Governors on the Run

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

When political analysts predict a chilly November for Bill Clinton, they're usually referring to the congressional elections. Justifiably so: in a TIME/ CNN poll, 41% of adults surveyed said if the vote were held last week, they would choose the Republicans in their district, vs. 35% who supported Democrats. Those figures, a stark reversal of the 42%-to-34% edge the Democrats held just two months ago, mark the first Republican plurality since 1952.

But Congress is only one place where Clinton may feel frozen out. In Governor's mansions around the U.S., he may lose some of his most crucial supporters. Consider Zell Miller, the Democratic Governor of Georgia. In 1992 he was extremely helpful to candidate Clinton, barnstorming the state with his old friend and even changing Georgia's primary date to Clinton's advantage. When Clinton won Georgia by a scant 13,000 votes in November, thus grabbing the state's 13 electoral votes, many credited the margin to Miller.

It's questionable whether he will be able to help Clinton again in 1996; last week polls gave Miller a narrow five-point lead in his own race against Republican Guy Milener. Yet for a Democrat, he's fortunate. With 36 states electing Governors next month, the Republicans are on the verge of controlling a majority of state houses for the first time since 1968. Of the eight most populous states, Pennsylvania is a toss-up; but Michigan, Illinois and Ohio will almost certainly go Republican. And in the four electoral-vote behemoths -- California, New York, Texas and Florida -- once favored Democrats, some of them political legends, are stumbling badly. If they fall, Clinton in '96 will forfeit the nitty-gritty, dig-out-the-vote effort he got from Miller in '92 -- in states he cannot afford to lose.

The gubernatorial shift, unlike the upheaval in Congress, cannot be traced directly to fatigue with incumbents in general or Clinton in particular. Governors' races spotlight local personalities and such issues as immigration, gambling and state income taxes. But that is small solace for the Democratic leadership, which is wondering what went wrong in the Big Four.

NEW YORK: If progressive Democrats maintained their own private Rushmore, Mario Cuomo, the immigrants' son who became his party's conscience, would be on it. New Yorkers, however, have had 12 years to study the cracks in the granite. Cuomo's supporters, especially in New York City, still revere his full-blooded liberalism and bouts with presidential candidacy, his vetoes of the death penalty and defense of New York's generous social programs. But the same acts infuriate critics in rural areas and suburbs. And Cuomo has had trouble keeping businesses in the state or helping reduce local taxes.

The result was what Republicans last summer called ABCD: Anyone But Cuomo, Dummy. Into the role of Anyone stepped a little-known protege of New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato's, a state senator named George Pataki. Pataki has presented a detailed crime-fighting plan and a fuzzy promise of a $5.6 billion tax cut.

Cuomo has focused on the tax cut's vagueness, calling it a "con job" and a "political fantasy." But without waiting for details, many voters have been far more critical of Cuomo's own, more modest $1.6 billion cut, seen as cynical from a man who could have proposed it long before the election (much like his last-minute scheme to lower state electricity rates by buying the huge Lilco utility). Says Lee Miringoff of Marist College, one of many pollsters who have chronicled a Pataki lead of about 44% to 40%: "Cuomo has a problem: he's running on his past record. Pataki, on the other hand, has no appreciable past."

Recently Cuomo received an endorsement from former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, which may mobilize black voters, a vital Cuomo constituency. In fact, Cuomo's wife Matilda has rather intemperately warned of "race riots" should he lose. Meanwhile, Cuomo has also profited from current Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's reluctance to endorse his fellow Republican; Giuliani apparently fears that the big tax cut may come at his city's expense.

TEXAS: Back in 1988, Ann Richards seemed to have the Bush family number. Her comment that the Republican presidential candidate was born "with a silver foot in his mouth" gave a lively preview of what, by most accounts, has been an entertaining and competent governorship. And yet with the most recent polls ! awarding her only a two-point lead over Bush's eldest son George W., Richards' humor has sounded increasingly strained.

She has grounds for frustration. In a year in which the No. 1 public issue is crime, Richards has already funded more new state-prison beds (104,000) than all previous Texas Governors combined. Despite bobbling a thorny school- financing issue, she enjoys a Clinton-should-be-so-lucky approval rating of 60%.

Her failure to pull away from Bush may have less to do with her performance than with the state's shift toward the G.O.P. Since her election, Texas' most heavily Republican counties have added 120,000 voters to the rolls -- and Richards' 1990 margin of victory was only 100,000. In fact, she might have lost then, had her opponent, bumptious millionaire Clayton Williams, not compared rape to the weather ("If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it") and forfeited tens of thousands of votes by otherwise Republican-leaning women.

Richards may have hoped to bait Bush, who is known as thin-skinned, into a similarly disastrous gaffe; she has goaded him by crediting his business successes to "his daddy's friends," calling him "that young Bush boy" and once, a "jerk." Yet Bush has stayed calm, politely staking out positions to her right on crime, welfare and the size of government. Against this, Richards, who is said to genuinely dislike Bush, appears adrift. Says Austin political consultant Bill Miller, who has worked for both parties: "Ann Richards is in serious trouble. Bush is taking the fight to her. She's on the ropes and getting hit all over."

FLORIDA: Lawton Chiles, 64, is another larger-than-life pol under pressure from a Bush scion (Jeb, 41). But unlike Richards, Chiles has had crucial help from a highly placed official -- Fidel Castro. Until refugee Cubans began braving the Florida Straits in early August, the folksy, eccentric Governor looked vulnerable to Bush's claims that he was out of touch with Florida's economic interests. By month's end, however, he was Florida's Horatius at the immigration bridge, prevailing upon a reluctant Clinton to intern at Guantanamo those rafters plucked from the sea. Almost overnight, Chiles commandeered Florida's red-hot immigration debate and became the only gubernatorial Friend of Bill's with valid anti-Bill credentials.

All of which has merely brought him within five points of the front-running Bush in mid-September. Bush's proposal to build $1 billion worth of new jail cells without a tax increase may sound improbable, but the pro-life challenger has garnered many believers with talk of "family values," a draconian illegal-immigration policy and a philosophy on crime that almost excludes thoughts of rehabilitation.

Chiles' handlers profess confidence, noting that he has just lately run his first TV spots, in part because he refuses PAC money or any individual contribution over $100. Indeed, few play the populist card better than Chiles, as Bush learned during a recent debate. The challenger switched briefly into Spanish and then turned to Chiles: "Governor, what I've just said was the Governor needs to lead. And the government needs to be able to sell."

Chiles was all courtliness: "And if I might reply to you in Cracker?" (a slang term for descendants of white Floridian pioneers). "I know how to lead. I know how to sell," he said, launching into an example. "Now," he concluded, "do you understand Cracker?" If Bush wants to hand Chiles his first defeat in 36 years of public life, he may need a few lessons.

CALIFORNIA: If the state's economy had stayed sour, little could have stopped Kathleen Brown. Pete Wilson, the incumbent, forced to raise taxes in his first term, had reaped a 20% approval rating. Brown, the state treasurer, as well as the daughter and sister of previous Governors Pat and Jerry, demanded fiscal overhaul and gleaned a 23-point lead in the polls.

But then recovery arrived, and Wilson, a onetime Nixon advance man, staged a comeback his old boss would have admired. Freed of his fiscal straitjacket, he joyfully pressed the new hot buttons: crime and illegal immigration. His ads trumpeted his leadership of last year's triumphant three-strikes-and- you're-out movement and his enthusiasm for the death penalty. He signed on to Proposition 187, the tremendously popular, probably unconstitutional, California ballot issue that would deny the state's 1.6 million illegal aliens any health care, welfare grants or even public education.

Brown spent weeks trying to outtough Wilson with positions ill-suited to the task. She seemed overly studied in her statement that if elected, she would enforce the death penalty despite her philosophical opposition to it. And, courageously but at great cost, she has attacked Proposition 187. By last week Wilson was enjoying a 50%-to-42% lead.

Brown's hopes now rest on a detailed, 63-page booklet called Building a New California, which will be mailed to 1 million homes as a way of suggesting that, unlike her opponent, Brown "has a plan." Eric Schockman, an elections expert at the University of Southern California, is enthused. "Since Labor Day, I've seen a different Kathleen Brown," he says. "She's more candid." In fact, in a debate with Wilson last Friday night, Brown emphasized her tough attitude on crime by disclosing that years ago one of her daughters had been raped and her son had been mugged.

At the White House, officials are monitoring the gubernatorial elections with a kind of desperate optimism. "We still win Texas, Florida and New York," predicts an official. Do the polls suggest otherwise? Well, he explains, "Governors' races are extremely volatile." Even he excludes California, effectively writing off Kathleen Brown and whatever influence a Democratic Governor would wield over the state's 54 electoral votes. Beyond Pennsylvania Avenue, however, more objective handicappers offer a different morning line: If Clinton wins any of the big states in '96, they say, he will do so despite their Governors, not because of them.

With reporting by Greg Aunapu/Miami, Laurence I. Barrett and James Carney/Washington, Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, S.C. Gwynne/Austin, Jonathan Moody/New York and Sophfronia Scott Gregory/Atlanta