Seemingly overnight, California has become for Democrats what the South once was in national elections — their indispensable electoral building block. So it is fitting for them to celebrate in Los Angeles what they hope will prove a seamless transition from the Age of Clinton to the Age of Gore.

In no other state has the triumph of Clintonism been greater. The magnitude of this triumph was evident at the Republican convention in Philadelphia. Not a single power broker hailed from the nation’s largest state — a state without which no Republican presidential candidate won the presidency in the 20th century. Among the throngs of Congressional leaders and governors assembled in Philadelphia, the only statewide Republican officeholder from California was Secretary of State Bill Jones. And he had endorsed John McCain.

Things have gotten that bad for Republicans in the state of Earl Warren, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — a state that was represented on more than half the G.O.P.’s postwar presidential tickets. Lest his party’s delegates forget they are reveling in what was once called Reagan Country, President Clinton may want to remind his hosts this evening that in 1992 he was the first Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson to carry the state.

The contested center of Californian politics has long been fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and President Clinton helped break the Republican dominance in the state by catering to these affinities. Positioning his as the party of balanced budgets and free trade left Republicans to wallow in the morass of immigration, abortion and guns.

Democrats may want to pay homage to the special role of Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor, in the state party’s reversal of fortunes. His anti-immigrant crusade, a political blunder of epic proportions, may keep the state in the Democratic column long after the adopted son from Arkansas (this is the president’s 55th trip to California while in office) leaves the scene.

Governor Wilson fashioned his anti-immigrant pitch in the throes of a devastating recession early in the 1990’s, one made more severe than elsewhere in the nation by the post-cold-war downsizing of the state’s defense industry. At the time, appealing to disgruntled middle-class whites seemed like a winning strategy. Indeed, Governor Wilson was re-elected in 1994 while backing Proposition 187, an initiative to deprive illegal immigrants of access to education and other social services.

But the long-term damage to the party proved devastating. Along with other Republican-backed measures aimed at overturning bilingual education and affirmative action, Proposition 187 drove a whole generation of Hispanics into the Democratic fold. Mr. Wilson garnered 44 percent of the Hispanic vote when he first ran for governor in 1990. By 1998, however, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Dan Lungren, received less than 20 percent.

Worse, the G.O.P.’s is a shrinking slice of a rapidly growing pie. Hispanics make up about a third of the state’s population and are expected to become the majority in the next half-century.

Meanwhile, many of the less-educated, disgruntled Anglos who may have applauded the state Republican Party’s drift to the right have left the state. The recession triggered a massive migration, well over a million of them, in the first half of the decade. To those who remained in California to experience the current tide of prosperity, the party leadership’s view of immigration as more of a threat than an opportunity seemed bizarrely defeatist. Where once Ronald Reagan rhapsodized about America being a shining city on a hill, Pete Wilson now wanted to build a moat around it.

But a word of caution is in order for California Democrats as they uncork the Champagne bottles this week. Independents, not Democrats, are the only growing category of registered voters. Recent polls suggest the race could be closer in California than previously thought, and Vice President Al Gore’s choice of Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate could dampen the enthusiasm of the party’s Hollywood backers.

Democrats would also be foolish to take the votes of Hispanics, those Americans most likely to still live in a traditional family, for granted. This is particularly true if Gov. George W. Bush succeeds in his effort to broaden his party’s voting base. In his book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner called California a “beautiful fraud,” referring to how much of the desert state was transformed into a verdant mirage. It may yet prove that to political analysts too eager to read permanence into the current political snapshot. Things change, especially in Reagan Country.



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