For Republicans, the first tale is a political horror story that began last year when Assemblyman Brooks Firestone abandoned a promising campaign for lieutenant governor to seek a vacant U.S. House seat created by the death of Democratic Representative Walter Capps.
Firestone, a progressive two-term Republican legislator, seemed an ideal candidate in the culturally moderate central coast district of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties where registration is evenly divided and voters are among the most independent in the nation. Firestone's socially moderate and fiscally responsible record fits this district, the 22nd, and he had the resources to wage a high-visibility campaign in a swing district that both parties then considered a 1998 battleground.
From a party point of view, Firestone should have been a consensus candidate. But he was opposed by Assemblyman Tom Bordonaro, who represents a more conservative district in San Luis Obispo County to the north. Soon, Firestone was being demonized in mailers and television commercials as anti-baby, pro-tax, and pro-gay. Some of these attacks came from zealots in the Bordonaro camp, others from national groups opposed to abortion rights. Firestone did not respond in kind. In the January 13 special election he finished third behind Bordonaro and Lois Capps, widow of the deceased congressman. "We were partial-birthed to death," said Firestone's campaign manager, John Davies. Predictably, Capps trounced Bordonaro in the runoff, winning 54 percent of the total vote in a district where her husband had been elected with 48 percent. Only then did the usually genial Firestone express his true feelings about Bordonaro: "He won the primary with a vicious campaign but it cost him the general election."
Firestone and Bordonaro represent the poles of a divided GOP. Both are success stories. Firestone, heir to a tire fortune and a successful vintner, is a pillar of the Santa Ynez Valley. Bordonaro, member of a ranching-business family that started poor, has been in a wheelchair with limited use of his arms since a 1977 car accident. He has been an inspiration to the handicapped. Asked in his first campaign if he preferred to be called "disabled" or "physically challenged," he replied with typical good humor, "Actually, I'd prefer to be called Tom." In the Legislature, he was consistently conservative except on votes to limit cutbacks of welfare aid for the blind and disabled. Firestone, who called himself a "responsible Republican," joined with Democrats in an effort to restrict the sale of cheap handguns, favored abortion rights and warned that Republicans could become a permanent minority unless they tolerated diversity within their ranks.
Firestone typifies "coastal Republicans," who tend to be more liberal than their inland colleagues on environmental and social issues. Although Bordonaro, from inland Paso Robles, also represents a district that is partly coastal, his views typify the conservatism that prevails in land-locked districts of the Central Valley and Inland Empire and in Orange County. This conservatism is the majority view within the GOP legislative and congressional caucuses.
While Republicans were blowing their chances in the 22nd, a more positive story line was developing in two other swing congressional districts, both of which were being vacated by Democrats. One was the 3rd Congressional District, which includes Sacramento suburbs and sprawls northward up the Sacramento Valley from Rio Vista to Red Bluff. it has been represented since 1978 by Vic Fazio, a member of the House Democratic leadership. Republicans have targeted this district since a 1992 reapportionment improved Republican registration, but Fazio's political skills and a GOP proclivity for nominating baggage-ridden, rightwing candidates kept the seat in Democratic hands. in 1998, Assemblywoman Barbara Alby, another social conservative, was favored to win the GOP nomination, but she was upset by wealthy developer Doug Ose, a moderate newcomer to politics. As Joseph Schultz, press secretary for Democratic nominee Sandie Dunn complained, "Ose ran more like a Democrat than a Republican in the primary."
Four hundred miles south, Assemblyman Steve Kuykendall had a difficult race in the 36th Congressional District, which was vacated by wealthy three-term Representative Jane Harman in her unsuccessful pursuit of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The 36th, embracing the "aerospace belt," in the beach cities of Los Angeles County, has a well-educated, high-tech electorate and a slight GOP registration edge. Harman defeated a conservative to win the seat in 1992 and seemed a vulnerable target in 1994, the "Contract with America" year when the GOP won control of the House. But in the 36th, the GOP nominated conservative Susan Brooks, and Harman turned the election into a referendum on abortion rights. She eked out an 812-vote victory. When Brooks ran again in 1996, a better Democratic year, Harman beat her by 19,000 votes.
Kuykendall, Firestone's seatmate in the Assembly, is the sort of pragmatic businessman who once typified GOP legislators. On the Rancho Palo Verdes City Council and in the Assembly, he earned a reputation as a problem-solver. Harman, who had worked with Kuykendall on district issues, gave him a heads-up on her decision to run for governor, helping him to jump into the primary race. Kuykendall won handily, defeating Brooks and Los Angeles Councilman Rudy Svornich.
Five weeks before the November election, the message of these three congressional primaries seems clear. In the 22nd, Capps holds a wide lead, and the race has been taken off the top-target list of the GOP. Ose, meanwhile, has such a commanding lead in the 3rd that Democrats are all but conceding the district. No one is conceding anything in the 36th, where the Democrats nominated Janice Hahn, member of the well-known Los Angeles County political family. But Kuykendall leads in the polls of both parties and is favored to win.
Ose and Kuykendall, along with Matt Fong, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, were beneficiaries of the open primary, which encourages candidates of both parties to make what Republican Representative Steve Horn of Long Beach calls "sensible appeals" to a broad electorate. Ose, Kuykendall, and Fong did not have to move to the right to win nomination; they emerged from their primaries with essentially the same appeal they have made in their fall campaigns.
The open primary was advocated 20 years ago by Horn, a top aide to Senator Thomas Kuchel, a onetime GOP moderate. But it is the immediate fruit of Tom Campbell's narrow loss in the 1992 GOP U.S. Senate primary to ultraconservative Bruce Herschensohn. After Herschensohn was defeated by Democrat Barbara Boxer, Campbell Supporters placed an initiative on the 1996 ballot creating the open primary. (Campbell persuaded industrialist David Packard to provide much of the financing.) The initiative won handily. It has made the California GOP safe for moderates and left the way open for the Republican Party's return to its glory days in California.
But which glory days? California has been a Republican bastion for most of the century. The state had only one Democratic governor before Edmund G. (Pat) Brown was elected in 1958. After Brown's two terms and two terms by Ronald Reagan, Brown's son, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, was governor from 1975-83. If Gray Davis wins, he will be the fourth Democratic governor of the century. More often than not, California's political destiny has been in Republican hands.
This hasn't been all bad. The most productive legislative era of the first half century occurred under the leadership of Hiram Johnson, a Republican who had become so disgusted with the corruption of both parties that he founded his own, the Progressives. Most Progressives were former Republicans and many later returned to the GOP fold. Essentially Johnson's progressives were Republican liberals who made California a national leader among states that provided for working people and the less fortunate. This was the social legacy that the great Earl Warren, a three-term governor, invoked in mid-century as he fought a visionary battle for health insurance and put California in the national forefront of state spending on education. President Harry Truman said that Warren "is a real Democrat and doesn't know it," but he was, in fact, a real Republican of his day.
The other glory period for the Republicans came during the governorship of Reagan, the premier conservative icon. What is often forgotten is that GOP legislators of the Reagan era (and in some ways Reagan himself) would be hopelessly progressive by the standards of the GOP Assembly caucus of today. During 12 years that included Pat Brown's second term and Reagan's two terms, Republican legislators played major roles in constructive legislation that helped the children, the poor, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded and welfare recipients.
Reagan appointed Sierra Club member Ike Livermore as his resources director. He blocked federal plans to build the Dos Rios Dam and flood Round Valley and to build a wilderness-destroying highway to Monarets Summit. He signed a landmark permissive abortion bill authored by Democratic state Senator Anthony Beilenson that was pushed through the Assembly by Republicans.
When Pete Wilson, a freshman assemblyman during Reagan's first year in office, became governor in 1991, he was astonished to find that the religious right wielded so much power in the Assembly caucus. it bothered Wilson when a legislator invoked Scripture to oppose a tax increase that was needed to balance the budget. ironically, in view of his own later reputation, Wilson was dismayed by what seemed to him a streak of meanness in the GOP caucus. Perhaps such qualities have a way of rubbing off. Years later, Wilson on his own initiative reduced conjugal visits for California prison inmates--a program that Governor Reagan had initiated to reduce homosexual assaults in prison.
Meanness is now a staple of California politics, and it comes not only from the right. State Senator David Roberti was effectively destroyed by fellow Democrat Phil Angelides in the 1994 campaign for state treasurer by unfair commercials suggesting that he sanctioned the murder of an abortion doctor. The ugly campaign for Proposition 187 repelled Latinos, and the subsequent battle over Proposition 209 alienated African Americans. Politics in California was never for the faint of heart, but it now requires a strong stomach as well.
The 22nd congressional District is a paradigm for how California Republicans have allowed narrow-mindedness (some would also say political stupidity) to make them a minority. The internecine battle in the special election arguably cost the party two of its better state legislators in the loss of Firestone and Bordonaro.
After his defeat Firestone was asked by GOP legislative leaders if he would run for the Assembly again. He asked in turn if they could guarantee that the right wing wouldn't go after him again. No one can guarantee that, and Firestone didn't run. His Assembly seat is now a toss-up between a Democrat who is to the left of the district and a Republicans who is to the right of it.
Meanwhile, the open primary offers hope that Republicans will become less dependent on the zealots who wield more power in closed primaries than in general elections. Campbell is cautiously optimistic that as moderates win more elections, the party structure will become more pragmatic over time.
How Fong, Kuykendall, and Ose fare in November, will offer valuable clues about the direction of California's conflicted GOP.