Wilson versus the right.

MANY ambitions are ascribed to California's Governor Pete Wilson, including the presidential variety, but his immediate goal is clear: he aims to reshape his state's Republican Party in his own image, stamping a new imprint--cool and pragmatic--on the party that midwifed the anti-big-government evangelism of Ronald Reagan.

In the nine months since he assumed office, Wilson has set about this task energetically, beginning with the basics, the restructuring of definitions. Conservatism? It's "alive and well," he assured This Week with David Brinkley. However, true conservatives are those who "are willing to pay taxes." Also, they're "about 75 per cent prochoice. Not pro-abortion, pro-choice. They feel very strongly about the physical environment." Who's outside this tent? Well, there's the "religious Right." They're "not conservatives."

Such talk wins huzzahs from the Eastern media and most of California's major newspapers. Wilson is applauded for charting a high-road path to Republican triumph--much as Rockefeller, Romney, and Percy were once hailed for similar vision.

One problem, though, is that legions of California's defined) aren't buying the script. For the senior of these foot soldiers, pride as well as policy is at stake. Join a group of aging ex-YAFers for drinks, and as the evening progresses you might hear them reminiscing about glories past--about how, sparking a movement that would transform the party nationally, they wrested the Golden State's GOP from the moderates. Threee great battles are the stuff of romance: Goldwater's besting Rockefeller in the 1964 presidential primary; Reagan's capturing the gubernatorial nomination two years later; and the dumping of an arch-liberal relic, Senator Thomas Kuchel, by the valiant Max Rafferty in the 1968 senatorial primary. It is that inheritance that is now under siege.

The Right's suspicions of Wilson are not new. They date at least from 1976 when, as mayor of San Diego, he supported Gerald Ford over Reagan in the presidential primary. Yes, conservatives backed Wilson for governor last year, mostly to guarantee a GOP voice in reapportionment; but they still didn't account him a blood brother.

Yet even many who were wary of him during that election are surprised at how far he has gone astray since taking office. His tax increase, by far the largest in state history, is what steams people most, but much else also rankles. State regulatory power is on the gallop. An EPA is up and running; expansion has been sought for the already muscular Coastal Commission, which second-guesses landowners near the ocean; more "growth management" is promised (translation: restrictions on building that will further inflate housing costs).

In Republican Orange County, the natives are restless. The county delivered the votes that ensured Wilson his election. Now local party leaders grouse that the governor has chosen not a single Republican from their turft as a senior advisor. The one Orange Countian rewarded with a cabinet position, Education Secretary Maureen DiMarco, is a Democrat who smiles indulgently at the suggestion that the public-education establishment might be top-heavy with administrators; she'll explain to you at length the perils of educational choice.

After all the indignities and heterodoxy, the camel-breaking straw was the tax increases, all $7.7 billion of them. Wilson's defenders stress the fiscal realities, but critics wonder, citing the budget's continued growth. Was the emergency as grave as it was portrayed, or were the additional revenues needed in part to fund a wish-list of new spending?

Whatever the answer, Wilson bungled from the outset. Instead of demanding concessions from big spenders as a condition for give on his part, he proposed billions in taxes as his opening offer, declaring his plan "a solution, not a negotiating stance." Weeks of negotiation followed, by the end of which the seasoned pragmatist had been handed his pants by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

Originally the governor demanded suspension of all automatic cost-of-living increases for welfare programs; he eventually accepted just a five-year suspension. He finally accepted some negligible tinkering with the costly workers' compensation system, after insisting at first on sweeping change. He dropped an effort to trim school spending (partly, it must be said, because of indifference among lawmakers from his own party). And he reneged on his promise not to accept any increase in the personal income tax. Where he stayed nail-tough was in dealing with anti-tax Republicans; they won no concessions, just a series of tongue lashings.

Thus greased by threats and incentives, the $56-billion budget was finally eased through, accompanied by new levies on sales, income, auto registration, snacks, and newspapers-- in all, adding $1,050 to the average California family's tax burden.

The conservative counterrevolt grew hot, fast. So much so that Governor Wilson, titular head of the California GOP, chose to be a no-show at formal sessions of the party's recent state convention in Anaheim.

By keeping his distance, he stayed out of harm's way. At least seventy resolutions had been submitted to the convention. Only one saluted the governor, for appointing a law-and-order justice to the state Supreme Court (it passed). Meanwhile, delegates voted to repudiate the tax increases. They congratulated GOP governors in three other states who resisted new taxes. And they condemned the Republican National Committee for pouring money (at Wilson's request) into moderate B. T. Collins's campaign against a conservative in a July primary for a Sacramento-area Assembly seat.

The conservative-moderate feuding will continue, with right-wing anger targeted at moderate candidates--Tom Campbell and appointed Senator John Seymour--for the state's two Senate seats, both up for grabs next year. Redistricting could give Wilson a chance to return fire at legislative conservatives, but the Right's tacticians aren't trembling; they say you can't craft a district in which a conservative can't capture the primary.

In any case, Wilson could be smart to ask if maybe his policies, and not the obstructionism of right-wingers, are the real source of his troubles. His "most dangerous problem isn't with conservative activists, it's with the people of California," says conservative Assemblyman Tom McClintock.

In the special primary elections for Assembly seats in July, Wilson's heavily funded candidate in Sacramento just squeaked by, while in Orange County, the governor's man was upset by a conservative who made opposition to tax hikes his sole issue. In the San Gabriel Valley, the GOP assemblyman who cast the deciding vote for the Wilson budget had to work furiously to turn aside a recall drive. A fledgling tax-revolt group in Orange County attracted so many people to its August meeting at a Santa Ana restaurant that an overflow crowd of several hundred had to stand in the parking lot, where they listened to denunciations of the governor over a makeshift PA system.

When the Orange County Register asked readers in July for comments about taxes, hundreds of calls flooded the lines, the same complaint being voiced again and again: we feel pushed to the wall. Employers know the feeling. They're front-line targets as the state grows more authoritarian in zoning, health and safety, and environmental rule-making. Even before the latest tax increases, California had the tenth hightest total state and local tax burden, and the sixth highest corporate income tax. Employers pay about $11 billion yearly in worker-compensation insurance costs, fourth highest in the nation. One hundred thousand manufacturing jobs have been lost since July 1990.

With an exodus of entrepreneurs heading for lower-tax states already under way, Pete Wilson's burdensome New Conservatism might call to mind, as much as anything, the Old Conservatism of Herbert Hoover. As Reagan conservatives battle the governor's agenda in the political trenches, it's likely that more and more business owners will cast their votes with their feet.

Mr. Johnson is an editorial writer at the Orange County Register.