Rep. Tom McClintock (R)

The new congressman from the 4th District is Republican Tom McClintock. He spent his early childhood in White Plains, N.Y., where he lived until he was 9. His earliest exposure to politics came at a young age, when his mother took him to a campaign rally with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon at a local airport in 1960. After graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles, he worked briefly as a political columnist and a state Senate aide before leaping into elected office at age 26 with a successful run for the California Assembly in 1982. From his earliest days in the Legislature, McClintock established himself as perhaps its most vocal, if not the most effective, budget hawk, railing against tax increases and high spending under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Supporters saw an eloquent champion of conservative ideas, a policy wonk with a penchant for quoting Abraham Lincoln. Detractors viewed him as an ideological obstructionist with few legislative accomplishments.

McClintock tested the limits of his appeal in a liberal state through a relentless effort to win higher office. His name has appeared on a ballot in California in every state election since 1982. He ran twice for a U.S. House seat in Southern California, dropping out of the 1986 race during the Republican primary and losing the 1992 race to Democrat Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson. He ran for state controller in 1994 and again in 2002, narrowly losing both times. In 2006, he was unsuccessful as his party’s nominee for lieutenant governor, even as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sailed to re-election. But no race elevated McClintock’s profile in the state as much as his quixotic campaign for governor in the 2003 recall election. As star-struck Republicans lined up behind former actor Schwarzenegger, McClintock forged ahead unbowed, presenting himself as the true Republican in a field of hopefuls that at one point included political commentator Arianna Huffington and actor Gary Coleman. McClintock emphasized his decades-long opposition to the state’s car tax. (Increases in the vehicle registration fee during Democrat Gray Davis’s tenure were at the heart of the embattled governor’s unpopularity.) He finished with 13.5%.

Opportunity struck yet again for McClintock in 2008. In February, after nine-term Republican Rep. John Doolittle announced he would step down amid a federal probe of disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, several Republicans in the district urged McClintock to get into the race. Barred by term limits from seeking re-election, McClintock got in and faced an intense, three-month primary campaign against former Rep. Doug Ose, a Republican moderate who held the neighboring 3rd District seat from 1999 to 2005. Ose attacked McClintock as a career politician and carpetbagger, although Ose also lived outside the district. McClintock, who noted that he had lived in the district’s Sacramento suburbs while serving in the Legislature, ran ads branding Ose as a liberal who had voted to raise taxes and had earmarked millions of dollars for federal projects in his district. McClintock won the primary 54%-39% over Ose.

In the general election, McClintock faced Democrat Charlie Brown, a retired Air Force officer who came within 10,000 votes of beating Doolittle in 2006. Brown, who raised his family in the Sacramento suburb of Roseville, renewed criticism of McClintock as an opportunist who didn’t live in the district. McClintock ran ads calling attention to Brown’s attendance at a 2005 protest by Code Pink, the fiercely anti-war group, and asserted that Brown supported gay marriage but not the troops in Iraq. He portrayed Brown as a clone of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat. McClintock’s expected easy victory actually took weeks to unfold. He won by precisely 1,800 votes, 50.2%-49.8%, and took six of the nine counties. McClintock said he had turned back “a liberal wave that swept over America and lapped at the edge of this district.”

In the House, McClintock got seats on the Education and Labor Committee and the Natural Resources Committee. He promised to eschew earmarks, the funding requests that members often tack on to major spending bills for special projects in their districts. He faces the prospect of a tough re-election race in 2010.