Gore Studiously Works Connections in California

Last April, the California Department of Health Services asked its federal counterpart for help in paying for a state family planning program.

After hearing nothing from Washington for six months, Gov. Gray Davis turned to Vice President Al Gore. Within weeks, the assistance was on its way: A promise of $900 million over five years in federal aid for what had been a state-funded program.

It is a story that the governor’s office is ready to tell--so ready that it will fax at a moment’s notice a summary of what Gore has done for California.

But the relationship between Washington and Sacramento, between a presidential candidate diligently courting the politically critical state and a savvy governor, is more complicated than a single anecdote of high-level telephone calls and a turn of the federal budget spigot.

As Gore and Bill Bradley focus on the primary elections in California and New York on March 7, the vice president is hoping the attention he has lavished on California will, after seven years in office, pay off.

But the fiscal pipeline between Washington and California flows both ways.

As the state’s economy has shifted from its earlier reliance on military spending, it has, in the 1990s, become a net exporter of money to Washington: From 1994 through 1998, the gap between the amount California sends to Washington in federal tax payments and what it receives in federal spending has grown consistently larger each year--in Washington’s favor.

In 1998, the most recent year for which such comparisons are available, California received $19.4 billion less from Washington than it sent east in tax payments, up from a $5-billion deficit five years earlier, according to the California Institute for Federal Policy Research.

At its heart, complain Republicans, the relationship between the Clinton administration and the nation’s most populous state has been long on image but short on reality.

“Al Gore is a former colleague and a nice guy. But his presence in California has been to raise money” for Democrats, said Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), chairman of the House Rules Committee and head of a Republican California task force.

Dreier also said the state asked the Clinton administration to help settle a dispute over gasoline additives leaking from storage tanks but that, so far, Gore has failed to deliver a speedy resolution to the problem. “To clean up ground water,” Dreier said, “he hasn’t been there.”

Winning the administration’s support for an increase in visas so that foreign workers could take jobs in the high-tech industry, Dreier said, “was like pulling teeth.” Also difficult was a battle waged by the industry to gain protection from Y2K liability litigation, he said.

Or consider, for example, the troublesome question of illegal immigrants who break state laws: The state argues that the cost of housing them in its prisons should be met by the federal government because it is Washington’s responsibility to secure the nation’s borders. Of the 160,000 prison inmates in California, 13.5% are illegal immigrants.

The administration’s supporters in Washington and Sacramento, illustrating examples of Washington’s assistance, note that two years ago the federal budget devoted $585 million to help states pay such prison costs.

Although Clinton sometimes gets credit for the funding, he actually sought $500 million and it was Congress that raised the total to $585 million. (Of that total, California received $177 million.)

A year ago, Clinton also asked for $500 million, and again Congress raised the payment by $85 million.

To be sure, the relationship with California is one the Clinton administration has cultivated carefully.

Consider the frequency of visits: Throughout the last seven years, either Clinton or Gore has shown up in the state approximately once a month. In 1998, a Gore political advisor pointed out, the vice president raised money for every Democrat seeking statewide office.

“He made a huge effort and obviously you hope when you do things like that that the favor is returned later,” she said.

Consider too the route east: Californians have filled the upper reaches of the administration, particularly in Clinton’s first term when the secretaries of state (Warren Christopher) and defense (William J. Perry) were from California, as were the U.S. trade representative (Mickey Kantor), the head of the National Economic Council (Laura D’Andrea Tyson), and the budget director (Leon Panetta, who eventually became Clinton’s chief of staff).

And now, when Gore has flown west, Davis has missed few opportunities to show up at his side.

The governor was with Gore last Thursday in Venice, when Gore visited a special effects studio to tout the state’s economic advances and the educational requirements of the high-tech industry.

And in January 1998, Gore and Davis (then lieutenant governor) were side by side in the cafeteria of Pacoima Elementary School, a visit emblematic of Gore’s more than 60 visits to California: He was dishing up a smidgen of hope in a gang-plagued community, $600 million in job-inducing tax credits for poor neighborhoods across the country, and the promise of connecting every American school to the Internet within three years.

Sean Walsh, who was Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s press secretary, said Clinton’s offerings targeted politically key groups, but did little to help California survive the recession in the early 1990s, or to address such problems as the burden caused by new immigrants.

“The Clinton administration has been much like a candy man to California,” said Walsh, now a corporate spokesman in Silicon Valley. “The treats they put out look good, but they are not quite filling.”

Times staff writer Miguel Bustillo in Sacramento contributed to this story.