A HISTORIC MOMENT, BUT HOT HIS

McClintock sees recall election as historic moment (Daniel Weintraub, August 26, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

When California lawmakers voted in 1999 to approve legislation giving state employees more generous retirement benefits and opening the door to a round of big increases in local government pensions, only a handful of legislators opposed the bill.

One of them was then-Assemblyman Tom McClintock.

A couple of years later, when both houses of the Legislature overwhelmingly approved a rich new contract for state prison guards, giving them a 35 percent increase over five years, there was even less resistance. Just one lawmaker voted no. It was McClintock, who was by then a state senator.

Both bills became law and today stand as monuments to the worst excesses of the Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis. They also could be exhibits A and B in McClintock's campaign for governor in the recall election, vivid examples of how things would be different if he won on Oct. 7.

"Governor McClintock could have stopped both of those, and would have," the Ventura County Republican told me in a recent interview.

The pension bill is costing taxpayers more than $500 million a year, with the ripple effects on local government probably at least that big and still growing. The tab for the prison guards' contract, when fully implemented, has been estimated at upwards of $600 million annually by the non-partisan legislative analyst. Alone the two actions account for more than 10 percent of the structural gap between spending and revenues in the state budget.

McClintock, 47, believes that bills such as those are only the start of the problem. He has cast himself as the one candidate capable of taking on what he calls the "spending lobby" of interest groups, a loose and ever-changing coalition of public employee unions and advocates for the services they provide.

Mr. McClintock seems like a worthy guy, but he's not going to be the next governor of CA and if he were he couldn't get anything through the legislature anyway. He should cut a deal with Arnold and Karl Rove to back him in a campaign against Barbara Boxer in exchange for getting out of this race. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 26, 2003 6:25 PM