VOTERS STIRRING; WILL A GERGENIZED WHITE HOUSE SEE IT?

President Bill Clinton has now added to his stable of White House advisers the estimable David "I Was Never a Republican Or a Conservative" Gergen, a veteran of three of the last four Republican White Houses. Columnist Joe Sobran acidly observed:

"If a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, then Gergen is vaguely familiar for being vaguely familiar. He has no national following; no one remembers anything he says five minutes after he says it ... On the other hand, Gergen is a tall, white male with a wife and two children, and can thus project a reassuringly non-lesbian image. This will pass for diversity in the Clinton administration ..."

It says much about national media bias that a bland, self-styled "independent" centrist like Gergen has long been public television's hand-picked spokesman for conservative opinion. Gergen will be at home serving the man he confesses voting for, easily the most liberal President in 50 years. He has had a long-running stint on Public Broadcasting System's MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour, where, columnist Robert Novak tartly observes, he represents "the Left" to panelist Mark Shields' "far Left."

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Something's happening out there.

This past week saw Los Angeles elect its first Republican mayor in more than 30 years. Mayor-elect Richard Riordan, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist, ran as a conservative pledging the privatizing (selling off) of city services and putting thousands more police on the street. His Asian-American opponent was city councilman Mike Woo, a down-the-line liberal who trumpeted his endorsement from President Bill Clinton. Clinton visited the city to campaign with Woo.

Riordan won a solid 54 percent victory, despite jolting, late revelations that he had two DWI convictions 17 and 20 years earlier. The fact of such baggage suggests that were it not for those arrests, the 63-year-old Riordan would have won an even larger victory over his young, liberal opponent.

This amazing result from Los Angeles came on the heels of the stunning, 2-1 senate landslide for Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison on June 5 in the Lone Star state. The current occupant of the White House is so unpopular among Texans that his party's appointed candidate, Sen. Bob Krueger, didn't want the President to come in for him in the race to fill the unexpired term of former Senator, now Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen.

Krueger spent the entire spring distancing himself from Clintonomics, even voting against the President's tax-laden budget when it came through the Senate. But voters simply didn't believe Krueger when he said he'd stand up to his President, and the more Hutchison focused her fire on Clinton, the more she appealed to voters. So Hutchison won a seat that had been in Democratic hands since 1875 and Texans have two Republicans representing them in the U.S. Senate for the first time since Reconstruction days.

Hutchison's campaign ("We don't have a deficit because we're undertaxed, but because Washington spends too much") was straight out of the well-worn hymnbook of Ronald Wilson Reagan. (Funny thing why the GOP ever discarded those old favorites? but that's grist for another column.)

Statewide, Hispanics gave Hutchison a majority, while Perotistas came home to the GOP; up in the Panhandle, she won 80 percent; her majorities in East Texas piney woods counties, reliably Yellow-Dog Democrat turf, simply awed observers. A Washington Post news analysis piece from Dallas this week headlined the following message:

"Texas Voters Send Two Powerful Messages: State's Democratic Base Has Crumbled and Clinton Is a Liability"

Texas Democratic Party state chairman Bob Slagle was especially brutal in his evaluation, saying that with his liberal policies, President Clinton has become "an anchor around the necks of our candidates down here."

(The good news for Democrats is that Texas Republicans could still screw all this up; waiting in the wings to run as a GOP gubernatorial candidate next year is George W. Bush, son of the former President.)

Still, amazingly, it isn't just Texans and Los Angelenos who are responding to a strong conservative message. Something really is happening out there, whenever voters are offered the real thing, and not a watered-down, George Bushian version of split-the-difference moderation. Additional confirmation of voter unrest came last month from an unlikely precinct: Jersey City, New Jersey, population 230,000, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Jersey City is a 65 percent minority town long dominated by the machine of yesteryear's Boss Frank "I Am the Law" Hague.

In the Jersey City mayor's race, in a town where Republican registration is a pathetic six percent, voters turned to 34-year-old Republican Bret Schundler, Harvard grad, devoutly religious, Wall Street financier and an outspoken conservative. Schundler avoided the sort of bland centrism that David Gergen will urge on President Clinton and instead unfurled a banner of bold colors. He offered Jersey City voters a platform of privatizing city services; tax cuts; expanded enterprise zones to attract business to the inner city; and, notably, all-out support for school choice, including vouchers for parents to choose their children's schools.

Teachers' unions howled, and Jesse Jackson was brought in to denounce the Republican, but voters loved it, and Bret Schundler crushed the machine, 2-1, carrying in with him eight of his nine city council running mates. He even won 50 percent in Marion Gardens, a minority housing project featured last month on ABC's "Nightline" as an example of urban decay.

The national media won't tell you much of this, but something is indeed happening out there, where live real Americans of all colors, who know government is failing them.