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.

The veteran lawmaker -- he was first elected to the Assembly at age 26 -- believes that the recall campaign represents a historic moment in which Californians have pulled themselves from their daily lives to pay closer-than-normal attention to their government. And he compares this time to 1910, when Hiram Johnson was elected governor as a crusading reformer and went on to establish direct democracy, including the right to recall public officials, as a cornerstone of California's political system.

"Democracies are fairly weak institutions in normal times, but when a crisis approaches they become incredibly resilient and strong," he said. "The citizens rise to the occasion. That's what we are seeing in California today."

But Johnson was fighting the railroad monopolies, which were widely despised and had no natural constituency among the broader public. McClintock's target -- the "spending lobby" -- is much broader, and includes the very voters to whom he is trying to appeal.

Once you get beyond pension hikes, salary increases and bureaucratic belt-tightening, balancing the budget means reducing programs and services on which people rely. And since McClintock is also promising to repeal the recent increase in the car tax, a move that would widen the state's projected budget gap to more than $12 billion, he would almost certainly have to make cuts in popular programs.

McClintock acknowledges the distinction between Johnson's challenge and his own. But he doesn't consider it crucial. Those who run or depend on government programs remain a minority, he says, and the majority are clearly feeling burdened by the weight of those obligations.

"I think the people of California are coming to the conclusion that if we don't bring the state's finances under control, if we don't restore the state's economy, the future is bleak," he said.

With businessman Bill Simon dropping out of the race, McClintock now stands as the major voice for conservative Republicans in the campaign, and he hopes to challenge actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as the informal GOP standard-bearer in a race that has no official party primary. Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is the lone major Democrat in the race and is expected to get most of the votes cast by his party's members.

McClintock rejects calls by party leaders for him to quit. Voters, he says, are perfectly capable of sorting out the contenders and casting their ballots for either their favorite candidate or the one they believe has the best chance of winning, depending on their views.

And while he can't match Schwarzenegger's celebrity status, McClintock has deep connections to the Republican grass roots, and the backing of conservative activists who don't want him to quit. He is raising money through the Internet and hopes to air a television commercial later this week.

And he never turns down an invitation to speak. His message: He may not be a star, but he's been focusing on the root of today's problems since before Arnold starred in the first "Terminator" movie.

"I have been 20 years in the public arena, fighting for precisely those reforms that the public now realizes are essential to restore the state's finances and economy," McClintock, who authored the original car tax cut, told me. "The positions I have taken are unchanging, and you can count on them."

And Schwarzenegger can count on this: McClintock is not backing down, at least not without a fight.