Gore Helps Raise $100,000 Amid Criticism

SACRAMENTO — Vice President Al Gore, under fire for soliciting campaign funds from his White House office, shrugged off Republican attacks Thursday and helped raise about $100,000 for the California Democratic Party.

“I was happy to accept,” Gore said of the invitation to attend a fund-raising reception that followed a speech on education to a joint meeting of the Legislature. “I’m looking forward to it.”

The fund-raiser, held at an office building one block from the Capitol, had drawn criticism from California Republicans as inappropriate at a time when Gore’s fund-raising techniques are under challenge.

Gore said the “principal purpose” of his Sacramento trip was to address the Legislature. “Then, I began to fill in some other events on the schedule,” the vice president told reporters.

Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) said Gore did not learn until after he accepted Lockyer’s invitation to address the Legislature in October that he also would be featured at the fund-raiser.

In view of the controversy over Gore’s White House solicitations, Lockyer said it “would have been more embarrassing to withdraw from [the Sacramento fund-raiser] than to just stay steady and keep your commitments.”

Gore’s role in the fund-raiser largely overshadowed what his Democratic hosts in the Legislature had hoped would be a rare opportunity to showcase the educational policy initiatives of the Clinton-Gore administration.

In his speech to the Legislature, which ran 44 minutes and included touches of his self-deprecating humor, Gore announced a late-starting addition to the president’s “education crusade--a national blueprint to reinvent the way we spend money on public education.”

He said the details will be announced later, but he urged policymakers and parents nationwide to demand that public school funds be spent on classroom programs and not on “unnecessary layers of middle management.”

“How much of the money in the school where your children attend classes is going to teachers and for books and for other things that are actually in your child’s classroom?” he asked.

He said parents should ask, “How much, instead, is going to bureaucracy that is unnecessary? To overhead costs that have grown completely out of control . . . and how does all of that spending contribute to the education of your child?”

Most Republican lawmakers boycotted the Assembly-Senate session.

Led by Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, a GOP candidate for governor, only about a dozen of the Legislature’s 53 Republican lawmakers attended. Democrats and their staffers turned out heavily.

Some GOP members complained beforehand that they did not want to be “stage props” for a speech by a vice president who, they claimed, came to California chiefly to raise money for Democratic campaigns.

“The vice president’s brief appearance in the state Capitol is intended solely to provide a veneer of propriety to a day crammed with partisan political fund-raising,” said GOP Assemblyman Tom McClintock of Northridge.

Gore said he had no other fund-raisers scheduled during his two-day California trip. He later attended a nonpartisan Sacramento conference on water and was to spend the night in Southern California before visiting a school in San Bernardino today.

Last week, Gore conceded that he made telephone solicitations from his White House office in 1995-96 for presidential campaign contributions. He said he charged the calls to the Democratic National Committee.

Gore contended that he did nothing illegal or improper, asserting that he and Clinton are exempt from a law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities at government buildings. Even so, he said, he would not do it again.

Disclosure of the telephone calls by Gore occurred as Republicans in Washington turned up the heat for investigations of fund-raising tactics employed by the White House in the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign last year.

In response to a reporter’s question after the speech, Gore said he hoped that the fund-raising controversies would not impede White House policy initiatives.

Asked whether they might damage his prospects for a presidential campaign in 2000, Gore replied: “Same answer.”