Barbara Boxer remembers the "dark days" when California and its issues were dismissed by official Washington with disdain and hostility.
"Dianne Feinstein and I joked that it was ABC — anything but California, anyone but California," Boxer said, recalling when the two Democrats joined the Senate in 1993.
Now, as California Democrats pour into Washington to celebrate Barack Obama's inauguration, the state can claim a surge of influence in the new, tech-friendly administration. Congress, too, is looking westward, with Californians taking key positions of power.
Two Californians were named to Obama's Cabinet — Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu at the Energy Department and Rep. Hilda Solis at the Labor Department — and Leon Panetta, former President Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff, has been appointed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.
Obama also named a pair of Golden Staters to key White House posts: Christina Romer, a Berkeley economist, will chair the Council of Economic Advisers, and Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, will bring her experience as a state environmental regulator to the job of chairing the Council on Environmental Quality.
"These are superstar choices. California is 'in' right now, and we can remember when California was 'out,' " Boxer said. "There is a lot more respect for the state, especially on energy issues."
Shift on tech, energy
On a policy level, it's a shift from oil drilling to renewable energy, from sidestepping the issue of global warming to dealing with it aggressively, from a pro-industry stance to greater sympathy for organized labor.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a San Jose Democrat, measured the change this way: "I remember Gov. Jerry Brown coming to Washington talking about windmills, and people made fun of him. Now everybody is talking about wind energy and solar."
Californians with deep experience in tech and energy issues, particularly clean technology, have Obama's ear. That includes Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, venture capitalist John Doerr, who is close to Al Gore, and John Thompson, the former Symantec CEO who may be a contender for commerce secretary.
That influence can be seen in major ingredients in the $825 billion stimulus package prepared by the House with the Obama team's input. Doerr, for example, lobbied for the $11 billion that would go toward modernizing the electricity grid. Tech groups pushed hard for $6 billion in grants to speed up broadband deployment. Wind-energy advocates secured a long-term extension of the production tax credit.
And California renewable-energy companies and investors, struggling with the frozen credit market, cheered when Obama announced his goal of doubling the production of renewable energy over the next three years.
"I think what the Obama administration intends to do is move the technology that has been pioneered in California across the country," said Cathy Zoi, CEO of Palo Alto-based Alliance for Climate Protection.
The state's new clout should not be viewed in the traditional sense of more "pork" for California, said Norm Ornstein, an author and longtime analyst of government for the American Enterprise Institute. But it will play out in other ways.
"There will be a greater sensibility on issues that matter to California and drive the California economy," Ornstein said. "It helps that Obama puts a high priority about keeping the nation's edge on technology, and is listening to Silicon Valley on that."
California-friendly
Some appointees are not from California but tend to view key issues in California-friendly ways. Carol Browner, a top Obama adviser on energy and the environment, supported the state's pioneering regulations as Environmental Protection Agency chief. And Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a graduate of Santa Clara University who has worked on border-state issues, has been named to head the Homeland Security Department.
Obama is unlikely to cultivate as cozy a relationship with the state as Bill Clinton did, predicted Jack Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College who worked for Republicans during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
But he agrees that just as Reagan-style California conservatism was adopted in Washington in the 1980s, Obama is likely to embrace California-style progressivism.
Unlike the 1990s, when Clinton had to deal with a Republican majority in Congress, Democrats now control both branches, with state leaders well-represented — starting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
Lofgren, who chairs the immigration subcommittee in the House, knows she can get Napolitano on the phone if there's a problem with the immigration bureaucracy, or she can contact Solis on a labor issue.
Lofgren chairs the delegation of 34 California Democrats in the House, which met last week and bid farewell to Solis.
"There in the room were the chairmen of the Energy Committee (Henry Waxman,) Education and Labor (George Miller), Foreign Affairs (Howard Berman), and Veterans Affairs (Bob Filner)," Lofgren said. "I thought, if you wanted to get something done, come to this room."
State labor leaders expect that with Solis in the Cabinet, they will have a friendly ear on minimum-wage and family-leave issues, and other concerns of an increasingly immigrant work force. Solis, from Los Angeles, is the daughter of immigrants and her father was a union worker.
"She is very well-connected and can help bridge the gap and the tensions between immigrant workers and other sectors of the community, including some unions," said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.
But Pitney, a veteran observer of Washington, warned that Californians looking for rapid change on energy, labor and other issues from Obama and other leaders they just elected may be disappointed.
"Electing officials is a lot like shopping online," Pitney said. "Everything looks better when you log on than when the package arrives at the door."
