THE TIMES POLL : Clinton Gets 51% Approval Rating in State

By a margin of 51% to 29%, Californians approve of Bill Clinton’s handling of the presidency and they support his economic program by a similar spread.

But many are skeptical about the Administration’s military base-closing plans and fear they will further hurt the state’s economy, according to the Los Angeles Times Poll.

California residents surveyed by the Times were almost evenly divided on whether there is sufficient justification for the proposed shutdown of eight bases and reduced operations at others in California.

But overwhelmingly, they believe California is being asked to bear more than its share of cutbacks in national defense spending. One reason there are so many California installations on the Pentagon’s 31-base closure list is that the state has been the national leader in military outlays and employment.

Of the 1,294 adult Californians sampled, 60% said California was being treated unfairly and 76% thought the base closings would have a negative effect on the state’s beleaguered economy. Fourteen percent said the closures would have a direct economic effect, either on them or on members of their immediate families.

About one-fourth of the respondents said the base closings, which have been highly publicized in the state over the last several weeks, made them think less of Democrat Clinton. However, 65% said it had no effect on them, and Times Poll Director John Brennan said the issue does not appear to have significantly affected Clinton’s overall popularity in the state.

“It’s a drag on him, but it’s a marginal drag,” Brennan said.

Democrats, not surprisingly, were Clinton’s strongest supporters: 71% gave him a positive job rating. Independents were about evenly divided and half the Republicans surveyed gave him poor marks.

Clinton’s economics program received support that paralleled his own job rating, with 53% approving of his plan and 34% opposing it. Republicans were strongly opposed and independents evenly divided.

There was no comparable poll indicating how Republican George Bush fared in California in the early months of his presidency in 1989. As of last October--a month before the election--Bush enjoyed only a 32% approval rating in the Times poll.

Of Clinton’s 51%, Brennan said, “I think that’s a pretty good rating for Clinton, given the malaise in the state and the fact that this base-closing thing is viewed as unfair,” Brennan said.

Clinton scored a 58% job approval rating in a national Times poll in February, shortly after his economic program was released. Brennan said a lower approval score might be expected in California because the economy is worse in the state.

Brennan noted, however, that Clinton’s 29% disapproval in the Times poll of California residents was only one point higher than the 28% Clinton registered in the national survey in February.

Bush carried California narrowly over Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election and failed to maintain a strong presence in the state during his term. Going into the fall 1992 campaign, it became evident that Bush forces did not expect to carry California’s 54 electoral votes and virtually ceded the state to Clinton.

Clinton won California last November with 46% of the vote to 32% for Bush and 21% for independent H. Ross Perot.

Clinton’s political advisers consider California a critical part of the Clinton coalition, which has a strong Western bias.

California political leaders lobbied the Clinton Administration heavily before the Pentagon formally released its base closure list and two California facilities that had been marked for closure were spared. They were McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento and the Monterey Presidio, the home of the Defense Language Institute.

At the time, Defense Secretary Les Aspin said the additional closures would have put too severe of an economic strain on the state. The independent Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission now says it may consider closing McClellan and Monterey after all to assure that politics play no role in the process.

The wisdom of the base closings was questioned most strongly by Southern Californians outside of Los Angeles and respondents identifying themselves as conservatives. Liberals, college graduates and San Francisco Bay Area residents were more likely to find the cutbacks as justified even though they agreed with most Californians that the cuts would hurt the state economically.

The poll was conducted last Saturday through Monday. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.