Tom Campbell’s career is marked by nonconformist approach and few policy successes

Reporting from Sacramento

In the fall of 2005, voters delivered what was arguably the biggest political defeat of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career. A key mastermind behind the plan they rejected was Tom Campbell.

As the governor’s budget chief, Campbell had guided Schwarzenegger to throw his weight behind a ballot measure that would ratchet down state spending. He chaired the campaign in favor of the measure and appeared in television ads. The proposal was the linchpin of a slate of initiatives the governor promised would bring order to Sacramento.

Instead, the measures brought the governor political chaos. His approval rating plummeted amid charges that the spending controls Campbell had helped draft would eviscerate school funding. The governor backed away from the plan after the election, and Campbell returned to his job as a business school dean.

It was not the first, or last, time that Campbell’s intellectual reach would exceed his political grasp.

Campbell, now on his third run for the U.S. Senate, is known for his work ethic and an appreciation for big ideas. He is also known for having difficulty translating those ideas into achievements. Those who have watched his career say he refuses to bend ideologically and sometimes tilts at windmills, which has limited his ability to build the coalitions that are crucial to advancing an agenda. He has a tendency to overreach, they observe, and to refuse to compromise — characteristics that have hampered him in the political arena.

Political scientist John J. Pitney Jr. said Campbell is a stubborn nonconformist — a characteristic that may help him with voters tired of the status quo but doesn’t necessarily play well in the halls of power.

“His entire career consists of choices other politicians would not have made,” said Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.

Still, Campbell, 57, has been leading most polls this spring for the Republican primary against former Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina and Assemblyman Chuck Devore.

A fiscal conservative and social moderate, he has an impressive resume. He taught law at Stanford and was dean of UC Berkeley’s business school. He was a state senator and five-term member of Congress, representing Silicon Valley. He served as budget chief for Schwarzenegger and is now a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law.

After being elected to the House of Representatives in 1989, he wrote 104 bills, but only two became law. That is about one-third the average success rate of the 51 other representatives from California, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan website GovTrack.us.

The two Campbell bills that were passed and signed into law during his 10 years in Congress involved relatively minor issues. One clarified that certain volunteers at private food banks are not considered employees covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The other authorized money for the Peace Corps.

Even after Republicans gained control of Congress, Campbell had poor relationships with the leaders of both parties, whose blessing is typically needed to move legislation.

In 1997, he joined a small number of GOP lawmakers to vote against reelecting Newt Gingrich as House speaker. Campbell said he did not think the vote should occur while Gingrich faced an investigation into whether he had improperly commingled his political and charitable enterprises. Soon after, Gingrich rejected Campbell’s request for a committee assignment.

Campbell’s stand did not hurt him with the largely upper-class, college-educated and socially liberal voters in his Silicon Valley district, where Democrats had the edge in voter registration. He was reelected a year later.

Campbell also broke with GOP leaders by supporting gun control and abortion rights. In 1998, the House approved a bill to make it a crime for adults to take minors across state lines for abortions. Campbell was one of only two Republicans to vote against the measure, which was vetoed by President Clinton.

Campbell focused mostly on finance issues--tax reform, banking, privatization of public services—but he also liked to jump into foreign policy. He bucked the party leadership on the use of military forces against the former Yugoslavian republic of Serbia in 1999. Insisting that Congress had an obligation to vote on use of the American military there, he pushed to put his fellow members of the House on record (they voted against a declaration of war).

“I felt this was our duty. The leaders of both parties in the House urged me not to do so.” Campbell said in a recent interview. “I’m willing to take a position that the leadership might not want me to take. It shows, I hope, a degree of independence that could benefit the people of California.”

He notes, for example, that he was one of five Republicans to vote against the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which he said was partly to blame for the financial meltdown of recent years. The measure, pushed by the banking industry, allowed banking, securities and insurance companies leeway to merge, creating institutions that later received federal bailout money because they were judged so large that their collapse could hurt the national economy.

“It created financial institutions that were much bigger than otherwise would have been permitted. And the consequence was the ‘too big to fail’ doctrine that I don’t agree with,” Campbell said.

Campbell pursued efforts in Congress toward a smaller, more locally oriented banking system. Two bills he introduced to encourage what he calls “community-based banking” died in committee.

Campbell is “very brainy, very thoughtful on the issues,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a former Republican strategist. But Washington “is the big league, and he has yet to succeed there.”

His limited accomplishments, at a time when his own party ran Congress, hindered Campbell’s campaign against Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2000, when he was the GOP nominee. His attendance record in Congress that election year didn’t help: During the first half of the year, he missed 43% of roll call votes, posting the worst voting attendance record of any member of Congress, according to Congressional Quarterly records.

Missing votes because of the need to be back home campaigning is “a regrettable part of running statewide,” Campbell said.

Campbell’s image was also tarnished when his name surfaced--unfairly, he says--in the 1992 Congressional check-writing scandal. He was among dozens of lawmakers who the House Ethics Committee alleged wrote checks for more than their House Bank accounts held but were not financially penalized for the overdrafts. Campbell’s alleged overdrafts amounted to $160; he denies there were any, saying the committee’s records were mixed up and it refused to have them audited.

“I did not get to resolve that my records were accurate as opposed to the bank’s,” he said.

Campbell’s ideas about fundraising have alienated him from other politicians.

He introduced bills in Sacramento and Washington to severely limit contributions from outside a candidate’s legislative district. The bills went nowhere, and some of Campbell’s former colleagues are happy to point out that he has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors outside California during his campaigns.

“If you propose a change, you should believe in” it, he said. “But if you apply the change only to yourself, you would be putting yourself at an unfair disadvantage.”

Campbell’s short tenure in the state Legislature came between stints in Congress. After leaving the House to make his first unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 1992, he won a special election to the state Senate the next year, filling a seat vacated midterm.

His proposals had more success in the statehouse than in Washington. Thirty-nine of his bills were signed into law, more than double the average for state legislators. His measures made major changes to tax and banking laws and expanded affordable housing for needy Californians.

He was an early supporter of efforts to move nonviolent criminals out of the prison system and into house arrest, as well as to turn over prison healthcare to contractors. Although such proposals stalled when Campbell was a lawmaker, they are gaining traction now as state officials struggle to bring down prison costs.

Campbell was not a strict caucus man in the Legislature, to the chagrin of fellow Republicans. In particular, they didn’t always appreciate his occasional cooperation with the Legislature’s Democratic majority.

State Sen. Ray Haynes of Riverside said in a recent telephone interview that Campbell voted with Democrats too often for proposals that increased state spending and for bills that many Republicans felt were too liberal on social issues.

“I like Tom. He is a man of major integrity, but he was too tied into the status quo in the state Senate,” said Haynes, who ran against Campbell for U.S. Senate in 2000 and has not endorsed anyone in the current race.

Campbell said he tried to change the status quo on the state budget when he chaired the unsuccessful campaign for the 2005 spending cap, which would have set limits on how much the state’s expenditures could grow each year.

John Laird, a Democrat who was chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee that year, said Campbell was unwilling to listen to the majority party on the issue and unwilling to compromise to get the measure through.

“He was a strong advocate and very personable, but he couldn’t land the plane,” Laird said. “He couldn’t get it done.”

Campbell said some of the governor’s political advisors miscalculated when they persuaded Schwarzenegger to support other controversial measures, including one that would have limited teacher tenure, on the same ballot. That proposal drew a huge, successful campaign by unions to defeat the entire package.

And the spending cap he drafted had been altered by others before it was placed on the ballot, Campbell noted. The change would have given the governor additional power to make budget cuts in bad years, and public-employee unions whose members are paid from state funds campaigned hard against it.

“The opposition focused on it to say, ‘This is an attempt by the governor to get more power,’” Campbell said.

Although he blames others for that defeat, Campbell himself has sometimes been called politically tone deaf. At UC Berkeley, where he was dean of Haas School of Business for five years, he advocated steep increases in student fees to fund improvements to the school — and then accepted a big pay raise.

UC officials ultimately agreed to a more modest increase, albeit one that contributed to a leap in total master’s in business administration student costs from $10,538 in 2002, the year Campbell became dean, to $26,881 in 2007. The sum has since risen to $41,635.

“It’s the cost of providing a quality education,” Campbell said.

Student advocates said the fee hikes priced some Californians out of the school. Philippe Marchand, president-elect of UC Berkeley’s Graduate Assembly, noted that Campbell’s fee push was followed by pay hikes for him and other administrators. In 2007, Campbell’s salary rose from $275,000 to $300,000.

Said Marchand: “It seems in bad taste.”

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

This is one in a series of articles examining the backgrounds of the major candidates for California governor and U.S. Senate in the June 8 primary election.