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LA Times Profile: McClintock Convinced Persistence Will Pay Off
Uncompromising and outspoken, he believes his tightfisted ways will resonate with voters

By Daryl Kelley, Times Staff Writer

Tom McClintock was the bookish kid with a "Reagan for Governor" sticker on his Schwinn bicycle, the wonkish pol who eagerly joined the just-vote-no "caveman" faction of the state Assembly, the maverick state senator who never saw a new tax he could embrace.

Even within his own Republican Party, he has always been an outsider, consigned to counting his victories indirectly — as the instigator of ideas that catch on later, usually with someone else's name attached.

"By the time I got to junior high and high school, the term 'geek' certainly applied, and I'm still pretty much the same guy," said McClintock, 47. "But I do feel I've gone from being a lonely voice to one that people listen to."

Bill Simon's exit from the recall election over the weekend has given McClintock his moment. As the campaign's prominent fiscal and social conservative, he is now poised either to be a spoiler in the Oct. 7 election or, if votes on the long recall ballot are split just so, to replace Gray Davis as governor.

A new Times Poll last week found that McClintock's support has doubled since early July to 12% of likely voters, behind Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and Republican movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

With California's budget balanced only through borrowing and its credit rating at junk bond levels, McClintock believes he is finding an audience for his conservative fiscal positions.

As governor, he says, he would bypass the deadlocked Legislature, if necessary, to balance the budget through executive order and ballot initiative. He would cap government spending, cut California's bureaucracy, contract out for state services and reduce the state's workers' compensation benefits.

Last year, as the state budget shortfall ballooned, McClintock was the only member of the Legislature to vote against salary and pension increases for state prison guards, a package that costs at least $700 million a year. Davis, who received nearly $1.5 million in his first term from the guards' union, signed the bill.

Witty if a bit stiff, McClintock took his frugal notions to voters last fall as a candidate for state controller, using a fictional Scotsman, "Cousin Angus McClintock," to vouch for his being "as tight as a bullfrog's behind, and that, me friends, is watertight."

Though outspent 5 to 1, he lost by a slim margin and pulled more votes than any other Republican on the statewide ballot, including Simon in his loss to Davis for governor.

"From day one, I've said don't count Tom McClintock out," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a USC political analyst. "He's the true conservative in this recall race. He's a true believer."

Just two weeks into the race, McClintock and Simon were both asked if they would eventually throw their support behind Schwarzenegger to give the GOP its best chance of winning the governor's office. Simon relented Saturday, but a defiant McClintock stood firm.

"Forget it; I'm in this race to stay," McClintock said. "I believe in an election process where we have the campaign first and then the voters get to decide who wins. I know that's at variance with the country-club variety of the Republican Party, but so be it."

Bebitch Jeffe thinks McClintock has the credentials to stay in the race, if not the money. And she said Simon's withdrawal will bring a windfall of free media coverage to "the anti-Arnold."

Even his underfunded campaign treasury has received some help — swelling by Friday to $312,000 in cash and what his campaign said were pledges of $800,000. Analysts say it will take $6 million to $12 million to run a competitive race. He says he can win with $4 million, and is unveiling his radio and television campaign this week.

"I'm not tilting at windmills," McClintock said in an interview. "But I have found it takes a number of years of persistence to get a new idea to fruition."

McClintock's main new idea is actually an old one: to resurrect tax-activist Paul Gann's cap on state spending, so it could only increase as fast as inflation and population growth combined. Had such a cap been in place the past five years, he contends, the state would have seen a healthy surplus rather than a $38-billion shortfall.

"This is not a revenue problem," he said. "Inflation and population grew 21% [since 1998], and revenue grew 25%. The problem is the 40% increase in spending for the same period."

McClintock knows many of his proposals are not popular. But the tart-tongued, abrasive state senator has never been a consensus builder. He has taken shots at what he sees as excessive spending by both parties for two decades.

He criticized Republican Gov. George Deukmejian regularly on a variety of issues. For a decade, he has railed against Republican Pete Wilson for imposing "the biggest tax increase in American history" when he was governor.

Some arguments between McClintock and Wilson were so strong, legislators who attended the Republican strategy sessions said they watched in awe.

"They weren't personal," McClintock said. "Those were forceful arguments against the tax increase, and events proved my arguments correct."

He so angered Wilson that the governor opposed McClintock's first bid for state controller in 1994, drying up campaign contributions, said Tony Quinn, a Republican strategist in Sacramento for three decades.

"Everything in McClintock's career has turned out to be a cul-de-sac: He drives in and there's nowhere to go," Quinn said. "He's very bright, but the number of people who do not like him is very high."

McClintock's positions on social issues are consistently conservative: He is anti-abortion and anti-gun control, although most California voters support both. Last year he opposed construction bonds for schools and affordable housing that voters favored. He also supported Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative that sought to cut off free social benefits and education to illegal immigrants — a plan struck down in court but still popular with voters today.

Ventura County Supervisor Judy Mikels, who opposed McClintock in the state Senate Republican primary in 2000, said she considers McClintock a hypocrite for selling himself as frugal with taxpayers' money while collecting about $26,000 a year tax-free to cover living expenses in Sacramento during the legislative session.

McClintock's family resides in a rented house just 20 miles from the Capitol, she noted, not in his Southern California district. McClintock said the so-called per diem payments, accepted by nearly all legislators, pay for the two homes his job requires him to maintain. The second is a townhouse he owns in Thousand Oaks.

"For Tom to be so far out on balancing the budget, then accept the per diem, that's wrong," Mikels said. "And I am concerned about whether Tom can learn to be a consensus builder in order to show true leadership. He's always been 'Dr. No' up there."

But former Republican Assembly leader Scott Baugh said McClintock has been good in recent years at coming up with ideas that the GOP can rally around.

McClintock's plan to eliminate the state vehicle license fee was adopted in large part by Wilson in 1998. And two years later, McClintock's proposals on water and transportation were core to the Republicans' 2020 program for the future.

"Clearly, he did not march to the Republican Caucus drum," Baugh said. "When he disagreed, he wasn't afraid to say so publicly or privately. But he was a contributing member of our caucus."

The son a New York City ad salesman who moved to California when times got tough and a homemaker-turned-real estate agent, Thomas Miller McClintock II attended his first political event at age 4. He and his mom went to an airport rally that President Eisenhower hosted in 1960 for Vice President Richard Nixon.

"My only memory is looking through the chain-link fence and my mom shouting, 'Look at the bald man, son, look at the bald man.' "

It wasn't until his family's move to Thousand Oaks in suburban Ventura County in 1965 that McClintock started to become hooked on politics. Still a youngster, he supported Reagan for governor and Nixon for president. By age 14, he was writing letters to newspaper editors supporting the Vietnam War.

"Those were momentous times, times of upheaval," he explained. "It seemed to me in those days to be very much a question of supporting the nation."

In 1972, the 16-year-old McClintock helped form a statewide network of Republican high school students. He was elected to his party's county committee at age 19. A year later he began writing a conservative political column, which he syndicated to 10 small papers.

After receiving a political science degree from UCLA, McClintock got his start in state government as chief of staff for former state Sen. Ed Davis. (R-Chatsworth). He won a vacant Assembly seat in 1982 at age 26, lost a run for Congress in 1992 and failed in a run for controller in 1994. In the Assembly he was part of a group of lawmakers called the "cavemen" for their staunch conservative politics and their pledge to vote no on all government spending.

He returned to the Assembly in 1996 and won his state Senate seat in 2000, before losing for controller again last fall by fewer than 20,000 votes out of 6.6 million cast. All the while, he forged a reputation as an inflexible ideologue within the GOP.

"I'm a Jeffersonian Republican," he said, "which means I believe the fundamental responsibility of a government is to preserve the liberty of the people, rather than to abridge that freedom for whatever fancies the government in power develops."

McClintock favors strong budgets for public works — water, power and road projects — while hitting hardest at funding for people — state employment, education and public health care.

He acknowledges that public works are his top priority, but he says there's plenty of money to go around if it's spent properly. Forty years ago, he said, California spent one-third as much per person for government services as it does now, after adjusting for inflation. But state services have gotten worse.

That's partly because there are so many state employees — 44,000 more than in 1998 — and they are paid so much in wage and retirement benefits, he said.

If the lean and ramrod-straight McClintock is rigid in his approach to government, he said he is much the same in his private life. He describes himself as a homebody who is tight with the family dollar.

He doesn't travel much outside California and has no hobbies except reading. McClintock's tax returns, which he prepares himself, show that he and his family live on his salary, with $114,600 in adjusted gross income.

Wife Lori is an administrative assistant at the First Baptist Church of Elk Grove, which they regularly attend, and is not far from their two children's public schools.

"I spend most of my time either at the office or at home," McClintock said. "I'm boring."

But he thinks he can be effective.

He sees himself, in fact, as a modern-day Hiram Johnson, the California Republican governor who took on railroad barons and moneyed interests in 1910, then ushered in an era of progressive reforms, including the ballot initiative and the recall of elected officials.

"Hiram Johnson confronted the same problem; he was also a political maverick," McClintock said. "He realized he had to take his case directly to the people, and he did."

If state lawmakers won't curb their spending, McClintock says he'll take his case for reform directly to the people, too.

"Ultimately, the governor, whoever he is, will have to rally the people ... for the fundamental reforms needed to change our state," he said. "The Constitution gives the people the ultimate authority."

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