Torres, California Omitted From Cabinet Christmas List

As President Clinton spent hours Thursday puzzling over the last components of his second-term Cabinet, Rep. Esteban E. Torres was calmly holed up in his Virginia home, building a Christmas village for his 10 grandchildren.

So confident was the Pico Rivera Democrat that he would be named secretary of Labor that he already had encouraged his son-in-law to run for the congressional seat that he first won in 1982. He had cleared his calendar, canceling a town meeting in his district to wait by the phone for the call that never came.

What happened to Torres is much like what some believe happened to the state of California in this quadrennial Washington ritual--led toward a place at the head table, then banished to a bar stool in the kitchen.

“California is the biggest loser,” fumed Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles, shortly after learning that Torres had been passed over. “California got shut out. California is now off the radar scope and that doesn’t bode well for the next four years.”

White House officials strongly dispute such comments. California will not suffer for any of this in the end, they said, arguing that the administration has been so educated about the needs of the state that Clinton will not forget and Vice President Al Gore cannot--if he hopes to win the White House in 2000.

*

“The president and the vice president know the state. Members of the Cabinet are sensitized to California. California concerns are very much going to be considered in this second term,” White House advisor John Emerson, a former West Los Angeles lawyer and Clinton’s point person for the state, assured Friday.

Still, from the vantage point of some Californians on Capitol Hill, it has been a long slide from the easy access that the nation’s largest state enjoyed for most of the first Clinton term, with White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta at the president’s right hand and a team of distinguished Californians among his most senior advisors.

This will be the first time since 1969 that a Californian has not occupied a core Cabinet post. Although former Berkeley economics professor Janet Yellen was nominated to head the Council of Economic Advisers, which has Cabinet rank, hers is not considered a key position.

“That’s not at the table. That’s not even the back row,” one congressional aide said. “Now California lacks visible representation--people from the state having access to the White House, members from the Senate and the House having a way in to the president.”

As the president on Friday completed his top-level appointments, it was inevitable that some would be unhappy. And few were more upset than those who backed Torres, a man whose compelling rise from poverty to politics made his rejection all the more poignant.

He was born in a tent in a copper town in Arizona in 1930, when American industry was importing immigrants from Mexico to work for unlivable wages in the mines. When the economy went bust, Torres’ father was deported. He never saw him again.

He moved to East Los Angeles with his mother. Torres hooked up with a street gang and ran away from home. His teachers at Garfield High School told him blankly that we would never amount to anything, so he dropped out. A science teacher lured him back.

He would have been the first Labor secretary to rise from union ranks, having worked on an auto assembly line and then as an official with the United Auto Workers. He would have been the first gang member-turned-Cabinet official, perhaps the only member of the Washington elite who shows his gang tattoo to schoolchildren as a lesson in life.

He never earned a college degree but speaks five languages. He is an accomplished sculptor, an art learned while toying with a blow torch and scrap metal that he picked up off the assembly line floor.

“He’s the American success story. Pull yourself up from the bootstraps, he’s that,” Gonzalez said. “The guy is a grass-roots genius.”

Others on the Hill describe Torres as a gracious but unexceptional lawmaker who keeps a low profile in a House full of limelight grabbers.

On Friday afternoon, Torres declined interviews, issuing only this brief statement: “I am honored to have been considered for the nomination to be secretary of Labor. I wish the president and his new Cabinet much success and I look forward to continuing my work as a member of the 105th Congress.”

At Friday’s White House press conference, Clinton called Torres a “superbly qualified” candidate and thanked him for his “willingness to be considered.” While the president was still introducing his nominees to the world, Torres was on his way to the airport and home for Christmas.

Times staff writer Marc Lacey contributed to this story.