GOP’s Fong, Issa Clash on Spending, Education

With the days dwindling before the June 2 primary, the two GOP rivals for their party’s U.S. Senate nomination exchanged barbs Friday about who can best cut government spending and what the top priority should be for the nation’s troubled education system.

But on the topic of money and politics, car alarm magnate Darrell Issa had a proposal that brought enthusiastic applause from his financially strapped opponent, state Treasurer Matt Fong.

Asked at a joint appearance before the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce about his views on campaign reform, millionaire Issa said limits on individual and group contributions to candidates for federal office should be increased.

“We need to increase the amount Matt can get from individual contributions,” Issa told about 200 people attending the luncheon event at the Hyatt Regency. The limits for a Senate primary are $5,000 from a political action committee and $1,000 from an individual.

Fong applauded loudly for Issa’s idea--the only member of the audience to do so--prompting a round of laughter.

Although the byplay produced mirth, the campaign spending disparity has been no laughing matter to the Fong campaign. Recent disclosure reports show that Issa has spent more than $8 million in the race and Fong about $3 million.

More than 95% of Issa’s money has come from his own bank account; Fong has been forced to search the state for contributions to pay for all-important television advertising.

Fong told the audience that he went recently to a swim meet in which his 17-year-old son was competing and, between races, worked the crowd for contributions. Fong and his wife, Paula, also turned their 20th wedding anniversary party this week into a fund-raiser.

Issa began advertising on television in January. Fong began commercials in Cantonese on Chinese-language stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles and English-language commercials on stations throughout the state only last week.

Both candidates portray themselves as fiscal conservatives, devotees of Ronald Reagan’s philosophy that government should be trimmed wherever possible. But each has his own ideas on how.

Issa said Fong merely wants to “manage government and tinker at the edges, content to put government agencies ‘on warning’ to be less wasteful. That’s not good enough.”

The reference to “on warning” was a dig aimed at Fong’s assertion that he favors putting the National Endowment for the Arts on notice that it will be eliminated if it cannot stop giving public money to controversial projects. Issa wants to end its funding.

As he often does at stump speeches, Issa came armed with a list of agencies he would kill, including some he didn’t know existed until recently.

Fong portrayed Issa’s hit-list approach as naive, simplistic and destined for failure. He prefers a rigorous review of spending patterns and, in a kind of turnabout, blasted as “wrongheaded” what has been the centerpiece of Issa’s views on education: a plan to spend $50 billion in federal funds to put computers in classrooms nationwide in the next five years.

“We don’t need” more government bureaucracy, Fong said of Issa’s proposal. He called Issa’s five-year timetable naive.

Fong said he would put a higher priority on funding charter schools, establishing magnet schools and giving merit pay to good teachers.

From the Long Beach gathering--the third time during the campaign that the two have appeared at the same event--the candidates went their different ways--Issa looking for votes in Orange County and Fong continuing his fund-raising to keep his television commercials on the air.

The two will meet a final time Thursday for a debate at San Jose State University sponsored by the San Jose Mercury News.

Issa is expected to unleash a barrage of television commercials in the final week, with Fong getting campaign assistance from one of California’s more enduring political figures: his mother, March Fong Eu, former state Assembly member and California secretary of state.