State’s Hopes for Presidential Primary Power Fade

Last fall, when California moved its presidential primary to March 2000, state political insiders fairly rubbed their hands in glee at their sheer cleverness.

No longer would the nation’s biggest, most important state watch as tiny domains like Iowa and New Hampshire hogged all the candidates’ attention. For once, White House hopefuls would have to come to California to address the “big picture,” instead of the trifling concerns of those parochial provinces.

Or so it was said. In fact, judging from results so far, precisely the opposite has occurred. All the California dreaming has proved mere fantasy.

Iowa and New Hampshire have become even more important in the drastically truncated presidential sweepstakes. And California, for all the bluster, has assumed its customary role as a place where candidates come to extract money to spend someplace else.

“It’s hard to argue California’s making a big difference,” said Ken Khachigian, a GOP strategist with more than 30 years of presidential campaign experience.

“The bottom line,” said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, “is that the best California strategy is to win Iowa and New Hampshire. . . . Those are still the places that vote first and where your money can have the most impact.”

With the exception of Vice President Al Gore, who is already looking past the primary to California’s crucial role in the general election, most White House hopefuls have barely grazed the surface here. Democrat Gore and Republican millionaire Steve Forbes are the only candidates with paid staffers in the state. The GOP front-runners--Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole--haven’t set foot in California since launching their exploratory efforts in recent months.

To the extent candidates have visited, it is mostly to raise money, make some obligatory statement about California’s significance and perhaps offer their regrets for not sticking around longer.

“I would love to campaign in California,” Rep. John Kasich (R-Ohio) said last week during a Bel-Air stop, part of a five-day fund-raising swing that allowed the public only a few glimpses. “[But] I can’t even think about that until I get out of Iowa and New Hampshire. . . . If I die in New Hampshire . . . there’ll be no California, except for vacations.”

For years, members of the state political establishment have bemoaned California’s superfluous role in the presidential primaries. The last time the state figured in the Republican nominating fight was 1964; the last meaningful Democratic primary was held in 1972.

So four years ago, California moved its primary up from June to the end of March. No matter. Other states leapfrogged ahead and, once more, California was an afterthought, as GOP nominee Bob Dole clinched the nomination a week before the Golden State’s primary rolled around (President Clinton ran unopposed on the Democratic side).

This time, with two competitive nominating contests, state lawmakers pushed the California primary clear up to March 7, hard on the heels of the traditional kickoff contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. “It’s not reasonable that the nation’s most dynamic, diverse and distinctive state . . . has virtually no say,” then-Gov. Pete Wilson declared last fall as he signed the early primary bill.

But nine other states are now planning March 7 primaries, including New York, Massachusetts and Georgia. Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania may join the pack, further diluting California’s impact.

Bill Carrick, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist, said: “The truth is, if you’re not on television on March 7 in some of the most important and expensive advertising markets in the country--New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles--it doesn’t matter how many kaffeeklatsches you attend in Visalia.”

Even standing alone, California is simply too big and spread out for the kind of eyeball-to-eyeball campaigning that typifies Iowa and New Hampshire.

In those close quarters “even if a person hasn’t actually met a candidate, someone in their family probably has. A mother, brother, cousin, or maybe the wife of a close friend. That creates a buzz,” said Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who has been to California twice this year versus six trips to Iowa, with a seventh planned soon.

“In California,” Schmidt went on, “it’s very difficult to create that buzz if you’re campaigning in Redding and have it reach down to Fresno or Bakersfield.”

For years the only plausible way to communicate with any significant number of Californians has been through paid television advertising. But the required investment may give pause even to someone like the deep-pocketed Forbes. The publishing magnate spent about $6 million on a wall-to-wall New Hampshire ad blitz four years ago; a comparable spree in California would cost roughly $198 million.

“No matter what financial resources you bring to the table, you have got to have ‘earned media’ to go along with it,” said Bill Dal Col, Forbes’ campaign manager, referring to the free publicity that comes with a strong showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Otherwise, it will never be enough.”

California is not only big, it’s distant--both geographically and culturally--from the prevailing East Coast political establishment.

Khachigian, a California native who fights a battle every four years to get Republicans to take the state more seriously, called it “the George H.W. Bush syndrome,” after the former president who effectively ceded the state rather than campaign here against Clinton in 1992.

“No one likes coming out [here]. It’s so damn far and time-consuming and disruptive,” said Khachigian, “especially compared to the Midwest where you can cover half a dozen states in a day.”

Even if they do show up in California, candidates don’t always speak the language.

Appearing last month in Beverly Hills, former Vice President Dan Quayle related how three years ago, at a San Diego presidential debate, a local man framed a foreign policy question in terms of economics. “He said, ‘I want to know what the candidates are going to do about defense jobs,’ ” Quayle recalled with a certain incredulity--as if the notion was loony at a time California was still recovering from a steep recession driven by world events.

Recently, at a reporters’ round table in Washington, candidate Kasich fumbled when asked about two of California’s highest-profile ballot fights. “I don’t know what the referendum is,” he said of the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. “I don’t know what the immigration one was,” he said of Proposition 187.

If California’s early primary has yet to live up to advanced billing, perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. As Carrick, the Democratic strategist, pointed out, “There’s a history of this kind of thing failing.”

In 1988, a group of Southern states clustered together to create “Super Tuesday.”

“The idea was to make people spend more time campaigning in the South and also find a [Democratic nominee] more compatible” with the region’s conservative philosophy, Carrick recalled. “The end result was that Iowa and New Hampshire were more powerful than ever and a Northern liberal named Mike Dukakis walked away the victor,” capturing the nomination over several more moderate candidates, including a U.S. senator from Tennessee named Al Gore.