Democrats Stake Claims on West Coast

SAN JOSE — Al Gore and Bill Bradley campaigned up and down the West Coast on Saturday, with Gore speaking of the possibilities of the Internet and Bradley encouraging locked-out steelworkers in their battle with management.

Campaigning in Northern California, Gore said he will target the Bay Area as the first place “anywhere in the world” that eliminates the disparity in access to computers and the Internet between the well-to-do and low-income Americans.

“Children who are denied the chance to master computers today will miss out on opportunities in tomorrow’s economy,” he said.

Two states to the north, Bradley took his pro-labor, anti-union-busting message to a dreary, rain-doused picket line on the outskirts of the economically troubled city of Spokane, Wash., pledging his support for steelworkers locked out for the last 18 months by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp.

“This is a just fight, and I’m on your side in it,” Bradley told 100 workers bundled up against a biting drizzle in temperatures in the mid-30s.

The workers, who were locked out in September 1998 when their contract expired after they opposed the company’s efforts to contract out union jobs, applauded when Bradley said he is the only former shop steward among the four major presidential candidates.

Washington holds a nonbinding Democratic primary Tuesday, but delegates won’t be chosen until March 7, the same date as California’s primary.

In his remarks Saturday, Gore said he backs efforts to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit system to San Jose and touched upon several issues important to the high-tech industry.

“We need basic research and development, funded by the federal government, to provide a constant stream of new ideas and insights that can be used by the high-technology industries,” he said. “We need policies to continue the moratorium on taxation of the Internet. We need to make the research and development tax credit permanent.”

Before flying to Washington state, where Bradley is mounting a major effort for Tuesday’s primary, the vice president stopped in San Francisco to tout his plan to narrow the so-called digital divide.

At OpNet, a local nonprofit firm that trains low-income young people, Gore said he wants to make Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose “a testing ground for completely closing the digital divide before it is closed anywhere in the entire world.”

Gore did not set out any details but said that he and several Bay Area mayors, including Willie Brown of San Francisco, Jerry Brown of Oakland and Ron Gonzales of San Jose, as well as other mayors in the region, are commissioning their staffs to “put flesh on the bones of this plan.”

The vice president’s support for BART expansion was not a surprise. One of its fiercest champions has been Gonzales, whose successful mayoral campaign in 1998 rested in large part on that issue. Gonzales publicly endorsed Gore on Saturday, saying the vice president has “a good mind and a good heart.”

Bradley’s appearance at the Kaiser plant in Spokane was his second stop of the day in a town whose economy has stagnated in recent years and where 45% of workers earn less than $14,000 a year. Spokane was ranked 161st out of 162 cities of more than 100,000 population in a Forbes magazine survey of best places to live.

The steelworkers greeted him warmly, many carrying blown-up reproductions of Bradley’s trading card with the New York Knicks, where he served as a union representative.

Bradley started the morning at the Davenport Hotel, a historic downtown landmark symbolizing Spokane’s turn-of-the-century elegance, and where John F. Kennedy spoke in 1960, but which has been shuttered in recent years because of a lack of money to rehabilitate it.

“You can’t have an economy of 6.9% economic growth and have 45% of the people in this community earning under $14,000. You cannot do that,” Bradley said, his voice rising.

The trip to Washington’s interior followed one of Bradley’s most successful events as he crisscrosses the state in a desperate, last-minute blitz in hopes of scoring an upset victory, or at least closing the gap on Gore.

Both men were scheduled to speak to the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in Seattle on Saturday night.