The California governor, a Democrat with serious political problems, much preferred to have as his November opponent the rookie Republican candidate, an unapologetic conservative, rather than the more moderate, two-term big city mayor with demonstrated appeal to Democratic voters. So the Democratic governor’s people successfully planted a negative story in the press involving a technical violation of the law that had been committed 25 years earlier by the mayor who went on just as the governor’s managers had hoped he would to lose the GOP primary to the affable conservative newcomer.

The year was 1966, and the Democratic governor was Pat Brown who was tarnished in the voters’ eyes when it was revealed his camp had planted the smear on the moderate Republican and who lost badly that November to Ronald Reagan. The Gipper had defeated former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher in the GOP primary.

The question in the spring of 2002 is whether wealthy businessman Bill Simon Jr. who in his first try for public office last Tuesday trounced his heavily favored opponent, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, in the California GOP primary for governor is what the state’s conservatives have spent a generation futilely searching for: another Ronald Reagan.

Simon’s November opponent, Democratic governor Gray Davis, did not simply observe the GOP primary fight from 10,000 yards offshore through heavy-powered binoculars. Unopposed for renomination, Davis spent close to $10 million in television commercials in the purposeful destruction of Dick Riordan, whom the polls showed to be Davis’ most formidable opponent in November

The Davis ads documented Riordan’s switch from pro-life to pro-choice on abortion, attacked the mayor’s record on the death penalty and crime-fighting, and charged that during last year’s electricity crisis Riordan had backed selling Los Angeles city power at exorbitant rates to the rest of the state.

Instead of criticism for spending millions and scheming successfully to “pick” his November opponent, Davis today avoids any of the censure Pat Brown endured 36 years ago for planting one negative newspaper story. Davis, who has never been accused of being a romantic idealist and who has failed to capture the imagination of the state’s citizens, is now widely regarded as a tough, take-no-prisoners politician. Democratic activist Tom Higgins, an unenthusiastic backer of the governor, observes sadly, “Gray Davis is our Nixon.”

Davis is what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich once told me he feared most politically: “a double-death Democrat” aggressively endorsing capital punishment and zealous in his unfettered support for abortion. He now gets mixed to unfavorable reviews on his own leadership, especially during the state’s electricity crisis. The state faces a $17 billion budget shortfall this summer. Even though California is daily becoming an even more Democratic state, Mark Di Camillo of the respected Field Poll says that if Davis (and his record) become the issue, then Simon has a chance.

But the affable Bill Simon, to have any shot in November, had better not be another Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who won re-election as governor in 1970 with just 53 percent from an electorate that was well over 90 percent white, could not win in contemporary California, where November’s voters will be closer to 70 percent white, probably 17 percent Latino and the remainder mostly African-American and Asian. According to analyst-author Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California, Republicans now “start with a 20 point deficit (60 percent to 40 percent) among women voters and are down nearly three-to-one among Latino voters,” as well as trailing Democrats 55 percent to 45 percent among independents.

Reagan, it must be remembered, won the governorship as the reassuring symbol of traditional cultural values at a time when the state suffered the Watts race riots, when student protesters took over and occupied the administrative offices at the University of California Berkeley and when antiwar protests turned ugly. Of course, it was during Reagan’s Sacramento years that abortion, homosexuality and marijuana were for all practical purposes legalized.

This may explain why one early and strong Simon backer, former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, said the day of the primary, “Bill has to run hard and fast immediately to the middle.”

If as in the case of skydiving, hot tubs and personal trainers, California is politically previewing the future, then we can look forward with dread to the deep pockets of the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, following Gray Davis’s lead, and spending millions in the Democratic presidential primaries to wound or destroy the most formidable Democratic challenger to the GOP president. Let us hope not.

Mark Shields is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.