BREAKING CONVENTION SIMON BEAT MORE THAN FORMER MAYOR.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

TO appreciate just how overwhelmingly Bill Simon beat former Mayor Richard Riordan in last week's election, consider the following: His margin of victory, 18 percentage points, was only one point lower than Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza's rout of Rep. Gary Condit.

But Simon didn't just pummel Riordan, he also destroyed conventional wisdom and the simplistic theorizing about what it takes to win California elections. To become the next governor of California, he'll have to debunk the conventional wisdom one more time.

Conventional wisdom said that businessman Simon, the ``neophyte'' with no name recognition or grass-roots support, would never win the primary.

Conventional wisdom warned that Riordan was unbeatable, and Riordan, to his own detriment, believed it. He thought that his big-city base and popularity were enough to assure him victory, and so he looked clear past the primary. Rather than trying to cultivate a following with state Republicans, he insulted them, calling them, ironically enough, off-putting and self-defeating.

Conventional wisdom held that Riordan was the best, perhaps the only candidate who could beat incumbent Gov. Gray Davis. Davis so believed it that he spent $7 million airing anti-Riordan ads throughout the primary campaign. He thought Simon would make for easy road kill.

Simon's romp and Riordan's grand implosion spectacularly proved the conventional wisdom wrong. Any candidate who can't protect a 40-point lead in a primary with a $20 million budget wouldn't stand a chance in an open statewide election.

For all his much-ballyhooed advantages, Riordan won a smaller percentage of the vote in his primary than the scandal-plagued Condit did in his. For all his high-priced consultants, the former mayor was remarkably flat-footed in the face of Davis' attacks. Republicans should be grateful that he self-destructed in March instead of waiting until November.

Riordan's weakness - which Davis happily exploited - was his lack of conviction. It was his flip-flops and his inability to inspire, not Davis' ads, that ultimately did him in. Riordan never gave Republicans a good reason to vote for him. His campaign message could be summed up as ``I can win, but I won't do a thing for you if I do'' - and that's not very compelling.

In other words, Riordan looked, sounded and acted too much like the man he hoped to unseat. GOP primary voters weren't going to vote for a Republican Gray Davis, and in a general election, Democrats or independents would have just as soon pick the genuine article.

It was Simon who offered voters a real alternative, with an idea-driven campaign heavy on specifics. For that, he gets the chance to defy the last remaining kernel of conventional wisdom - that he can't beat Gray Davis.

According to this popular theory, Simon is doomed because he's pro-life, which, the dispensers of conventional wisdom tell us, is lethal for Republican prospects. (Riordan warned that the GOP would become an ``extinct species'' if it didn't embrace liberal abortion policies like his own.) The theory rests mostly on the abysmal showing of the party's last gubernatorial candidate, Dan Lungren, who was beaten by Davis by 24 points in 1998.

But in recent years, the party has fielded two other high-profile statewide candidates, both champions of legalized abortion, and neither fared much better than Lungren. Republican Matt Fong lost by a dismal 10 points to an eminently beatable Democrat, Sen. Barbara Boxer, in 1998. Two years later, Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein crushed socially liberal Republican Tom Campbell by 20 points, a comparable margin to Davis vs. Lungren.

It's not abortion that has devastated the California GOP. A recent Field Poll shows that for most Californians, the issue ranks 22nd out of a possible 25 in terms of importance, with four out of 10 respondents saying they're ``not concerned'' about it. The party's real problem has been that in a predominantly Democratic state, its establishment has failed to offer a competing vision to the Democrats' policies of ever-increasing government and social engineering.

This time it could be different. The establishment candidate in last week's race is nursing his wounds back in Brentwood. It's now up to Simon, the outsider, the self-proclaimed ``candidate of ideas,'' to provide Californians with a real alternative to the poll-driven, politics-first governance that gave the state an energy crisis and a $17 billion deficit under Davis.

Stumping on Simon's behalf will be a president who has an 80 percent approval rating and a former New York City mayor that Time magazine named its person of the year. Any concern that the Republican nominee can't reach out to liberals and moderates should be laid to rest when he rolls out his first ad showing the massively popular Rudy Giuliani, who supports legal abortion and gun control, explaining why, their political differences aside, he backs Simon to clean up California.

But Simon can't count on anyone else to win this election for him. In the primary campaign, he took too long to criticize Riordan, waiting until the final weeks. If Davis hadn't done the job of raising Riordan's negatives for him, it's doubtful that Simon could have pulled off his upset.

Simon shouldn't expect Davis to do him any such favors again. Far from it - the governor has begun his campaign in attack mode, and if Simon doesn't fight back just as hard, he'll lose as badly as the prognosticators say he will. So far, though, he seems willing to do whatever it takes to prove conventional wisdom wrong yet again.

In the final days of the primary campaign, Simon defied those who give him no chance with a prediction of his own: ``We'll see in November who's the easy road kill.''

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(color) Bill Simon, joined by his wife Cindy, accepts the Republican nomination for governor after winning the California Republican primary Tuesday.

Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press