ANAHEIM–California Republicans peered into their future Sunday, endorsing a controversial ballot proposal for the 1998 ballot that would virtually end bilingual education and getting their first glimpse at a handful of candidates dreaming of the presidential sweepstakes two years later.

The bilingual ballot measure was endorsed by a voice vote of party delegates meeting here. Party leaders had tried to table the endorsement, fearing that it would inflame Latinos already angry at the party for its support of the anti-immigration measure Proposition 187.

Just before the vote, party Chairman Mike Schroeder warned convention delegates that their endorsement of the bilingual education ban would require sensitivity.

“We have to be careful that our support for the initiative is interpreted as a concern for children and that it not be framed . . . as to bash any particular group and any particular culture,” Schroeder said. “We need to proceed with this in a way that’s responsible and a way that keeps us united.”

Ernesto Feliciano, head of the state’s leading Latino Republican group, called the endorsement “sad for the Republican Party.”

“Now it’s up to the Republican Party to let [the measure] stand on its own merits . . . and not use it as a wedge issue heading into the 1998 campaign.”

The endorsement came after a low-key 25-minute debate that underscored the concerns within the party over its treatment of Latinos, the state’s fastest-growing bloc of voters.

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Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is leading the anti-bilingual campaign, said backers have collected two-thirds of the signatures necessary to put the measure on the June 1998 ballot.

The party also endorsed a proposed ballot measure meant to strip labor unions of the right to automatically tap members for political donations. The initiative was praised Saturday by Gov. Pete Wilson, who will act as its honorary chairman.

Only part of the weekend’s agenda was devoted to state issues. Delegates also got to check out a handful of potential presidential candidates, among them Wilson, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and U.S. Sens. John Ashcroft of Missouri, John McCain of Arizona and Fred Thompson of Tennessee. Former candidate and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson also spoke Sunday.

All of them struck familiar Republican themes, such as shrinking government, cutting taxes and bolstering the nation’s families. They also poked considerable fun at the Clinton administration’s fund-raising scandals, and in particular at Vice President Al Gore, whom each may hope to oppose in 2000.

Wilson scalded Gore with a trio of gibes at his Saturday address, referring first to a controversial fund-raiser at a Los Angeles County Buddhist temple.

“Our economy is at full throttle, personal income is way up,” he said. “You know that when a Buddhist monk sworn to a vow of poverty can cut a $5,000 check for Al Gore.”

Later, the governor said that if Gore’s presidential aspirations don’t pan out, “there’ll always be a place for him on the television show, ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals.’ “

Quayle and Ashcroft were the clear crowd favorites, earning standing ovations for speeches that stood out as the most substantive and well-delivered of the convocation.

Quayle hammered at government abuses that he said had placed American freedoms under attack. One familiar target was the Internal Revenue Service.

“We are losing our freedom to a tax code nobody understands,” Quayle said Saturday. “The only sane thing to do is just get rid of it. Start all over. By getting rid of it, we will put government back in its place.”

He saved his most biting criticism for the administration that defeated him and President George Bush in 1992. In words that drew whoops >from the crowd, he referred to Gore’s assertion that his actions in the fund-raising scandal were legal because “no controlling legal authority” had determined otherwise.

“When it comes to the White House, there’s no controlling moral authority,” Quayle said. “And that’s what we need. . . . Before we go passing new laws, don’t you think we ought to bring to justice those who violated the current laws?”

Quayle also took up the subject of foreign policy, a distinctly presidential purview that has lost some of its campaign oomph since the end of the Cold War. It was precisely the uncertainties of the post-Cold War era that Quayle sought to plumb.

“As American citizens and patriots, we’d better be interested in national security and national defense,” said Quayle, ticking off recent defense cuts that he said have left the military strapped. “If we as a nation make a fundamental error in foreign policy, it can take our nation a decade to recover.”

His conservative colleague Ashcroft sounded a defiant tone, vowing Sunday that he would lead a Senate filibuster to block a $50-million national educational testing program advocated by President Clinton.

“No more, not one more cent,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s the federal government’s responsibility to impose any test.”

Ashcroft’s address appeared tailored to California. His opposition to Clinton’s school testing won loud applause from delegates who disapprove of federal intrusion into local schools. School testing has been the subject of contentious battles between the governor and Legislature.

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Ashcroft also scored the federal judiciary in California and a decision last spring that struck down part of the state’s term limits law. Ashcroft vowed to fight what he called “an out-of-control judiciary.”

Thompson, who is heading the Senate inquiry into fund-raising abuses, lambasted the Democrats for what he called an “unprecedented flow of money, illegal money” into their campaign. But he reserved his harshest words for Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who has been under fire for declining to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the matter.

“She is on the verge of undermining the integrity of the Justice Department of this country,” he said.

McCain, speaking Friday night, did not mention his potential presidential campaign, spending all of his speech extolling former President Reagan.

“Ronald Reagan did not believe in walls. That was his genius,” he said. “Like Ronald Reagan, we must be destroyers but not builders of walls.”

Robertson, speaking at a Sunday morning prayer breakfast, read at length from the Bible. He also castigated “militant feminists and homosexuals” for, he said, the “human tragedy … wreaked on our nation.”

“America’s soul is in crisis,” he said. “It’s not going to be fixed in the margins with adjusting some tax rate… . We must restore our faith in God.”



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