Tough Choice.

ALTHOUGH Los Angeles, perceived as a Democratic stronghold, has been largely an after-thought in the race for the White House, the impact of the presidential election will be felt here long after the shouting has died down.

Since most coverage here is largely ideological, I will try to be provincial and look at the upsides, as well as the downsides, of a George W. Bush or Al Gore victory for Los Angeles.

On some levels, the economic policies of Bush have much to recommend themselves to Southern California. Cutting marginal income tax rates are an enormous boon to places like L.A., which has a large concentration of high-income residents.

More money in the pockets of L.A.'srich -- including the "top 1 percent" -- means more money to be spent on houses, cars and other drivers of the local economy.

One of the ironies of urban politics in this gilded age is that urban elites often push for policies that actually hurt their own cause. Tax cuts, like those of the Reagan years, actually most benefited places like L.A. or New York, even though they frequently were most despised and disdained there.

Smaller, targeted tax cuts for lower-middle-class people, as proposed by Gore, are actually relatively more advantageous for places like Texas and other parts of the old Confederacy, where an economy built around $40,000 a year family incomes are more common.

"The Bush tax plan would be great for our economy," suggests one well-informed L.A. economist, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing a possible Gore win. "It would stimulte things in away we haven't seen since the 1980s."

Bush's pro-defense policies -- also despised by our dominant Westside liberal elites -- could have a positive impact on Los Angeles. A rising defense budget could re-invigorate this dormant old center of the regional economy, boosting both engineering jobs and some long-lost, higher-wage, blue-collar opportunities. This could bring back to life the economy of places like the Antelope Valley, the Century Boulevard Corridor, and the still-recovering South Bay. Score two for Bush.

But a Bush presidency would not be all ribs and black-eyed peas for L.A.

Beware California haters

For one thing, a Texas re-ascendancy would put the government firmly in the hands of people who see California as the major competitor against an emergent Lone Star hegemony.

When I was covering the 1996 Republican convention for Fox, along with Maureen Reagan, the former president's daughter, she told me how the Bush people, once the elder Bush was elected, cleared out the Californians who had made their way to Washington under her father.

George Sr. and his Houston-based coterie clearly never had any patience for Californians, even though it was one of our own who made it possible for this clan of transplanted New England bluebloods to get into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the first place.

On a more popular level, the Golden State is much envied, and despised, in Texas. It is frequently seen as having too much damnably nice weather and scenery (of which Texas has relatively little), as well as too many fuzzy-headed intellectuals, infidels and other deviants.

If Bush is elected, the big contract for the Joint Strike Fighter -- worth 10,000 jobs and $500 billion -- would probably not end up, as it should, in Palmdale, where it is being developed. Fort Worth would have a lot more pull in the Pentagon than L.A. inn Bush administration. The sad fact is that a combination of anti-business and anti-defense forces in California, and the relentless boosterism of Texas, already weakens our position, A Bush presidency might seal it.

After all, why would we want skilled jobs for the working class when we can pay them to work for other more politically correct parts of the bureaucracy? Having whined about the impact of the early 1990s defense cutbacks, the PC-dominated media and political class would probably find reasons not to want good jobs -- with transferable tech skills -- end up here anyway.

A Gore victory, of course, would be near nirvana for these politically dominant classes. They have reason to believe that Gore, more than Clinton, who could charm a snake out of its skin, might be more likely to cave into every destructive harebrained idea of the left, from affirmative action and bilingual education to a total surrender to the world-view of the teachers' unions.

So many Al Gores

Smart politicians like Gov. Gray Davis and brilliant ones like Bill Clinton know how to mollify the fringe elements without letting them gain control of the agenda. Is Al Gore capable of this kind of political maneuvering? Well, it depends on which persona -- he seems to have more than Sybil -- ends up in the White House.

If the Al Gore who I helped arrange a meeting with new-media executives a couple years ago enters the White House, we might be OK. At that meeting it was clear that if he had not "invented" the Internet, he at least understands its potential. He is clearly a bright and thoughtful man, who might be an ideal leader for the 21st century economy.

On the other hand, we might be electing one of the "other" Al Gores, like the ideological zealot who wrote "Earth in the Balance" or has, in recent weeks, been stumping the country like the reincarnation of turn-of-the-century populist William Jennings Bryan. If either of those characters gets to 1600 Pennsylvania, business, not only in LA, will have hell to pay.

A zealot Gore government could hit L.A. in several ways. One, a massive federally directed attack on "sprawl" and the automobile might not be kind to our mega-city on wheels.

Second, a totally unrestrained Environmental Protection Agency -- run largely by trust-funded professional enviro-agitators -- could savage attempts to develop abandoned or underutilized inner-city properties, if anyone had ever done anything there, like drop a Coke can or drill for oil.

By the time the Gore term was up, many working-class Angelenos might find themselves sorry they didn't vote Republican, particularly if housing and gas prices soar, and blue-collar jobs dry up. They may realize then that what is ideal for the Sierra Club isn't necessarily ideal for East L.A.

If there is any real optimism here about the election, it lies not in how much these characters will change things, but in how enormous the barriers to their doing much could be.

Perhaps the thing to hope for on election night may be that we keep at least one house of Congress led by the loser's party, keeping the federal government at least somewhat ineffective.

That's our best hope for keeping control of the country left largely where it belongs, in the hands of localities, the marketplace and the unknowable designs of the Almighty.

Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and research fellow at the Reason Public Policy Institute.