CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / CONTROLLER : Candidates Both Vow to Cut Waste in Government : Businesswoman Kathleen Connell is making her first run for public office as a Democrat. She faces fiery former GOP Assemblyman Tom McClintock.

Back in 1952, state Controller Thomas Kuchel loftily cited his job as the one elected California position that “provides the necessary independent check on the financial operations of the spending agencies.”

More recently in the wake of enactment of another messy state budget by the governor and Legislature, Controller Gray Davis likened the job to the “guy in the circus following the elephant around.”

Whether the controller is the protector of the taxpayer or the sweeper of others’ messes, or both, political newcomer Kathleen Connell, a Democrat, and retired Assemblyman Tom McClintock, a Republican, are fighting for the relatively obscure post.

Together, they represent the clash of a political outsider trying to get inside and a former insider trying to get back inside. Both offer themselves as eager to energize the controller’s office into a dynamic enemy of government waste.

Davis, who served as the state’s chief financial officer for two terms, is vacating the post to run for lieutenant governor. The low-key battle to succeed him is heating up as Connell outdistances McClintock in fund raising, including loaning her campaign $1.6 million.

“I’m a businesswoman, an expert in public finance,” said Connell, an investment banker and former director of housing in Los Angeles. “I’m running against a man who is a career politician and spent his entire adult life being supported by the taxpayers.”

McClintock countered: “She spent nine years in a city bureaucracy, ultimately bankrupting a city agency. I spent 10 years in the Legislature trying to stop bureaucrats like her.”

Connell, 47, concedes that the launch of a new housing program she oversaw in 1976 ran into start-up problems. But she says that no bankruptcy occurred and that the program produced more than 10,000 new and rehabilitated housing units.

Connell is owner and president of a financial consulting firm, taught business at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and served in the Administration of Mayor Tom Bradley from 1975 to 1983. She holds a doctorate in economics and urban planning from UCLA.

Last year, Connell switched her voter registration from decline-to-state to Democrat and began running for controller, her first bid for elective office.

McClintock, 38, is a conservative from Thousand Oaks best known for his fiery attacks when he was a lawmaker against what he labels the big spending policies of Republican Govs. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. He accused them of making only cosmetic budget cuts when much more severe reductions were necessary.

Associates describe McClintock as a true conservative whose beliefs in individual responsibility, free market principles and reversing the powers of government are genuine. Critics call him an ineffective ideologue incapable of compromise.

One favorite McClintock trademark is the issuance of long lists of specific cuts he would make in government spending--from privatizing management of the Department of Corrections to eliminating the governor’s Cabinet. He is especially proud of a list that recommended cuts totaling $14 billion in a $50-billion budget. Most have been rejected by the Legislature as unrealistic.

The controller’s duties are regarded as mostly routine but important. The controller signs virtually all state checks, serves on tax, pension and land use commissions and audits a variety of government programs.

Connell says her first act as controller would be to try to persuade the governor and Legislature to empower her to launch a first-ever wave of performance audits of all state government agencies that would identify unneeded and duplicative services. She contends that abolishing such waste would offset a projected budget shortage next year by $2 billion to $3 billion.

McClintock says he favors the concept of performance audits, but maintains that they can consume valuable time, end up costing taxpayers more money and are not really necessary.

“It’s not hard to find waste in a government that costs so much and produces so little,” McClintock said. He favors a highly intensified use of existing auditing powers.

One of his first acts as controller, McClintock says, would be to stop writing checks for “giveaways to illegals,” about $3.4 billion that he estimates is spent by state taxpayers on health, education, penal and other services for undocumented immigrants.

Refusal to sign the checks, McClintock says, would trigger a legal test that could force the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the issue of public services for illegal immigrants.

He favors enactment of Proposition 187, which would cut most services to illegal immigrants. Connell opposes the measure.

Connell has received financial campaign support from traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as organized labor. She also has received substantial contributions from women’s organizations, executives of the entertainment industry and Southern California financial advisers, investors and developers.

But Connell is her own biggest contributor, loaning her campaign $1.6 million of the $2.2 million the campaign reported receiving in the past 10 months. Campaign spokesman Julion Ramirez said the loan came from personal funds of Connell and her husband, real estate investor Robert Levenstein.

In his latest financial statement, McClintock reported raising $737,131 for the primary and general campaigns, much of it in small contributions from former constituents in his old Assembly district.

McClintock’s largest single donation of $15,000 was made by the Taxpayers Political Action Committee, composed of major telephone and electricity firms, railroads and oil companies.