Clinton's left coast

Before voting for the 'agent of change,' take a look at his friends.

DON'T inhale."

Ronald Reagan's warning about Democratic smokeblowing comes to mind when you check out some of Bill Clinton's California connections. At their convention in Madison Square Garden, the Clinton Democrats swore that they've embraced a New Centrism; but in California, Bill Clinton is embracing at least a few well-credentialed leftists, a fact that should give pause to anyone wondering what kind of energies would really propel his Administration. Two West Coast worthies in his policy entourage rate special note: Professor Derek Shearer and U.S. Representative Maxine Waters.

Shearer, an economics professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, has known Governor Clinton since they were both students at Oxford. Today, the San Francisco Examiner calls him "one of the architects" of Clinton's "Rebuild America" plan to shovel trainloads of federal greenbacks into local infrastructure projects.

He is best known as an architect of an adventure in hyperactive government--the socialism that has reigned in Santa Monica for more than a decade. Draconian rent control has effectively confiscated the stock of apartment buildings by giving a commissariat (the "rent-control board") veto power over even minute details of "private"-property management. Naturally, the number of rental units has declined, as has the condition of those that remain. Shearer played a central role in the campaign that got rent control passed at the polls in 1979, and he remains a vocal apologist. His wife, Ruth Goldway, was mayor in the early 1980s, helping to construct the regulatory behemoth.

In Lockstep

IS A BUDDY of Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and the rest of the activists who decided to make Santa Monica their laboratory-- and the launching pad for a larger political movement that never quite took wing--Shearer was present at the creation of Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy. (He once explained that the term "economic democracy" is preferable to "socialism," which, he said, "has a bad name in America.") The CED was an outgrowth of Hayden's unsuccessful 1976 candidacy for the U.S. Senate; its foot soldiers helped elect him to the seat he still holds in the state Assembly.

Shearer's foreign policy views dovetail nicely with Hyden's, as well as with the radical Institute for Policy Studies with which he has enjoyed a comfortable working relationship. In a 1984 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, Shearer advocated cozying up to Nicaragua and Cuba via "baseball diplomacy."At one game, he rooted for Danny Ortega's players, explaining to his son, "it was President Reagan and the CIA who were fighting Nicaragua, not the United States."

These days, he is styling himself a "democratic capitalist." So the slogan's changed--but has the agenda? If Bill Clinton is elected, we may be unlucky enough to find out.

Maxine Waters, the scowling congressman from South Central L.A., was just named a co-chairman of Clinton's national campaign. Not long after she received that honor, she called George Bush a "racist" in a speech at the National Press Club.

Her subsequent refusal to recant was no surprise, because the charge was vintage Maxine Waters. Never mind that she pulls down a comfortable congressman's salary and her husband sells Mercedes in Hollywood; her defining quality is rage and alienation, and she has honed it to a knifesharp edge.

She served 14 years in the California Assembly before going to Congress in 1990. "The problem I have with her are her accusations that we were racists but she wasn't," says Republican Assemblyman Cathie Wright of Simi Valley. "She always assumed that everything you said was because you were white and she was black .... Whenever [Republicans] disagreed with her, she said we took the position because we were racists."

Or sexists. A few years back, GOP Assemblyman Ross Johnson sparked a patented Maxine Waters tirade by criticizing a state panel for deploying tax-funded lobbyists to wangle money from the legislature. Because the agency at issue was the Commission on the Status of Women, Johnson was a "sexist" to object.

Does she believe her own indiscriminately scorching words, or simply find incendiary language a handy weapon for unnerving foes and attracting the media? Either way, the effect is destructive, particularly to the black community she claims to serve. If there's a pervasive anger in black inner-city neighborhoods, then it is in no small degree a bequest of Representative Waters herself, along with like-minded black politicians who never met a problem in their community they couldn't blame on whitey.

Maxine Waters not only won't condemn the rioters who trashed her constituents' neighborhoods this spring, she romanticizes the violence, implying it was justified by white oppression. In an interview in the August issue of Ladies' Home Journal, she calls the riots a "rebellion," a term lending legitimacy, even glamor, to the deadly mayhem.