Campaign ’96 / ISSUES : Urban Policy: Where Campaign Trail Meets the Mean Streets : The state of education, housing and public safety haven’t been high on the candidates’ agendas. But they are crucial to metropolitan California.

Delaine Eastin, state schools chief, would take the three men who are running for president to schools in Los Angeles, Lynwood and Compton to teach them about the three Rs--the fact that California schools Really Really Really need federal support.

“We have among the poorest children in America living in California,” she says, children who need Head Start money, subsidized lunches, free breakfast programs. “There are schools I could take you to to show you the physical plant, the absence of computers and audiovisual materials, the class size.”

Father Greg Boyle, barrio activist, would take the candidates to Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, the largest grouping of public housing west of the Mississippi, the gang capital of the world, a wasteland in terms of jobs and opportunity for the young people unlucky enough to be trapped here.

If Bob Dole, Patrick J. Buchanan and President Clinton “wanted to have an impact on crime,” he says, “they’d have to address the fact that there’s a great disparity between the haves and have-nots in medical care, opportunity, education.”

Take rising crime, beleaguered schools and woefully inadequate low-income housing, toss in welfare for good measure and you have the four corners of urban policy, the kinds of problems that Eastin, Boyle and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan face every day in the course of their wildly disparate jobs.

In advance of Tuesday’s primary, Eastin, Boyle and Riordan will be paying sharp attention to any sign of a plan to solve the nation’s nagging urban woes by the candidates circling California--home to two of the nation’s biggest cities, two of its largest school districts and perhaps its densest concentration of gang crime.

They likely would have had more luck if millionaire publisher Steve Forbes had not bailed out of the race for the Republican nomination. Of all the GOP contenders, Forbes--a political follower of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp--alone spoke of the most troubled neighborhoods in the United States.

“Why not have a Homestead Act with the inner cities? Why not have more tenant control of the public housing?” he would say to audiences before he pulled out of the race last week. “Can they do a worse job in some of those projects than the housing authorities have done? If we want people to behave responsibly, we have to give them more responsibility, whether it’s in housing, on the schools, or other facets of our life.”

Neither Dole nor Buchanan have much enthusiasm for the Kemp-style agenda.

In an interview, for example, Buchanan criticized one of Kemp’s major ideas, which Clinton has also backed--legislation to set up so-called “empowerment zones” in depressed urban areas where certain government regulations and taxes would be eased. A compromise version of “empowerment zone” legislation passed Congress during the first part of Clinton’s term and a few trial zones have now been set up.

“I disagree with it,” Buchanan said. “The problem with the enterprise zones is it sets one little area against another.”

“Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes, unless they address ths issue of the globalization of free trade, the factories going overseas, they are not going to solve anything,” Buchanan said.

“I mean they made Mexico an enterprise zone. . . . You got hard-working people making six bucks an hour in Hermosillo making the Ford Taurus and up in Wayne [Mich.] they are making about 40 bucks an hour and paying benefits.”

As for Dole, he seldom talks about the issue. “No amount of federal intervention or redistribution of wealth” will change the fact that the success of cities depends on “the enterprise and creativity of the people who live in them,” Dole said in a policy speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors last summer.

The domestic policy question that seems to interest him most on the campaign trail is welfare reform. Dole would give control over welfare back to the states with only two federal requirements: Women who have children while receiving benefits would not get additional money. Recipients could only be on the welfare roles for five years.

Welfare “is a very important program for a lot of people,” he said last weekend while campaigning in Wisconsin. “Some people in America are going to need help, and we know that. Maybe they’re very old or maybe they’re very young. Or maybe they have disabilities. But we also know that if you can work, you ought to work. It helps your self-esteem. It helps you regain your dignity, and that’s what sending it back to the states is all about.”

Buchanan supports total state control of welfare programs with no strings attached by the federal government. His only caveat would be that no federal funds be spent on abortion services.

Clinton’s welfare reform proposal, which Congress received too late to act on at the end of his second year in office, would have put a time limit on benefits but retained federal control of the safety net for poor families.

Dole and Buchanan would both get rid of the U.S. Department of Education, contending as they do that it meddles in areas more properly belonging to families and the communities in which they live. Buchanan often gets his biggest cheers when he tells his passionate supporters of his plans for the nation’s schools.

“Let’s take, for example, the U.S. Department of Education,” he’ll say and the crowds will erupt into laughter and boos. “We don’t need some miserable secular humanist in sandals and beads at the Department of Education telling us how to educate America’s children. . . . So let me make you one solemn promise. If I am elected . . . we will shut down the Department of Education and send the money back to the states and the people!”

The federal government should retain some responsibilities, such as the student loan program for colleges, Buchanan said in an interview. But “with regard to the primary and secondary education, you send that back in block grants to the states, and you tell the states it is going to be whittled down over time. ‘You have time to adjust, but it’s going down to zero. And this is going to be a state responsibility henceforth.’ ”

Dole, for his part, supports establishing education vouchers that would provide money for parents to pay to send their children to private schools--a position Buchanan also favors but which Clinton opposes.

Unlike the Republican candidates, Clinton supports the Goals 2000 education reform program which calls for nationally competitive education standards. And he is a major proponent of increased computer literacy in the schools. Earlier this month he visited California to celebrate Net Day, which linked classrooms in all 58 counties with the Internet.

“We’re going to have to work together with the private sector to meet the important national goal of connecting every school and every library, every classroom and every library in America to the information superhighway,” he told the National Assn. of Counties two weeks ago. “We have to do that.”

Buchanan and Dole are in California as the issue of crime and guns again bubbles to the forefront. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on repealing the 2-year-old ban on assault weapons. Both Dole and Buchanan favor ending the ban. Clinton has said he would veto a repeal bill.

The cornerstone of Clinton’s battle against violence is the Crime Bill of 1994, which was passed in part to put 100,000 more police officers on the nation’s streets. In addition, the president touts his support for the Brady law, requiring a five-day waiting period for the purchase of a handgun. “Tens of thousands of people who have criminal records now have failed to get guns. This is a safer country because of that,” Clinton told high school students earlier this month.

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CALIFORNIA CONCERNS

One in a series examining the positions of President Clinton, Sen. Bob Dole and Patrick J. Buchanan on issues of importance to California.

ON URBAN AFFAIRS

Dole on welfare reform: “Some people in America are going to need help, and we know that. But we also know that if you can work, you ought to work.”

Buchanan on education: “We don’t need some secular humanist in sandals and beads at the Dept. of Education telling us how to educate America’s children.”

Clinton on the 1994 Crime Bill: “Tens of thousands of people who have criminal records now have failed to get guns. This is a safer country because of this.”