needs to compensate for his late-starting campaign: he unwisely stayed off the campaign trail all summer after defeating Lieutenant Governor Mike Curb in the June primary. One imponderable is whether California, which is still largely conservative on race, will be willing to elect a black Governor. The betting is that Bradley's steady performance during his nine years as mayor of Los Angeles has largely put such racial considerations to rest.

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