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Associated Press: Recall candidate fights "spending lobby" in bid for governorship
By Steve Lawrence

You wouldn't expect a conservative Republican politician to speak fondly of the 1960s, particularly that part of the raucous decade presided over by a liberal Democratic governor. Tom McClintock does.

For McClintock, the mid-60s were the "golden age of California government," when Democratic Gov. Pat Brown was running the state and it had "the finest highway system in the country, the finest public school system in the country ... (and) the finest university system."

Housing prices were low, jobs were plentiful and a family living on a modest income could find the home of their dreams in the Los Angeles suburbs.

That was McClintock's California in 1965, when the future state senator and candidate for governor and his parents moved west from New York looking for a better life.

That was before, in McClintock's view, an era of limits philosophy toward building more dams, power plants, highways and other infrastructure and a "lot of very bad decisions" led to a bloated, inefficient state government.

"The expenditures of government skyrocketed in that period but the state's commitment to its basic responsibilities were abandoned," he said.

The villains in his scenario are Pat's son, former Gov. Jerry Brown, and what McClintock calls "the spending lobby," the state employee unions and private companies that depend on state business.

But McClintock, in his nearly 17 years in the Legislature, has also had run-ins with Republican governors over spending and taxes.

"He is a conservative, a hard-right conservative," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar at the school of policy planning and development at the University of Southern California. "He is not a compromiser, which has limited his effectiveness."

McClintock calls himself a "Jeffersonian Republican" whose tightfisted fiscal views are catching on with voters.

"My focus has always been on fiscal policy," he said when asked at the first debate of recall election candidates if he was more conservative than most Californians.

State spending, adjusted for inflation, is now about three times per capita what it was in Pat Brown's day, and yet the state isn't providing the same high quality of services, McClintock contends.

The solutions include contracting out more state work to private companies, eliminating agencies that duplicate functions performed by other state, federal or local offices and tightening welfare standards, McClintock said.

"It's not hard to find waste in a government that spends as much as California and produces as little," he said.

McClintock opposes raising taxes to deal with the state's budget woes. In fact, he wants to eliminate the vehicle license fee, contending the approximately $6.2 billion in annual revenue generated by the "car tax" can be made up by reorganizing state agencies.

His other key positions include cutting school administrative costs, building more nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams to boost the state's electricity supplies, rolling back gun-control and abortion-rights laws and taking a hands-off approach toward Indian gambling.

"A century ago, Indians were banished to reservations with the promise of sovereignty on reservation property," he said. "That promise ought to be kept."

McClintock's critics say his claims about a big-spending government overlook the impact of Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax slash, and the demands on government in a different era.

Proposition 13 forced the state to shoulder a greater financial role to help compensate for the property taxes lost by schools and local governments, said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a nonprofit organization that examines state tax and budget issues.

Thee are also more Californians living in poverty now, without health insurance, and that puts more demands on the state, she said.

In the last 40 years, the state has also taken on additional duties in the area of civil rights, workplace safety, and consumer and environmental protection, said Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Marina del Rey.

"There's no question there is some inefficiency (in state government)," said Bowen, who describes McClintock as a "smart guy but not very pragmatic." "I suggest there was inefficiency in Pat Brown's day."

To his admirers, McClintock is a political straight arrow who does what he says he will.

"I think he's the most focused legislator I have ever met," said Sen. Bob Margett, R-Arcadia. "When he reaches a conclusion he does that in a very resourceful way without prejudice, but once he reaches that conclusion, that's it."

James Holman, the owner and editor of a weekly newspaper, the San Diego Reader, said he contributed $21,000 to McClintock's campaign because the senator opposes abortion and supports tax cuts.

"I don't know McClintock well, but I've studied his record, and actions speak louder than words," Holman said.

McClintock, 47, got an early start in politics. Despite his praise for Pat Brown now, he had a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on his bicycle in 1966 when the actor denied Brown a third term.

"Looking back on it, I still would have voted for Reagan, but that doesn't keep me from admiring the commitment to public works that was a hallmark of the Pat Brown administration," he said.

McClintock worked as a campaign volunteer at age 16, became a Republican county chairman when he was 22 and won his first race for the state Legislature when he was 26.

His previous campaigns have also included a bid for Congress and two attempts to win the state controller's office, the last time in 2002, when he was the California GOP's top vote-getter.

He traces his conservative views to the day he came home from school to find his mother crying because taxes had wiped out the family's savings. "That made a big impression," he said.

As governor, McClintock said his first act would be to roll back the tripling of the vehicle license fee triggered by the Davis administration to help ease the state budget deficit.

To do that he would have to make a finding that the state had enough money to reimburse local governments for the $4.2 billion in lost revenue, said Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for the Department of Finance.

McClintock's also trying to qualify a measure for the ballot next year to eliminate the vehicle license fee entirely.

McClintock said he would scrap the "outrageously overpriced" electricity contracts signed by Gov. Gray Davis during the 2001 energy crisis and give lawmakers 30 days to adopt a less costly system of treating workers who suffer job-related injuries.

If lawmakers didn't meet the deadline, he would try to put his workers' compensation plan on the state ballot along with a series of other measures, including proposals that would create a flat-rate income tax and reimpose a state spending limit adopted by voters in 1979.

The measures would "work a dramatic improvement on the state's finances and on its economy," he said.

"Small changes, tinkering at the margin will not bring prosperity back to this state. We have major components of our system that are broken and they must be repaired," said McClintock