ELECTIONS ’88 : Baker Banks on Record of Local Service to Win 40th

It was nearly 2 o’clock in the morning, and it showed in C. David Baker’s red and swollen eyes.

Baker and two of his colleagues on the Irvine City Council had just been booed loudly for voting to complete Yale Avenue through the town’s residential core. During six long hours of testimony, angry homeowners had warned that their quiet neighborhoods would become a speedway for commuters using the completed thoroughfare as a shortcut to nearby freeways.

The Yale Avenue project, Baker said, was necessary to relieve congestion in the city, and he stayed long after the meeting had ended to defend his position to several unhappy residents.

“I hung around because those people deserved an explanation,” Baker said recently, recalling the December, 1987, council session. “It comes with the territory. It comes with serving people. And that’s something I think I do a pretty fair job at.”

Baker, an attorney and former UC Irvine basketball star, hopes Republican voters in the 40th Congressional District primary agree with him Tuesday.

‘Home-Grown Candidate’

In a race in which some candidates have gone to extraordinary lengths to tout their national experience and Washington ties, Baker is running as the “home-grown candidate” who knows what’s wrong on Main Street and how to fix it.

Because Republicans hold a 2-to-1 edge in voter registration in the 40th District, the primary winner is expected to have little difficulty winning the general election in November to succeed Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach), who is retiring.

Badham, himself, has gone to bat for Baker, endorsing him early in the race and sending thousands of voters in the district an impressive 17-by-22-inch letter that begins: “This is the most important letter I’ve written in my 26 years of public service. . . .”

Badham goes on at length in the letter about Baker’s qualifications and his character, which has been both questioned and tested in a race that has evolved into one of the most divisive political scraps in county history.

Midway through the campaign, Baker’s marital fidelity was rudely challenged when an unidentified man at a candidate’s forum stood and accused the councilman of having an extramarital affair. Baker has never directly denied the allegation, saying only that he and his wife, Patty, have renewed their commitment to each other after a separation in 1986.

Baker, 35, has stuck to that explanation and believes he has weathered the worst storm of his young political career.

The issue, however, continues to dog Baker, surfacing again this week in a political mailer.

“Those allegations are a product of the worst kind of electioneering,” Baker said in a recent interview at his Irvine home. As he talked, he watched his two young sons playing in the next room.

“It hurts deeply . . . because I love this family,” he said. “Right now, I have never been so close to Patty.”

She was his sweetheart at Warren High School in Downey, and the two went to UCI together.

Baker acknowledged that in 13 years of marriage, he and his wife have had “some ups and downs” and that they separated in late 1986 for about five months. But, he said, their differences have been mended.

For her part, Patty Baker said she believes it is ironic that she and her husband have come under attack for salvaging their marriage.

“If we had divorced, this would never have come up,” she said. “But we choose not to take the easy route. We worked at making things right again. We worked at keeping our family together. Don’t we get points for that?”

Above all else, Baker said, he considers himself a family man. His is a value system, he said, rooted in love and admiration for his father, one of 15 children who grew up poor in rural Mississippi. To this day, Baker’s father, who is retired and lives in Irvine not far from his son, still cannot read or write, Baker said. But he is nonetheless a role model to his son.

“He missed just one day of work his whole life--the day I was born,” Baker has said often during the campaign. “Even then he missed only a half day. He wanted the best for us. He never let me down.”

Baker has tried to score on the political front by saying that the “local boy knows best” when it comes to the needs of the district’s half-million residents.

Emphasizes Local Concerns

Unlike attorney C. Christopher Cox and businessman Nathan Rosenberg, the other front-runners in the primary, Baker boasts of no Washington connections or experience.

But Baker believes that is a plus, one that he has tried to exploit, especially in an election year when local concerns, like growth and transportation, not the national budget deficit or arms control, are the burning issues in Orange County.

Baker talks of Orange County, and in particular Irvine, in almost religious tones.

“Why would anyone want to live anywhere else in the world?” he says often. “We are lucky . . . maybe even the chosen few, who have been blessed to wind up here. It is indeed a privilege.”

Baker grew up in Los Angeles County, blossoming into a star basketball player in high school. At 6 feet 9, he was sought by more than 100 colleges and universities but chose UCI on the advice of a coach who told Baker to attend school “where you would be happy living once your playing days ended.”

Even today, Baker said, he rarely reads newspapers because of experiences with newspaper coverage in his playing days. He recalls one game in particular, when the newspaper headlined his failure to hit two free throws, even though he had scored 38 points in the game.

Baker, a high school all-American, was a four-year starter at UCI and set numerous basketball records at the university.

Played in Europe

But the pros never called, and after a year of traveling and playing amateur ball in Europe, he returned to Irvine, earned a law degree from Pepperdine University and became a lawyer with the Los Angeles-based firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker.

In 1982, he ran unsuccessfully for the Irvine City Council, but two years later he was swept into office, largely because of his strong identification with efforts to build the city’s first hospital.

Now, he is in the thick of a congressional primary that may well become the most expensive in county history.

Baker himself has received more than $400,000 in contributions and, in addition to Badham’s, has the endorsements of such prominent local Republicans as state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) and Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley.

He has campaigned through mailers and has attended more than 100 coffees in an effort to win voter support. As the campaign draws to a close, he is spending time walking precincts in the district.

If elected, Baker has said, reducing the deficit will be his first priority.

Baker said he favors giving the President line-item veto power, and he said that Congress should abandon the annual budget process in favor of a two-year spending plan. Under the current system, Baker said, Congress “barely approves one budget when planning on the next begins. . . . There’s no time for long-range economic planning.”

Wants Pendleton Airport

The solution to the county’s air-traffic needs, he said, is construction of a major airport at the Camp Pendleton Marine Base in northern San Diego County. He is opposed to joint military use of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station because of its proximity to residential and industrial development.

Camp Pendleton, however, is relatively isolated and could serve both Orange and San Diego counties, Baker said. To carry Orange County passengers to the Pendleton airfield, Baker has proposed construction of a light-rail system, possibly paralleling the freeway. Users could then park and ride the rail system, reducing traffic on local freeways.

Of the three major contenders in the GOP primary, Baker is the only one to take a stand on the countywide slow-growth initiative on Tuesday’s ballot as Measure A. He is against it.

Cox and Rosenberg have declined to take a position, saying it is not a federal issue. Baker agrees but said the issue is “too compelling” for locally elected officials, including members of Congress, not to take a stand.

Baker says Measure A fails to address the critical issue of transportation adequately. To reduce traffic, he favors reducing the density of housing and commercial developments and accelerating plans to build roads.

As an Irvine councilman, Baker has often been portrayed as a friend of development interests, particularly the Irvine Co.

He says it is an unfair tag but understands why he has it.

Tireless Volunteer

“It’s assumed that the only ones who believe in private property rights and free enterprise values are entities like the Irvine Co.,” Baker said. “But I believe in those principles, like thousands of others. Yet somehow, because I share some of the same philosophic positions as the Irvine Co., it means I’m ‘their man.’ That’s ridiculous.”

A tireless volunteer, Baker has been involved in countless civic and social efforts in Irvine, most notably the fund-raising push to build the Boys and Girls Club of Irvine.

Among his accomplishments, Baker said, the most satisfying has been his role in a child-care program operated jointly by the city and the Irvine Unified School District. Nancy Noble, director of the Irvine Child Care Project, said Baker has “been instrumental” in raising money from private sources to finance before- and after-school day-care programs at five schools in the city.

But it is the Irvine Medical Center that really seems to stir Baker’s pride.

Like an expectant father, Baker talks fondly of next summer, when the 177-bed hospital is scheduled to open. The proposed $90-million hospital, and the accompanying 110,000-square-foot medical center caused a maelstrom of controversy in the city.

One faction, including a number of administrators, faculty members and physicians at UCI, believed the facility should have been built on their campus.

Lobbied for Alternative Site

But Baker and others, including Arnold Beckman, lobbied hard to have it built at one of several other possible sites around the city, finally settling on a site near Sand Canyon Avenue, just off the San Diego Freeway, that was donated by the Irvine Co.

“Had it not been for David Baker, it’s quite possible there would not be an Irvine Medical Center today,” said medical center president John Gaffney. He said Baker was instrumental in rallying citizen support for the project and helped shepherd the project through the approval process.

Baker contends that the wounds opened in the fight over the hospital, which will be affiliated with UCI, have all but healed.

But Dr. Stanley van den Noort, chairman of the UCI’s neurological department, said there is still resentment over Baker’s role in keeping the facility from being built on the university campus.

That sentiment was evident at a recent UCI candidate forum for the 40th District, when another candidate drew loud applause when she said the hospital should have been constructed on campus.

“The vast majority of people in the medical school believe it was a tragic error not to locate that hospital here, on campus where it could have been the focus of not only health care but research as well,” van den Noort said.

Pitted Against Agran

On the Irvine council, Baker has often been pitted against Mayor Larry Agran, a Democrat. The two men have clashed often over growth and social issues, including last fall when they were at odds over Agran’s proposal to convert a vacant, 50-bed dog kennel into a temporary shelter for homeless families. Baker opposed the plan, saying it would attract transients and drifters.

Before Baker opted to run for Congress, it was widely assumed that he would challenge Agran in Tuesday’s mayoral race.

In a recent interview, Agran called Baker “stubborn and unbending” and said he has accomplished “remarkably little” as a councilman.

C. DAVID BAKER40th Congressional District

Office sought: 40th Congressional District representative. The district includes Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach, Irvine and parts of Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Santa Ana and Tustin as well as parts of unincorporated south Orange

County.

Occupation:

Lawyer.

Party Affiliation: Republican.

Age: 35

Residence: Irvine

Public office

previously held: Irvine mayor, 1985; councilman, 1984-

present.