GOP Hopeful Seeks to Rival Boxer With Righteousness

Granting benefits to illegal immigrants is immoral. Same-sex marriage will destroy the foundation of civilization. Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer represents only wacky San Francisco liberals.

It’s 8:45 a.m. on a gloomy Saturday in Newport Beach, and Howard Kaloogian is just warming up.

The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has a rapt audience this morning -- about 200 members of a conservative breakfast club formed 20 years ago by former Assemblyman Gil Ferguson. A larger-than-normal crowd is at the Balboa Bay Club to hear Kaloogian, another former assemblyman who is among 10 Republican candidates hoping to win the March 2 nomination and face Boxer in the fall.

This group of believers isn’t buying the conventional wisdom that Kaloogian will lose the primary to former Secretary of State Bill Jones, a relative moderate endorsed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and most of the GOP establishment. The other major candidates are former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin and former Los Altos Hills Mayor Toni Casey.

“Howard will win because of what he stands for,” said Violette Lorenzen of Newport Beach.

Kaloogian is unruffled by polls showing that Jones, having won statewide office twice, is the clear front-runner to take on Boxer. He says he heard the same nay-saying a year ago when he launched a website called RecallGrayDavis.com and began a crusade on talk radio to oust the then-governor, who had just won reelection two months earlier.

“All of the political establishment said, you cannot do this, but I thought it was the right thing to do,” Kaloogian tells the crowd, adding that Jones was among the skeptics. Except he refers to Jones as “Smith” -- a swipe at Jones’ easy-to-remember name, which Kaloogian says is the sole reason for his opponent’s superior showing in polls.

With just days before the primary, this is one of the largest crowds to embrace Kaloogian. His campaign until now has consisted mostly of scores of half-hour guest spots on talk-radio stations, where interest was fueled by his opposition to President Bush’s plan to grant guest-worker status to illegal immigrants.

He’s clearly at home with the Orange County crowd; his manner is assured, his diction perfect. He speaks for a half-hour without notes, punctuating various points with heated gestures, responding to every question with the conviction of the righteous.

It’s a trait that has led him to be labeled arrogant and unsufferable by some critics, even within his own party. Some accuse Kaloogian of chasing conservative causes as a way to raise money through the Internet and of putting his political ambitions first.

One anonymous critic was irked enough by Kaloogian to fund a “Howard Is a Liar” advertisement on Rough & Tumble, a daily roundup of California political and government news posted daily on the Internet. The advertisement links to a Web page that challenges Kaloogian’s claim to have started the Davis recall. That honor, the ad claims, goes to advocate Ted Costa and “100 patriots” who signed the initial recall petition, as well as to Rep Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), who donated almost $2 million to propel the recall effort.

The website isn’t saying who posted the ad; no one is taking responsibility for it. Issa recently endorsed Jones, calling him a “fair, unbiased leader who will put Californians first in the Senate.” Issa’s office declined to comment on Kaloogian and denied any connection with the Web ad.

Kaloogian bridles at the criticism. The recall was the effort of a team, he said, of which he was one of several key members. But he insisted that his efforts and that of his campaign manager, Sacramento veteran Sal Russo, were pivotal to early interest in the recall and its ultimate success.

His confrontational style may have earned him enemies over the years, for no one is off limits -- his Republican convention rally last weekend, nominally against giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, included insults aimed at both President Bush and Gov. Schwarzenegger. But, he says, the same trait makes him formidable against the equally aggressive Boxer.

His fall campaign would be a frontal attack on Boxer’s positions, he said: on the war in Iraq, which she opposes; abortion rights, which she supports; gun control, which she supports; traditional values, which he said she flouts.

“I know how to do this,” he said of the campaign. “I’m feisty and I’m able to conduct a campaign against her. I know how to communicate. If we nominate the Bob Dole of California, we’ll lose.”

Kaloogian runs the campaign chiefly from his San Marcos home, which he shares for the winter with his father, a retired engineer from Michigan. He bought the home two years ago after the unexpected death of his mother, who’d fled to the United States to escape the Armenian genocide in World War I. He had been living in a Carlsbad condo and wanted more space for winter visits from his dad. He communicates with his Sacramento campaign team via cellphone and three computer screens.

At 44, running for Senate has become a second full-time job. He is divorced, with no children, and still works in the estate-planning law practice he began before serving in the Assembly.

His conservatism dates from high school, when a 1976 assignment to portray Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter piqued his interest in politics. Though he won the debate as “Carter,” he was more intrigued by Republican ideals, volunteering in the 1980 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush.

At age 20, he attended the 1980 Republican National Convention as Michigan’s youngest delegate for Bush. It was there that he heard his first speech by Ronald Reagan.

“I was so inspired by the things he had to say,” Kaloogian recalled. “I was for Bush because everyone in Michigan was for Bush. It taught me not to go along with the leadership just because they’re the establishment. I realized the establishment may have some reason to be behind somebody, but it’s the ideas that matter.”

He moved to California from Michigan in 1981 to attend Pepperdine Law School. By 1994, he was running for the Assembly, one of six GOP candidates with virtually no backing, just a set of conservative beliefs and unending self-confidence. Among his strategies: visiting area churches and volunteering to usher so he could talk to parishioners about his campaign.

Once in Sacramento, he joined several like-minded and better-known conservative colleagues, including then-Sen. Ray Haynes, now an assemblyman, and then-Assemblyman Tom McClintock, now a state senator. Both have endorsed his U.S. Senate campaign.

His legislative record was spotty: Among 108 bills he introduced or co-wrote, fewer than a dozen became law. Among them was a 1998 bill giving parents the right to review school materials and requiring parental permission before behavior or psychological testing could be done on students. Other successes included two bills on estates and trusts, one on receiverships and a resolution condemning the National Islamic Front for its part in the war in the Sudan.

Among those introduced but never passed were a bill that would have allowed charter schools to qualify for per-pupil funding, a bill that would have required an ultrasound to be performed and shown to any woman seeking an abortion, and one that would have required candidates for statewide office to submit a medical report establishing whether the candidate had been tested for controlled substances -- and the test’s results. (Kaloogian has not taken such a test; he says the proposal, meant to hold elected officials to high standards, did not enthrall his colleagues. “One of those young and dumb ideas,” he says.)

Kaloogian entered the U.S. Senate race late. He endorsed fellow conservative Assemblyman Tony Strickland, only to see him drop out on deadline for filing candidacy papers. He launched his campaign on Jan. 12 with a San Diego rally that featured an endorsement by Ron Prince, author of Proposition 187, the popular 1994 initiative designed to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants.

In an announcement e-mail, Kaloogian said he needed to raise $2 million for the primary. Through Dec. 31, he’d collected just $10,000 toward that goal. He now says he’s raised about what Jones has raised from outside donors -- about $200,000. But he’s not personally wealthy, he said, and cannot match the $350,000 that Jones made in an initial loan to his campaign.

Even without money, the word’s getting out among conservative voters, he says. They dominate primaries and do their homework, which means they’ll find out about him whether he has money for direct mail and television ads or not, he says.

His evidence: unnamed polls that show him “surging” into the 20% range, with Jones in the high 30s and the other major GOP candidates -- Marin and Casey -- in single digits. The momentum is his, he says, as long as enough voters realize he’s running. (An independent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California last week found him with the support of 5% of likely voters, well below Jones’ 24% and Marin’s 12%.)

He rests his faith in talk radio, the not-so-secret weapon of the recall campaign. To him, taking callers is like walking precincts and chatting with voters.

“I can win in the fall because I can challenge the current senator in a way the others cannot,” he says during a morning broadcast via cellphone with KSFO host Melanie Morgan, one of the prime movers behind the recall. “I can make it a referendum on Barbara Boxer just like we made it a referendum on Gray Davis.”

Morgan asks about the other major Republican candidates, whom Kaloogian dismisses as conservative wannabes: “Some have even taken what I’ve said and repeated it verbatim,” he nearly shouts into the phone, referring to his early criticism of Bush’s immigration plan that drew eventual condemnation from Jones and Casey. “They know it’s effective and that’s why I’m going to win.”

Morgan asks him a question about money and he’s ready for it -- he raised $26,000 just yesterday, he says, breaking out in a broad grin. If he wins next month, the money will come, he insists, creating a “cause celebre for the national conservative movement.”

“I believe that if we present the issues correctly, we represent the majority of California,” he says off the air, with less gusto but equal conviction.

“The conventional wisdom is going to be wrong again with Boxer.”