Campbell Combines Fiscal Tightness, Social Goals : Politics: Congressman is basing his U.S. Senate bid on ‘new conservatism.’ He is also building a large war chest.

In one of the lingering outposts of optimism in the battered Golden State, Republican Tom Campbell is raising money for his U.S. Senate bid outside a house so large the bathrooms have signs on their doors: “Men” and “Ladies.”

On the lawn, a lush green denial of the drought, Campbell spins into his stump speech. Behind him, the setting sun brilliantly illuminates the southern San Francisco Bay, bouncing breathtakingly off the San Mateo Bridge and the San Francisco skyline in the distance.

“It’s not a matter of pride to me that California, wealthy as we are, is 49th in pupil-teacher ratio. That is not something to hand your children,” scolds the second-term congressman, his Harvard inflection growing more pronounced with each sentence.

“I think our country can do better. I think we can do better and it’s just within our grasp. We created the Silicon Valley! We created entrepreneurship! We created new products that no one had ever thought of before. . . . We can do all of that again.”

On such words of wistful hope and appeals to a new generation of voters, Campbell is betting his political future. Betting that a relatively inexperienced congressman from Stanford, unknown in voter-rich Southern California, can find his voice in a sea of candidates. Betting that young professionals such as himself, oftentimes politically conflicted, will pay heed on Election Day. Betting that Republicans, even in the mother lode of conservatism, will cast their lot with a man who once voted for George S. McGovern.

Despite his relative youth--he will be 39 on Aug. 14--and short tenure in public office, Campbell is being taken seriously in his attempt to capture the GOP nomination for the seat being vacated by Democrat Alan Cranston. In part, that is because in a few brief months he has amassed more than $1 million in campaign donations from an aggressive stable of supporters. All told, he has about $1.5 million in the bank, far more than his Republican primary opponent Bruce Herschensohn, the Los Angeles television and radio commentator.

More than that, the Herschensohn-Campbell race--assuming it remains that--sets up a classic ideological battle that could signal which of two paths California Republicans will tread.

While Herschensohn is more traditionally conservative, Campbell is the breed of Republican that demographers suggest will define the party’s future in the state. In Campbell’s lingo they are “new conservatives”--fiscally tight, yet liberal on issues such as the environment and women’s and minority rights.

Traditionalists scoff at the notion.

“What Tom Campbell is saying now about his vision of a ‘new conservatism’ is the tired old approach of people trying to remake the Republican Party into something that in its soul it is not,” U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan thundered when he endorsed Herschensohn.

Not surprisingly, Campbell disagrees.

“When somebody says to me this is the traditional way you should be a Republican, I say let me try it my way,” Campbell said. “I guess that’s it. Condense it all down to that. I don’t like being told I can’t. I think I can.”

He is sitting in a Denny’s restaurant smack in the middle of his Silicon Valley district, a chocoholic drinking a double chocolate shake and wolfing down pancakes and scrambled eggs. The setting is odd--Campbell is dressed, as always, like an upscale investment banker, his thinning hair neatly trimmed, his Ralph Lauren suspenders in place.

Denny’s, it turns out, is his favorite restaurant.

“Fast, quick, reliable and homogenous--and what you get is no relation to the picture on the menu,” he quips.

Campbell’s resume is evidence of precocious success.

At 20 he earned simultaneous bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics at the University of Chicago. Three years later, he earned a law degree from Harvard. In 1980, at 27, he was awarded a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, where his thesis detailed job discrimination against women in the federal government.

In between, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White, served as a White House fellow, practiced law and worked in the Reagan Administration’s Justice Department. For two years, he directed the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition before leaving for a Stanford University professorship in law and economics. He was the youngest Stanford professor ever awarded tenure, which he maintains by teaching a Sunday morning class each spring.

In 1988, he spurned the advice of Republican elders and beat incumbent GOP Rep. Ernest Konnyu for the 12th District seat in Congress. He was reelected last November.

The last of eight children of a staunchly Democratic Chicago family, Campbell’s manners and verbiage are something from another age. “Balderdash and poppycock,” he said--seriously--in response to a question. “Much obliged,” he declared to the waitress at Denny’s.

His three-bedroom house on the Stanford campus is a museum for collections amassed during travels with his wife, Susanne Martin, who is fluent in five languages and leads trips to and from the Soviet Union. Masai swords on one wall, a Spanish toreador hat on another, Russian theater posters everywhere.

Like his house, Campbell can exude an aura of yuppified privilege--a factor that his political opponents suggest could be a liability in the Senate race. On occasion his acknowledged intelligence and penchant for technical discussions can come across as condescending.

But there is a contrarian, gee-whiz goofiness to Campbell that serves to knock the upper-crust image askew.

Without provocation, he yanks from his suit jacket a pocket protector jammed with pens. “Nerds at work,” it reads under a suitably insulting caricature.

“I know who I am,” said Campbell, breaking into a gleeful, toothy laugh. “Ich bin ein nerd.”

Politically, he says, he evolved into a Republican in the mid-1970s, when his study of economics drew him away from his more liberal familial leanings and into the GOP fold. Now, Campbell shares the coloration of the natives in what is perhaps the most iconoclastic Republican area in the state.

The district, nominally Democratic, has sent a series of moderate Republicans to Congress, including Rep. Pete McCloskey, who ran for President, and his successor, Rep. Ed Zschau, who nearly toppled Cranston in 1986.

As Cranston retires, Campbell is positioning himself for the seat as Zschau did before him--as an independent Republican with just enough experience in government to retain an outsider’s skepticism.

That can be a difficult balance to strike, even in a simple election. Next year’s crowded contests will not be that, which poses a problem for Campbell and the expected nine other Senate candidates from both parties. Most of them are not well known statewide, and all will be competing for attention along with presidential, congressional and legislative candidates.

“Among the 10 candidates, no one knows who I’m running against for what seat,” Campbell told supporters in Woodside.

While fund raising is the current focus of his campaign, Campbell’s ultimate challenge will be to broaden public support beyond his well-to-do district and into disparate pockets of California.

He says he will emphasize economics and education. On the former, his record largely toes the conservative line. He supports a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, a line-item veto for the President and a reduction in the capital-gains tax to encourage investment in new firms.

On those issues, he stresses his allegiance with President Bush, as he does when talk turns to the war in the Persian Gulf and the lifting of trade sanctions against China, both of which Campbell supported.

Of late, he has strongly backed Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, despite widespread fears among women’s and minority groups that the black conservative could set back abortion rights and affirmative action rulings.

“We elected George Bush and he’s going to appoint a conservative,” said Campbell. “Do you want a conservative who knows what it is like to be called a racist name? Do you want a conservative who knows what it’s like to come from nothing financially? Or do you want a conservative who doesn’t come from that background?”

Abortion rights, which Campbell supports without restriction, have been at the core of his disagreements with traditional conservatives. He frames his position as the ultimate expression of GOP abhorrence to government interference.

“It’s not an easy decision,” he said. “I don’t know what’s right, but I’m sure the government doesn’t know.”

He also has sided with Democratic majorities on other social issues, parting ways with the President on whose ticket he could run and drawing the ire of conservative Republicans.

He has voted to override Bush’s veto of legislation that would require employers to give workers unpaid parental leave. He opposes offshore oil drilling, and his environmental record earned him the endorsement of environmental groups that rarely back Republicans.

Twice he has supported Democratic civil rights bills that have been scorned by the Administration as requiring employment “quotas.” He reached the decisions after reading Democratic and Administration versions and concluding that there was “not a dime’s bit of difference” between them, he said.

Campbell mentions his positions at virtually every campaign stop, but dismisses outright any notion that party loyalty--or perceived disloyalty--will sway voters.

“I’m playing by the rules,” he said. “I’m running in the Republican primary. I’m not hiding my positions at all. I’m not deceiving anybody.”

Polls have shown that most Californians, including Republicans, agree with Campbell on issues such as abortion rights and the environment, but voters in a Republican primary can be a more conservative lot. So Campbell is enthusiastically courting voters his age and younger who tend, more than their parents, to share his views.

Campbell calls such voters vital to his success and argues that unless Republicans accept moderation on social issues, they will lose the allegiance of the young. Baby-boomers are clearly on his mind when he dwells on education, a prime concern for the generation now bearing its children.

“We’re still running a school system based upon the premise that the children need to go home to help with the harvest,” he said. “Japan is not running their school system that way.”

While Campbell has mastered a fairly effective rhetoric at this stage of the campaign, his proposals are sometimes noticeably sketchy.

On the subject of education, he demands that the student-teacher ratio be lowered, but does not say how, beyond the notion of giving businesses tax deductions if they loan employees to schools. He talks about involving students by offering them jobs, but does not say how that would be accomplished. He suggests that students whose parents work be allowed to stay at school for day care or extended learning, but says the financial burden would have to be born by local taxes.

“I would be lying if I said I’ve got the answer,” he said when asked for details. “I only have good faith.”

However tentative his proposals may be, he is not averse to dropping political bombs on his audience. Regularly, he suggests that medical care for the elderly be limited to those who are financially needy.

Under his plan, people of a certain age or older--say, 40--would be fully covered by Medicare when they reach 65. But those under that age today would get benefits only if they are needy when they become eligible for Medicare. There is another catch--fair or not, people under 40 today would likely still have to pay the same levels of federal taxes as their elders.

“It may be that we eventually get our deficit down so much that we can cut our contributions and that would be fine with me,” he said. “But I can’t right now, given the budget deficit, say that’s something I could do.”

At this early stage of the campaign, Campbell is coursing across California each weekend, spending as much as three-quarters of his time in the south, where he is less known.

One recent day, he was home in the embrace of the Silicon Valley. Across the street, riders unsaddled their polo ponies in the settling dusk, while in the back yard of an elegant shingled home a youthful crowd bustled about, talking of kids and computers and exuding well-being. Months away from the nail-biting, gut-wrenching close of a campaign, optimism seemed a natural companion.

“If we make it, and I think we will, we’ll send one whale of a message,” Campbell told the crowd, a broad grin creasing his face. “You can be pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-business, conservative-minded, respectful of individuality and you can be a United States senator in the Republican column from California. That’s all possible.”