COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Candidates Posture as the Economy Burns : Even if Clinton wins, can he shed his Wall Street advisers and find some courage?

Watch the presidential candidates flail away at each other and ask yourself whether either of them has the slightest idea what to do about the economic emergency facing the nation.

There’s no mystery about what this emergency consists of. Just look at California, home to over a tenth of the country’s economic activity. If you think the bloodletting over the state budget just concluded in Sacramento was bad, wait till next year.

California’s crisis, which is merely the national crisis writ large, reflects the classic cycle of austerity logic. Chop spending and jobs and the economy shrinks. People have less money to spend, economic activity slows, and down we go.

Election campaigns and the pitiless scrutiny of the press don’t tell us much about what the man who ends up living in the White House for the next four years will actually do about the economy.

If you take President Bush’s rhetoric seriously, which nobody does, he is promising to take almost a trillion dollars out of federal spending over the next five years, without raising taxes. This would spell the elimination of any federal aid to the poor.

Ignore what Bush is saying and try to forecast what he’ll do. The database of the last four years offers nothing much but pleas to lower the capital gains tax rate, which even his own chief economic adviser says will do nothing for economic growth.

What about Bill Clinton? Most of what the Arkansan has put on paper about his economic plans is waffle, contrived to dodge Republican bullets about being a tax-and-spend Democrat.

Prowl through Clinton’s economic manifesto and the only evidence of a strategy to put the country back on track is the “Rebuild America Fund,” which promises $20 billion for transportation and infrastructure, environmental technology and defense conversion, to be balanced by cuts elsewhere in the budget.

This is like pledging to lance a pimple on the broad backside of disaster, and is mostly testimony to the spavined cowardice of conventional economic debate.

It’s quite likely that Clinton will be sitting in the White House in four months’ time. Can we learn anything about his likely economic strategy from the advisers who stand at his elbow?

Various cabals are maneuvering for advantage. The most powerful faction--which raises much of the money for the Clinton campaign--is the Wall Street crowd headed by Roger Altman, an investment banker who is vice chairman of the Blackstone Group.

Don’t expect any turnaround if Altman and associates win President Clinton’s ear. Their agenda is the well-worn trail to continued stagnation: budget-cutting, a tiny increase in public spending. Blackstone’s chief, sometimes touted as Clinton’s Treasury secretary, is Pete Peterson, senior curator in the museum of dead economic ideas, most of them about the therapeutic potential in raising the savings rate and thus creating new capital. There’s plenty of capital around. The problem is getting it invested in productive areas.

Hovering on the fringe of the Altman faction and rushing their resumes to the Clinton campaign are familiar specters from the Brookings Institution, notably Charles Schultze and Barry Bosworth. These are the budget balancers and austerity-mongers who guided Jimmy Carter to his economic downfall. Clinton aides even hint they might give a big job to Mr. Austerity himself, Paul Volcker.

Since Clinton’s most demonstrable asset is his instinct for survival, he is presumably capable of realizing that Wall Street plus Brookings points his presidency toward the graveyard. He may therefore listen to advice from the Harvard economist Robert Reich, even to the left-liberal Economic Policy Institute, which calls for big public spending.

Reich preaches public investment in education and infrastructure, which is nice, but such things cost money. What do you do if business is not prepared to pony up its share of the tax bill? California’s infrastructure and education are still superior to Arizona’s, but Hughes Aircraft announced this week it is moving three plants to Arizona, costing California 4,500 jobs.

With all his talk about training, Reich never explains which well-paid jobs these highly qualified workers are supposed to be heading toward.

What Clinton needs and what the nation needs is commitment to a big-spending program, kicking in immediately with $60 billion to $120 billion. There has to be public control of investment, serious planning for post-Cold War conversion. Such thoughts are much too raw for the presidential campaign. But the next man in the White House has to face up to them, or every year from now to 2000 will be a rerun of the California budget fight.