NEWS ANALYSIS : Two Symbols of Budget Gridlock : Capitol: Democrat Vasconcellos uses powerful position to fight program cutbacks. Republican McClintock decries those who want a tax hike.

Two members of the California Assembly have come to symbolize, in many minds, the bitter tensions and deeply felt political convictions that are at the heart of the stalemate that has left the state without a budget for 16 days.

One is John Vasconcellos, 58, (D-Santa Clara), the proudly liberal chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee who is leading the effort to fight off Gov. George Deukmejian’s attempt to cut deeply into health, welfare and other human service programs.

The other is Tom McClintock, 36, (R-Thousand Oaks), an ultraconservative lawmaker who has been keeping the budget pot boiling by blasting fellow Republicans who fall out of line and firing off missives that refer to California as “the golden welfare state.”

The budget gridlock has left the state facing a host of bureaucratic and real-life problems as bills pile up that cannot be paid without a legislative-passed and governor-signed budget. The Capitol debate on how to unsnarl that tangle is being framed largely in partisan terms.

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate were able to overcome their differences last week, reaching agreement on a $50-billion-plus budget. But in passing the budget to the Assembly, the Senate moved it to a partisan minefield where Democrats and Republicans go at each other with a “give no quarter, take no prisoners” mind-set. In the Senate, the background buzz is one of quiet civility; in the Assembly, it’s more like a bare-knuckles barroom brawl.

Like the positions of their respective parties in the budget fight, Vasconcellos and McClintock live in political worlds that are poles apart.

They intensely dislike each other politically and appear to have almost nothing in common.

Vasconcellos, an institution in the Legislature who may be best known as the father of California’s self-esteem movement, calls McClintock’s politics “tragic.”

“They are the politics of nihilism and cynicism--of I’ve got mine and ---- you,” Vasconcellos said. “He is so tight, so grim. It is sad to see a human being so embittered so early.”

McClintock says of Vasconcellos: “(He) is a very passionate man--with other people’s money. I think that his compassion tends to run dry when it comes to the families of California that are struggling under enormous taxes which he has largely been responsible for imposing.”

McClintock views himself as the champion of the taxpayer, who he generally portrays as long-suffering, overburdened, God-fearing folks “who have all these costs heaped on them year after year and are sick and tired of it.”

Hogwash, replies Vasconcellos, who contended in an interview that his Republican adversary represents not middle-class Californians but the rich. “He believes in survival of the fittest and ---- the poor.”

Vasconcellos is a big, rumpled bear of a man who, despite his touchy-feely philosophy, can be gruff and his rhetoric peppered with vulgarisms. He seems larger than life, a self-styled “Johnny Appleseed of Self-Esteem.” His pet creation--the now-defunct Task Force on Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility--was lampooned in “Doonesbury.” He wears wire-rim glasses, beat-up, worn-out shoes--and his heart on his sleeve. Last week, as he prowled the halls of the Capitol, he wore a button on the lapel of his suit jacket that said “Self Esteem 1990.” His biography describes him as “the conscience of the Legislature.”

McClintock, by contrast, wears conservatively cut suits that give him a tweedy look. He is emotionally cool, and speaks in deep, measured tones as if everything going on in the Capitol is of the gravest concern to a Big Republican in the Sky who is keeping score of ideological slips and failures.

The source of Vasconcellos’ power is far more tangible than McClintock’s. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Vasconcellos presides over the most important committee in the Assembly, one through which all bills with any money in them must pass. This is the committee that operates with a $1-million budget, where bills are approved, gutted or killed entirely. Everyone on the committee and its staff of 18 knows that Vasconcellos is boss.

Vasconcellos, for more than a decade, has sat on a two-house conference committee that drafts the now $50-billion-plus state budget, serving as chairman of the committee every other year. A grunt or a fragmented sentence from the powerful lawmaker can mean the gain--or loss--of millions to a variety of programs.

Vasconcellos has risen to power in the Assembly in tandem with Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), a close personal friend. Lawmakers from both parties generally acknowledge his mastery of the budget process.

“I can’t think of another legislator who knows as much about the range of issues in the budget as John,” said Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento). “Damn few people really ever pay attention to the budget. John has.”

McClintock, on the other hand, as a minority party Republican, heads no committees. Much of his power comes from being able to say no, an endless source of irritation to Vasconcellos and other Democrats. They know his power stems from the constitutional provision requiring a two-thirds majority vote for budget and tax increase bills, as well as veto overrides. This means that a relatively few Republicans can block major legislation and keep Democrats from overriding Deukmejian’s vetoes.

With that leverage, McClintock, who works with a staff of three, loves to write newsletters knocking liberals and what he calls the “welfare-industrial complex.” Vasconcellos is a favorite target. McClintock chides him for his “sanctimony” in championing the causes of the poor and disadvantaged.

McClintock, who is ambitious and openly covets the job of Assembly Republican Leader Ross Johnson of La Habra, grates not only on Democrats.

Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), whose district is next door to McClintock’s, commented: “I think much of what he is doing is posturing himself because he would like to take Ross Johnson out and he doesn’t have enough votes.”

But McClintock has a following. One of his supporters is Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach). Ferguson said he is often startled by the volume of anti-tax, anti-big government newsletters McClintock puts out. “He is like a little publishing machine. He floods us with facts and information,” Ferguson said.

Vasconcellos and McClintock, both full-time legislators, said during interviews that their philosophies began developing early in life, their values passed on to them by their parents, who were liberal and conservative, respectively.

One rare thing the two do have in common is a pull, manifested early in life, toward politics. Vasconcellos, an attorney elected to the Assembly in 1966, served an apprenticeship on the staff of former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. McClintock, elected in 1982 when he was 26, wrote a column for four years for the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle, then got his feet wet in legislative politics by working for two years on the staff of state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita).

Their districts vary widely. McClintock’s is a heavily Republican, mostly affluent region in Ventura County that includes Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and parts of Oxnard. Vasconcellos’ district is heavily Democratic, and includes Santa Clara and San Jose’s heavily Latino Eastside.

Asked to sum up his philosophy, Vasconcellos is expansive: “We are one family and one state and we owe it to each other to invest in each other’s opportunities. Those of us who are fortunate ought to be grateful and we ought to be generous.”

McClintock says all that is fine, as long as it doesn’t involve any tax increases: “Our problem is being caused by a set of interests in Sacramento that have an enormous investment in the waste that permeates virtually every department of state government and have a very strong vested interest in continuing that waste and putting more and more money into it.”