GOVERNOR : Brown Campaign Gets Back to Basics : Candidate tries to recover momentum by hammering home her plan for the state’s future. She says Gov. Wilson lacks such a vision.

Tacitly acknowledging that she must go back to basics if she is to win the race for governor, Democrat Kathleen Brown on Thursday launched a statewide campaign to convince voters that she alone has a plan to rebuild troubled California.

As she--and a host of surrogates around the state--handed out slickly packaged copies of a 62-page compilation of her speeches and policy positions, Brown also launched a fiery and quite personal assault on her Republican opponent, incumbent Pete Wilson.

“Pete Wilson is a career politician,” the state treasurer told about 1,000 cheering students gathered in an outdoor amphitheater at Santa Monica College. “Wilson will stop at nothing, he will say anything, he will do anything to get voters. He has done it before and he is at it again. . . .

“He plays on your fears, he plays on your anger, he taps into the cynicism and draws on the worst of our emotions,” she added, “instead of reaching out and calling upon the best of California and trying to inspire our confidence and our hope for a better future.

“No, not our Pete. He likes to divide, he likes to bully, he likes to blame, he likes to bash everyone from kids to immigrants to the President of the United States. And I’m here to say he’s got to stop.”

But as much as Brown sought to tar Wilson, her campaign as much as acknowledged by its actions Thursday that it has thus far failed to establish her as a credible alternative for the voters of California.

In the middle of her speech, with great flourish, Brown helped aides distribute copies of her booklet, titled “Building a New California.” The candidate and her aides described the effort as a novel way to attract voters, but actually the packaged platform has become a staple of campaigning in recent years.

Normally, however, such documents are used in the early, introductory phases of a campaign, when candidates are just beginning to build a rapport with voters. That Brown was distributing it with little more than a month to go before Election Day was essentially an admission that she has not yet made her case.

In an interview, Brown manager Clint Reilly acknowledged that the campaign has problems.

“If the equation is your opponent has a 2-1 negative job rating and yet he’s winning election, it’s very clear the problem is your candidacy is not getting articulated to the voters,” he said. “It’s clear we need to develop our candidate as a viable alternative for governor.”

One persistent difficulty for Brown continued to haunt her Thursday, as U.S. Rep. Mike Huffington used a statement of Brown’s to criticize her fellow Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The statement was included in television and radio ads aired by Huffington, who is challenging Feinstein.

In a recent National Journal article, Brown defended her personal opposition to the death penalty by saying that because of her principles she did not change her position for political expediency as had several Democrats, including Feinstein.

Brown subsequently said that her statement about Feinstein was “mistaken.” On Thursday, she demanded that Huffington withdraw the ad, and again said she had not meant to criticize Feinstein, who changed her position on capital punishment in the early 1970s, nearly 20 years before she ran for statewide office.

“The whole intent was to assert that while it might have been politically advantageous for me to change my position, I did not,” Brown said.

As far as the strategic imperative of releasing her plan, Brown cast it in somewhat brighter terms than had Reilly, saying that it was meant to inspire voters to look toward the future.

“It is returning to where I began,” she said. “My campaign has always been about restoring the promise to California families and rebuilding the state.”

The plan repeats Brown’s springtime promise to create 1 million jobs for California; it pledges a host of incentives for business, sets as a high priority the restoration of the state’s schools and colleges and vows to make the state’s streets safer.

The booklet will serve as the backbone for the last month of the campaign, aides said. Beginning Thursday night, television ads touting it were due to appear around the state, and aides said that all of Brown’s appearances and its campaign mailers would be tailored to reinforcing the contention that Brown has a plan, but Wilson does not.

A spokesman for Brown’s opponent immediately labeled the release of her plan as a publicity gimmick from a “fairly desperate” candidate.

“There is nothing new here,” said Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur, who said it would take a forklift to heft a compilation of Wilson’s pledges for the future.

“What is more interesting is what is not in this book,” Schnur said. “What’s not in this book is that Kathleen Brown is against the death penalty. What’s not in this book is that Kathleen Brown is against the ‘Save Our State’ initiative. What’s not in this book is that Kathleen Brown is going to raise taxes on the state of California.”

Actually, the book does mention Brown’s position on the death penalty with one sentence near the end of a 15-page chapter on crime. “I support three strikes for felons, one strike for rapists and as governor I will enforce the death penalty,” it says. It does not specify her personal opposition, a position she has said will have no bearing on her handling of the issue.

The book does not explicitly mention Brown’s opposition to the initiative mentioned by Schnur, Proposition 187, which would ban all but emergency services for illegal immigrants. But she does express opposition to the concepts included in the initiative, from denying medical care to illegal immigrants to dismissing their children from schools.

Overall, both in the book and in her speech Thursday, Brown put forth a more moderate position than she had at times in recent months as she sought to match Wilson on tough approaches to issues such as crime and immigration.

She forwarded a far more populist attack, in keeping with her campaign’s desire to both ratchet up the enthusiasm of her partisans and inspire voters who have not yet made up their minds.

“This has to become a people’s campaign, a people’s campaign to take our state back from the special interests,” she told the students, adopting the traditional approach of an underdog. “Take it back from the right wing of the Republican Party and take it back from Peter Barton Wilson.”

Brown’s criticism of Wilson as a “career politician” mirrored a popular line of attack for challengers this campaign season, though it seemed an odd stroke from a woman whose brother and father could have been characterized the same way. She also sought to isolate Wilson from moderates, even those within his own party.

“He’s got a record of catering to the right wing of the Republican party and he’s got a record of catering to the moneyed and special interests while he taxes the middle class and balances his budget on higher education and sticks it to you,” she said.