The California Question for Clinton : Can America recover if the economic recovery doesn’t occur here, too?

Three hundred economists and business leaders gather today and Tuesday in Little Rock for an “economic summit” or “retreat” or “working conference”: The name keeps changing. What are they up to?

Summit comes from the jargon of the Cold War, but everyone at this gathering is enthusiastically on the same side. Retreat implies privacy and quiet, but this gathering will be televised from start to finish and chaired by the President-elect himself. Working conference ? Well, we wonder how much work ever gets done on camera, but that particular phrase may reflect the thinking of the gathering’s organizer, political economist Robert B. Reich, who has described his role during the transition as helping Bill Clinton “to make sure that he considers every option in detail “ (emphasis added).

While the Little Rock 300 may provide Clinton a few new options to consider in outline, their gathering will be, quite clearly, more rally than research. Nothing wrong with that: Clinton’s electoral victory clearly owed something to a superbly managed, televised convention. Today begins Convention II, kicking off Campaign II, Clinton’s attempt to match Ronald Reagan’s memorable first hundred days.

Unfortunately, here is where we get the jitters. California was all but forgotten in Campaign I. Will it be the same in Campaign II? Bush tacitly conceded this state to Clinton so early that neither candidate had to address the needs of a state hit harder by the recession than any other in the union.

UC Berkeley’s Laura Tyson, newly appointed head of the Council of Economic Advisers, may help to keep the woes of her 31 million fellow Californians on the agenda. But California’s two Democratic senators can do more if they remember constituency as well as party. And the state’s 52 representatives can roar like a lion on Capitol Hill if they will but grumble in unison.

The California economic summit proposed by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and quickly seconded by Gov. Pete Wilson cannot occur in time to have any major effect on Clinton’s first 100 days. But for an agenda of Los Angeles-related federal business sorely in need of attention, the California team in Washington need look no further than the already much-noticed RAND report, “Urban America: Policy Choices for Los Angeles and the Nation.” In one policy area after another, that study shows, Washington calls the tune, but Los Angeles--urban America in an acute form--ends up paying the piper.

This news, make no mistake, has not made it inside the Beltway. If and when it does, the post-riot city now regarded, wrongly, as “totaled” may be seen as merely stalled. Let the recovery begin, and let it begin here.