California and the West : THE WASHINGTON CONNECTION / CATHLEEN DECKER : Gore Gets Call for Help on 310 Area Code

Granted, the job of vice president isn’t always heavy lifting.

Traditionally, the nation’s vice presidents have been ready to don funeral suits at a moment’s notice and jet off as mourner-in-chief for the important dead. Or to drop from that ever-present reminder of their status, Air Force Two, to chat up any state, county or local bigwig willing to line their party’s coffers.

It is they who get the photo ops the president spurns, they who deliver the bad news the president doesn’t want to deliver, they who see their politician’s egos scrunched into a job that, to paraphrase Will Rogers, consists solely of waking up every morning and determining if the president is still breathing.

Things have been different, if by degree, for Al Gore. From the beginning, President Clinton vowed to make Gore a more equal partner. And so he has, at least compared to previous presidents. Gore comes into his own race for the White House able to boast of a policy-wonking role in the lengthy economic resurgence, of hand-holding the leaders of the musical-chairs government in Moscow, of shepherding the country toward the millennium--if not really inventing the Internet.

Gore, in his presidential race, is trying to convince America that he is the indispensable man, the one guy who just has to be living in the White House come 2001 if the country is to hew to its moorings.

But even he might have blanched a bit at the headline on a recent press release sent out by California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa: “Speaker Villaraigosa requests Vice President Gore’s involvement in 310 area code overlay issue.”

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To backtrack, for those outside the 310 area code (including all of 202 Washington and its 703 and 301 suburbs): Californians are gobbling up phone lines at such an astonishing rate that the ink is barely dry on one phone company notice before another change comes barreling down the information highway.

Phone companies blame our addiction to cell phones, pagers, fax machines and, of course, regulation-issue phones. Consumers say the phone companies are hogging numbers, reserving them in huge bunches that force regulators to create more and more area codes just to keep up with demand. Even worse, the latest orders to come down in the 310 area code require everyone to dial 11 digits just to order a pizza.

Enter Villaraigosa, and Gore.

The speaker has adopted the brouhaha as his own. According to his staff, he brought the issue to Gore’s attention recently and, voila, a letter and its corresponding press release soon followed.

“I am convinced that this action would cause significant disruption to the businesses and residents of the West Los Angeles area, and ultimately pose a health and safety risk to this community,” Villaraigosa’s letter to Gore declared.

“Please extend my warmest regards to your family,” it added.

True, this could be one civil servant imploring another to do something for the higher good--in this case, to lean on the Federal Communications Commission to ease its rules governing the dispensing of phone numbers.

It could also be one candidate imploring another.

For all his activity on the issue, Villaraigosa does not currently represent West Los Angeles. But he would love to soon, as the city’s next mayor, and getting there requires a coalition of Eastside Latinos, Westside activists and enough others to defeat better-known candidates.

Gore, for his part, would love to keep Democratic denizens on the Westside happy enough to help him trounce his opponents en route to the presidency.

Still, it’s something of a no-win situation for the vice president.

A local Gore partisan, reading the Villaraigosa missive, could only sigh. Anonymously, of course.

“I guess he thought it would be real helpful to Gore,” the activist said sarcastically.

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The problem is this: If Gore does something, he’s weighing in with federal regulators on behalf of campaign supporters. If he does nothing, he’s ignored both the state’s Assembly leader--and one of its leading Latino politicians and his biggest backers--and all those potential donors.

On top of that, Gore is already fighting a reputation for attending to small-bore items instead of dispensing grand themes. He has railed against lost luggage and other air travel difficulties, auto traffic and similar travails that unnerve this year’s prototypical voters: cranky working parents.

For the record, officials in both Villaraigosa’s and Gore’s camps denied that politics played a role here.

“It’s just one of those consumer issues that’s offensive,” said the speaker’s spokeswoman, Elena Stern. She said that Villaraigosa wrote Gore and not, say, Clinton, because the two men are friends.

So far, Gore has not responded to the letter, which asked for hasty action because of looming decisions by state and federal regulators. But Gore spokesman Alejandro Cabrera did not rule it out.

“By and large, the vice president generally feels that local issues are best handled at the local level,” he said. “But he will on occasion step in.”