Beam That California Clout Eastward : With next year’s first-ever March primary elections, the state has a chance to move to the political front table. Go for it.

For one more column at least, let’s extend the crazy holiday spirit of optimism. Let’s boldly predict that 1996 will prove to be the Year of California.

I divine that our special collective year will commence around March. The reason one can be so precise is that March 26 is the date of the California primary, held for the first time on this early date. Dumbly, we’ve been holding them in June, when the game is near the end and no one cares. Now all eyes will be on us in March as we hand out the largest bloc of delegates to each party convention. Then, in the fall, after the Republicans have gone through the nominating motions in San Diego, we’ll dangle before Bob Dole and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton a greater number of electoral votes than any other state offers. Can one become president of the United States without our 54 big ones? Maybe, but it’s delightfully tough.

Will all this go to our head? Oh, probably not. But that raises a different question.

On the whole, California has been very happy to go its own way and not get too involved in what happens back East. We’ve been our own nation with our own crazy culture. It’s been fun but it’s also been a mistake. This is beginning to dawn on a lot of Californians, including Prof. Abraham Lowenthal of the University of Southern California. The affable former Easterner (he renounced the East in 1983) feels strongly that California needs to have a much greater voice in the national dialogue if America is to realize its coast-to-coast potential and California is not to get shortchanged. If you leave the national discussion to East Coast discussants, you’ll get an East Coast discussion and in the end East Coast policy perspectives.

So this year Lowenthal made an interesting move: With the help of dozens of well-connected Californians, he put together a whole new West Coast institution--the Pacific Council on International Policy--to “complement,” as he puts it, the venerable Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He wants this new group, through meetings and publications, to put forth emphatically and intelligently a Western U.S. perspective on foreign-policy issues. As Abe diplomatically puts it: “No small group can define national interests or choose appropriate policy instruments, nor should any region of the country be excluded from redefining the U.S. place in the world. But the interests and perspectives outside the Northeast corridor have not been adequately taken into account.” His hope is that our very own council on foreign relations will give California that strong, transcontinental voice inside the American foreign-policy establishment that it has been sadly lacking. Three cheers for Abe.

We want to be at the front table. And why shouldn’t we be? Is it asking too much?

But that’s one of our biggest problems: We don’t often ask. It’s not so much that we’ve been denied by anyone--in part we’ve been denying ourselves. We’ve lacked voice. We’ve lacked everything from a plugged-in foreign affairs council rooted here on the West Coast to something as basic as an effective congressional delegation that works together to press the California agenda in Washington. To make matters worse, a punishing economic recession and a string of other disasters have had us in a reclusive funk for years. But now, with the economy looking better and opportunity knocking, it’s time to kiss that funk goodbye.

California, once the struggling Western frontier to which young men were told to go, is now the established, wealthy next-door neighbor to the new frontier in Asia, just across the ever-shrinking Pacific Pond. Points out Dr. Richard Drobnick, USC’s vice provost for international affairs: “Can you remember when Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, etc., were commonly referred to as the ‘Far East’, a term that conjures up images of distance, mystery and impenetrability? Now, in the closing decade of the 20th century, these countries could be more accurately described as . . . California’s ‘Near West’.”

Since 1989, American merchandise exports (that can mean T-shirts, tomatoes, software-- anything that’s not services) to the “Near West” have expanded by 50%, with California accounting for at least a quarter of it. What California should therefore campaign for, perhaps with the Pacific Council helping lead the way, is a foreign policy that achieves the best possible relationship with our new Near West.

1996 could be the year that it all starts to come together, if only California would start to speak up. With the media’s klieg lights on us, we should, for a while at least, have the eyes and ears of rest of the country. Sounds like a terrific opportunity. Let’s do something terrific with it.

Tom Plate’s column usually runs Tuesdays. His e- mail address is tplate@ucla.edu