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September 9, 2003, 02:36 PM
McClintock proud to be on right
By Alexa H. Bluth -- Bee Capitol Bureau - (Published September 7, 2003)
On a drizzly morning, state Sen. Tom McClintock rolled his state-issued Dodge Intrepid into a parking lot behind a Sacramento radio station.
He stepped out of the car alone -- "I've never believed in entourages," he later muttered -- and strolled into the building to start a day on the campaign trail.
It was friendly territory for McClintock. Talk-show hosts are his most unapologetic fans, and they provide precisely what he craves: a hospitable stage to spell out the blueprint he has crafted over years in the California Legislature to heal the state where he grew up and where his strict political ideals were born.
In a state where Republicans hold no constitutional offices and statewide candidates usually seek to espouse centrist views, McClintock, 47, often travels alone.
A Republican state senator representing Ventura County, he is one of the Legislature's most conservative members and the most right-leaning major candidate for governor of California.
He subscribes unswervingly to small-government principles and conservative social and fiscal ideals. Colleagues and friends, Republicans and Democrats, uncannily describe him with the same three words: "A true believer."
In the historic recall election, McClintock has, at the least, a bully pulpit for his views and the opportunity to become a major spoiler in Arnold Schwarzenegger's quest to seize a statewide office. At best, he hopes to become the chief executive of a Democrat-dominated state.
"A governor with the political will to act and the understanding of the state can, in a fairly short period of time, dramatically change the direction of California," he says.
McClintock is the son of a salesman who moved his family to California from New York in 1965 to search for a job.
The journey to California and his childhood in the San Fernando Valley, he said, shaped his values and, ultimately, his desire to govern.
His parents purchased their dream house -- paying $35,000 for a ranch-style home with a pool -- and his father commuted 40 minutes to downtown Los Angeles. McClintock now laments that homes in California are beyond the grasp of many working families and that choked traffic forces unbearable commutes.
"My family and every family like ours, had they come to California today seeking a better future, would not have found it here," he said. "That's the tragedy that our generation is tasked by history to correct."
He recalls a defining moment as a preteen that showed him "the impact that a poorly run government can have on families."
His mother had gone into real estate a couple of years earlier and, he says, miscalculated her tax withholding.
"All of the plans that she had laid out for the whole year were just wiped out by that tax bill," McClintock said. "That certainly did make a big impression on me."
McClintock's political involvement began at Ventura County High School, where he started Young Voters for the President. Campaigning for President Nixon and writing letters to the local paper, he found a passion.
At 20, he served on the GOP's Ventura County central committee and began writing a political column for the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle -- "for the princely sum of 25 cents per column inch."
The University of California, Los Angeles, graduate quickly dropped plans to go to law school and syndicated the column to 10 newspapers. Then he got a call from state Sen. Ed Davis, former Los Angeles Police Department chief, asking him to to be his chief of staff.
"The opportunity to go work for a childhood icon was irresistible," McClintock said.
He soon sought his first election to public office and began his now famed practice of taking on what he calls the "Republican establishment." In 1982, he defeated a local mayor who had Republican Party backing in the primary and won a seat in the state Assembly at age 26.
He left the Assembly in 1992 to lead a state taxpayer advocacy project before running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1992 and losing a 1994 bid for the state controller's post.
After the losing races, McClintock returned to the Assembly for two terms before his 2000 election to the state Senate.
Last year, he lost a second bid for controller by two-tenths of a percentage point to Democrat Steve Westly, a wealthy eBay online auction executive.
The posts of controller and governor, he said, appeal to him as opportunities for "restoring good management practices to the state's bureaucracy and changing the state's spending priorities."
Now, the unusual format of the recall election could present the best possible conditions for McClintock to win statewide office. Were Gov. Gray Davis recalled, his replacement would be selected by a plurality and could win with a small percentage of the vote.
When conservative businessman Bill Simon left the field, McClintock strategists were giddy at the prospect of luring his supporters -- and their checkbooks -- to their camp.
But to be sure, McClintock already had a cement-solid base of voters in California. They have downloaded colorful McClintock campaign signs from his Web site to paste to their cars and to post in their yards. They organize fund-raising picnics and call in to talk radio stations to extol McClintock's virtues. They write checks -- often for less than $100.
Political observers doubt whether his scrappy, largely grass-roots campaign can compete against the likes of millionaire Schwarzenegger and well-funded Davis in a state where television advertising is key to reaching far-flung voters.
More moderate Republicans fear he will siphon critical votes from the party's best hope of winning the governorship, Schwarzenegger. Several Republicans have called on McClintock to follow Simon's lead and bow out of the race.
McClintock says he will not, and those who know him say they believe he means it.
"I don't think if the president of the United States called Tom, he would get out," said Dean Andal, a former GOP Assembly colleague who lost to McClintock in last year's controller primary.
In the Legislature, McClintock has been similarly unbendable. Republican lawmakers look to him as a beacon, a philosophical starting point.
"Tom is like a steel post that is in four feet of concrete," said Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas. "He is exactly who he is, and he doesn't move with the political winds."
This straightforward, lone-wolf approach is appealing to his loyal followers. But colleagues -- including conservative lawmakers -- say his refusal to compromise can be a liability.
"Tom is a gifted writer. ... He gives a great speech, and he is a very articulate advocate of conservative philosophy rhetoric," said Andal, who shares many of McClintock's views. "But he has no experience in running anything.
"He is unwilling to get into the room and negotiate a deal," Andal said. "That would require some level of compromise."
Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Murrieta, called McClintock "one of the most knowledgeable legislators" but agreed that he does not act as a team player.
"When he gets into politics, he comes up with a plan -- and it's the plan no matter what, and sitting down and trying to deal with folks on that level, he is insistent," Haynes said. "Many, many times he is right. But politics is the essence of the team sport."
McClintock fought the vehicle license fee for years, but he cast the sole vote against a deal to cut the fee in 1998 signed by former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson because the cuts were not permanent.
"Tom was right on the policy. Tom was right on the idea, and Tom was right on the popularity of the idea," Haynes said. "But he literally in that case wanted the whole thing, and he couldn't get (it)."
Another example: He hasn't voted in support of a state budget in decades, even those shaped by Republican governors.
McClintock is unmoved by the criticism.
"Sometimes you have to be very persistent when introducing ideas that amount to a change in the status quo," McClintock said. "But change occurs when the necessity for it ultimately overcomes our resistance to it, and we've now entered such a period of history."
Abolishing vehicle license fees has been perhaps his most persistent charge, and it is one of two chief platforms in his governor's bid -- along with another issue that is not new to him, pledging to shrink government.
Upon taking office, he routinely promises, he will begin improving government "before lunch on my first day."
He said he would end the car license fee, which would leave a $4 billion revenue hole. His plans to fill the hole -- and attack another estimated $8 billion shortfall -- center on taking a cleaver to state government.
He proposes forming a commission -- modeled after the panel that suggested military base closures in the early 1990s -- to seek out bloat in state government.
He has his own ideas about where to cut: any and all agencies that duplicate services already provided by the state, cities or federal government. For example, he said, he would close the State Architect's Office, one of California's two tax agencies -- the Board of Equalization and the Franchise Tax Board -- and the state Environmental Protection Agency.
McClintock said he would quickly call five concurrent special legislative sessions, though he said he has little faith the Democrat-controlled Legislature will heed his instructions and that he plans to take the matters to the voters.
His orders: Replace California's workers compensation system with Arizona's to cut costs to businesses, send voters a proposed strict state spending cap, contract out many state services to private companies, enact tort reform to eliminate punitive damages in civil cases and overhaul city and county financing.
On social issues, McClintock is against abortion and gun control, and he would seek a new day in court for Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigration measure. He favors school vouchers and school site-based budgeting.
He said he supports -- but would not initiate -- laws banning late-term abortions and requiring parental consent for abortions.
"Those are certainly laws I would approve if they were placed on my desk, but I expect to have my hands full reorganizing the state's bureaucracies and reforming our basic approach to public works," he said.
McClintock has few hobbies outside spending time with his teenage children and wife, who works at the family's Elk Grove church. Although he is a Southern California lawmaker, McClintock's family rents a home in Elk Grove.
"He doesn't know anything, as far as I can tell, about fishing," Oller said. "He's all about work; he's not very much about play."
McClintock does read voraciously. A ceiling-high bookcase in his Capitol office is filled with books about the U.S. Constitution, democracy and a slew of biographies, including Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
Friends say he has a subtle and glib sense of humor that emerges only after time.
In his 2002 controller bid, his ads featured the fictional "Cousin Angus McClintock" whose fiscal views are "as tight as a bullfrog's behind -- and that, me friends, is watertight."
In another lighter display of his Scottish heritage, he sought to name an official state tartan.
But when it comes to the recall race, he is serious. His conservative platform, he is convinced, ultimately will appeal to more than just his most loyal supporters.
"I believe," he said, "that the positions I have taken over the years are resonating with a broad cross-section of California voters."
About the Writer
---------------------------
The Bee's Alexa H. Bluth can be reached at (916) 326-5542 or abluth@sacbee.com.
Tom McClintock
Party: Republican
Age: 47, born July 10, 1956
Occupation: State senator
Education: Bachelor's degree in political science, University of California, Los Angeles
Residence: Newbury Park
Family: Married, two children
Background:
* Assemblyman, 1982-92 and 1996-2000
* Director of the Center for the California Taxpayer, 1992-94
* Director of economic and regulatory affairs at the Claremont Institute's Center for Policy Studies, 1995
* State senator, 2000-present
Here is the link. (http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/recall/story/7371310p-8315004c.html)
By Alexa H. Bluth -- Bee Capitol Bureau - (Published September 7, 2003)
On a drizzly morning, state Sen. Tom McClintock rolled his state-issued Dodge Intrepid into a parking lot behind a Sacramento radio station.
He stepped out of the car alone -- "I've never believed in entourages," he later muttered -- and strolled into the building to start a day on the campaign trail.
It was friendly territory for McClintock. Talk-show hosts are his most unapologetic fans, and they provide precisely what he craves: a hospitable stage to spell out the blueprint he has crafted over years in the California Legislature to heal the state where he grew up and where his strict political ideals were born.
In a state where Republicans hold no constitutional offices and statewide candidates usually seek to espouse centrist views, McClintock, 47, often travels alone.
A Republican state senator representing Ventura County, he is one of the Legislature's most conservative members and the most right-leaning major candidate for governor of California.
He subscribes unswervingly to small-government principles and conservative social and fiscal ideals. Colleagues and friends, Republicans and Democrats, uncannily describe him with the same three words: "A true believer."
In the historic recall election, McClintock has, at the least, a bully pulpit for his views and the opportunity to become a major spoiler in Arnold Schwarzenegger's quest to seize a statewide office. At best, he hopes to become the chief executive of a Democrat-dominated state.
"A governor with the political will to act and the understanding of the state can, in a fairly short period of time, dramatically change the direction of California," he says.
McClintock is the son of a salesman who moved his family to California from New York in 1965 to search for a job.
The journey to California and his childhood in the San Fernando Valley, he said, shaped his values and, ultimately, his desire to govern.
His parents purchased their dream house -- paying $35,000 for a ranch-style home with a pool -- and his father commuted 40 minutes to downtown Los Angeles. McClintock now laments that homes in California are beyond the grasp of many working families and that choked traffic forces unbearable commutes.
"My family and every family like ours, had they come to California today seeking a better future, would not have found it here," he said. "That's the tragedy that our generation is tasked by history to correct."
He recalls a defining moment as a preteen that showed him "the impact that a poorly run government can have on families."
His mother had gone into real estate a couple of years earlier and, he says, miscalculated her tax withholding.
"All of the plans that she had laid out for the whole year were just wiped out by that tax bill," McClintock said. "That certainly did make a big impression on me."
McClintock's political involvement began at Ventura County High School, where he started Young Voters for the President. Campaigning for President Nixon and writing letters to the local paper, he found a passion.
At 20, he served on the GOP's Ventura County central committee and began writing a political column for the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle -- "for the princely sum of 25 cents per column inch."
The University of California, Los Angeles, graduate quickly dropped plans to go to law school and syndicated the column to 10 newspapers. Then he got a call from state Sen. Ed Davis, former Los Angeles Police Department chief, asking him to to be his chief of staff.
"The opportunity to go work for a childhood icon was irresistible," McClintock said.
He soon sought his first election to public office and began his now famed practice of taking on what he calls the "Republican establishment." In 1982, he defeated a local mayor who had Republican Party backing in the primary and won a seat in the state Assembly at age 26.
He left the Assembly in 1992 to lead a state taxpayer advocacy project before running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1992 and losing a 1994 bid for the state controller's post.
After the losing races, McClintock returned to the Assembly for two terms before his 2000 election to the state Senate.
Last year, he lost a second bid for controller by two-tenths of a percentage point to Democrat Steve Westly, a wealthy eBay online auction executive.
The posts of controller and governor, he said, appeal to him as opportunities for "restoring good management practices to the state's bureaucracy and changing the state's spending priorities."
Now, the unusual format of the recall election could present the best possible conditions for McClintock to win statewide office. Were Gov. Gray Davis recalled, his replacement would be selected by a plurality and could win with a small percentage of the vote.
When conservative businessman Bill Simon left the field, McClintock strategists were giddy at the prospect of luring his supporters -- and their checkbooks -- to their camp.
But to be sure, McClintock already had a cement-solid base of voters in California. They have downloaded colorful McClintock campaign signs from his Web site to paste to their cars and to post in their yards. They organize fund-raising picnics and call in to talk radio stations to extol McClintock's virtues. They write checks -- often for less than $100.
Political observers doubt whether his scrappy, largely grass-roots campaign can compete against the likes of millionaire Schwarzenegger and well-funded Davis in a state where television advertising is key to reaching far-flung voters.
More moderate Republicans fear he will siphon critical votes from the party's best hope of winning the governorship, Schwarzenegger. Several Republicans have called on McClintock to follow Simon's lead and bow out of the race.
McClintock says he will not, and those who know him say they believe he means it.
"I don't think if the president of the United States called Tom, he would get out," said Dean Andal, a former GOP Assembly colleague who lost to McClintock in last year's controller primary.
In the Legislature, McClintock has been similarly unbendable. Republican lawmakers look to him as a beacon, a philosophical starting point.
"Tom is like a steel post that is in four feet of concrete," said Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas. "He is exactly who he is, and he doesn't move with the political winds."
This straightforward, lone-wolf approach is appealing to his loyal followers. But colleagues -- including conservative lawmakers -- say his refusal to compromise can be a liability.
"Tom is a gifted writer. ... He gives a great speech, and he is a very articulate advocate of conservative philosophy rhetoric," said Andal, who shares many of McClintock's views. "But he has no experience in running anything.
"He is unwilling to get into the room and negotiate a deal," Andal said. "That would require some level of compromise."
Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Murrieta, called McClintock "one of the most knowledgeable legislators" but agreed that he does not act as a team player.
"When he gets into politics, he comes up with a plan -- and it's the plan no matter what, and sitting down and trying to deal with folks on that level, he is insistent," Haynes said. "Many, many times he is right. But politics is the essence of the team sport."
McClintock fought the vehicle license fee for years, but he cast the sole vote against a deal to cut the fee in 1998 signed by former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson because the cuts were not permanent.
"Tom was right on the policy. Tom was right on the idea, and Tom was right on the popularity of the idea," Haynes said. "But he literally in that case wanted the whole thing, and he couldn't get (it)."
Another example: He hasn't voted in support of a state budget in decades, even those shaped by Republican governors.
McClintock is unmoved by the criticism.
"Sometimes you have to be very persistent when introducing ideas that amount to a change in the status quo," McClintock said. "But change occurs when the necessity for it ultimately overcomes our resistance to it, and we've now entered such a period of history."
Abolishing vehicle license fees has been perhaps his most persistent charge, and it is one of two chief platforms in his governor's bid -- along with another issue that is not new to him, pledging to shrink government.
Upon taking office, he routinely promises, he will begin improving government "before lunch on my first day."
He said he would end the car license fee, which would leave a $4 billion revenue hole. His plans to fill the hole -- and attack another estimated $8 billion shortfall -- center on taking a cleaver to state government.
He proposes forming a commission -- modeled after the panel that suggested military base closures in the early 1990s -- to seek out bloat in state government.
He has his own ideas about where to cut: any and all agencies that duplicate services already provided by the state, cities or federal government. For example, he said, he would close the State Architect's Office, one of California's two tax agencies -- the Board of Equalization and the Franchise Tax Board -- and the state Environmental Protection Agency.
McClintock said he would quickly call five concurrent special legislative sessions, though he said he has little faith the Democrat-controlled Legislature will heed his instructions and that he plans to take the matters to the voters.
His orders: Replace California's workers compensation system with Arizona's to cut costs to businesses, send voters a proposed strict state spending cap, contract out many state services to private companies, enact tort reform to eliminate punitive damages in civil cases and overhaul city and county financing.
On social issues, McClintock is against abortion and gun control, and he would seek a new day in court for Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigration measure. He favors school vouchers and school site-based budgeting.
He said he supports -- but would not initiate -- laws banning late-term abortions and requiring parental consent for abortions.
"Those are certainly laws I would approve if they were placed on my desk, but I expect to have my hands full reorganizing the state's bureaucracies and reforming our basic approach to public works," he said.
McClintock has few hobbies outside spending time with his teenage children and wife, who works at the family's Elk Grove church. Although he is a Southern California lawmaker, McClintock's family rents a home in Elk Grove.
"He doesn't know anything, as far as I can tell, about fishing," Oller said. "He's all about work; he's not very much about play."
McClintock does read voraciously. A ceiling-high bookcase in his Capitol office is filled with books about the U.S. Constitution, democracy and a slew of biographies, including Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
Friends say he has a subtle and glib sense of humor that emerges only after time.
In his 2002 controller bid, his ads featured the fictional "Cousin Angus McClintock" whose fiscal views are "as tight as a bullfrog's behind -- and that, me friends, is watertight."
In another lighter display of his Scottish heritage, he sought to name an official state tartan.
But when it comes to the recall race, he is serious. His conservative platform, he is convinced, ultimately will appeal to more than just his most loyal supporters.
"I believe," he said, "that the positions I have taken over the years are resonating with a broad cross-section of California voters."
About the Writer
---------------------------
The Bee's Alexa H. Bluth can be reached at (916) 326-5542 or abluth@sacbee.com.
Tom McClintock
Party: Republican
Age: 47, born July 10, 1956
Occupation: State senator
Education: Bachelor's degree in political science, University of California, Los Angeles
Residence: Newbury Park
Family: Married, two children
Background:
* Assemblyman, 1982-92 and 1996-2000
* Director of the Center for the California Taxpayer, 1992-94
* Director of economic and regulatory affairs at the Claremont Institute's Center for Policy Studies, 1995
* State senator, 2000-present
Here is the link. (http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/recall/story/7371310p-8315004c.html)