Heads Scratching Over Hunter’s Changeable Views

Stepping up to the microphone during a recent legislative debate, rookie Assemblywoman Tricia Hunter (R-Bonita) disclosed that she keeps a gun on her nightstand when her husband is away from home.

“My husband happens to be in the Navy and I was chased off the road by somebody, who for some reason decided that I was going to be the target,” Hunter said, referring to a 1983 incident in San Diego. “Fortunately, for me, I had friends available that did provide a gun that I now keep in the house and in my bedroom and at my bedside.”

The admission--along with her vote that day against the latest handgun-control measure--has some people wondering whether the nurse-turned-politician is backing away from the positions that catapulted her into national headlines and victory in a hotly contested election last year for the 76th District Assembly seat.

Hunter last year was the only pro-choice Republican in a legislative race that was the first in the country to be decided after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Webster decision, a July ruling that gave state Legislatures more say in the politically explosive abortion issue.

That legal opinion elevated what might have been a long-shot candidacy into a political litmus test on abortion. It galvanized the support of pro-choice advocates, who came out in droves to help her squeeze a victory last October in a solidly conservative district. Hunter’s endorsement of an assault-weapons ban enacted earlier by the Legislature also drew support from the gun-control lobby.

But just five months later, incumbent Hunter, 37, is downplaying the significance of her pro-choice position, in the race and in her day-to-day activities as state legislator.

And her vote last month against a 15-day waiting period for hunting rifles and long gun sales--a measure that narrowly passed the Legislature--has some people grumbling.

“When she came out against assault weapons, we supported her, and here we thought that we had someone very much on our side,” said Stan Foster, a San Diego businessman and national vice chairman of Handgun Control Inc., who characterized Hunter’s vote as a “terrible disappointment.”

“Not only did she vote against us, but she spoke against us on the floor of the Assembly on a critical issue,” he said.

Some critics say Hunter is simply posturing to curry favor with her conservative constituents in time for the June primary, where a handful of Republican hopefuls believe they can turn the abortion issue around and knock her off.

“I think what you’re going to see from Tricia Hunter is that she is going to vote whatever is expedient,” said Poway management consultant Dick Lyles, who lost twice to Hunter last year. “It’s real clear what she’s trying to do is appear to be a mainstream Republican.”

But the feisty political newcomer says her votes and tactics in Sacramento should come as no surprise. Hunter maintains that she’s always been more conservative than portrayed by the media or campaign rhetoric, which focused on abortion and gun control.

Most of her time in office so far, she says, has been used to feel her way through the often mysterious legislative process and to show her colleagues--especially her fellow Republicans in the Assembly--that as a former political outsider, she’s willing to play on the team. While some of the most ardent anti-abortion Republicans still resent her, Hunter said she’s been willing to win over such key people as Assembly Minority Leader Ross Johnson (R-Fullteron), who supported Lyles in the special election primary last year.

She is also mindful of cultivating the Republican heavyweights back home as well. She took a two-day break and flew back to San Diego last week to meet Vice President Dan Quayle, as well as mingle with the party faithful at a fund-raiser featuring former President Ronald Reagan and U.S. Senator Pete Wilson. In her district, she’s won over Poway City Councilwoman Linda Brannon, a special election opponent who is now co-chair of Hunter’s reelection committee.

“I could have gone to Sacramento with a chip on my shoulder,” she said on the return trip to Sacramento. “I had a right to be indignant, angry at the way I was treated (by Republicans) in the election. But what purpose does it serve? It doesn’t do me any good.

“If you maintain the negative that came out of my race, you’ll be ineffective. You have to work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. And I don’t plan to be ineffective. I’ve never been ineffective in my life,” she said.

By most Sacramento standards, however, that effectiveness still seems a way off. In a place where power and prestige is measured by the square footage of a legislator’s Capitol office, Hunter’s position in the pecking order is made abundantly clear by her cramped working quarters and its doorway between the elevators and stairwell.

Her committee assignments are so unimpressive that she’s had only one meeting in two months. Her small staff has been has written only a handful of bills.

Yet Hunter toils away by arranging meetings with constituents, lobbyists and fellow lawmakers. Her big ambition: to land an assignment on the Assembly’s Health Committee, where she wants to exploit her expertise as a hospital administrator and surgical scrub nurse.

“It can be a very lonely place and tends to be a very lonely place because you don’t know who you can call a friend,” Hunter said of the Capitol. “You have to be very cautious.”

And cautious she’s been, especially when it comes to the subject that many political pundits credit for her election in the first place--abortion. Hunter showed her pro-choice leanings when she broke with Assembly Republicans and voted for a bill in January to restore $20 million to the state’s family planning budget--the biggest birth control test to emerge so far.

But she’s also making moves to distance herself from the emotional issue. She says her polls show that it was her position on the assault weapons ban--and not abortion--that won her the special election. And while she will continue to be pro-choice, she views it as only a “very minor vote” because abortion-related issues come up so infrequently in the Legislature.

“It’s not my only issue,” she said. “I don’t want to go to rallies and I don’t intend to be a flag-carrying (advocate).”

To prove the point, she turned down an invitation to appear with a long list of other lawmakers at a pro-choice rally outside the Capitol in January to mark the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion. She was absent, although her victory in the special election was invoked by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) as an example of the political muscle flexed by pro-choice forces.

She has also voted against the pro-choice lobby. During the November special session on earthquake relief, she joined Assembly Republicans to block a resolution that simply called on Gov. George Deukmejian to restore the family planning funds. She voted against the measure, she said at the time, because it was a surprise and was out of place in the special session.

In a milder test, Hunter last week abstained from voting on anti-abortion amendments that were proposed for a bill regarding genetic testing. The amendments failed.

“She abstained against us on that bill, which was disappointing,” said Norma K. Clevenger, lobbyist for Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “But I think probably because the amendments came up quickly, nobody had the time to talk to her.”

Still, Clevenger and other pro-choice supporters--some of whom have adopted a wait-and-see attitude about Hunter--say they believe the Bonita Republican will hang in during the big fights. Some of the mixed signals, they say, may be attributable to her worries about being reelected.

“I think she sees herself as being somewhat vulnerable,” said Clevenger.

Some local Republicans believe Hunter will be vulnerable in this year’s traditional primary race because it does not allow for a crossover vote from pro-choice Democrats, who rallied to Hunter’s side last fall. Without those crossover votes, they contend, Hunter would not have been able to eke out a 197-vote victory over Lyles in the special election primary and fend off an unusually strong write-in campaign by him in the Oct. 3 runoff.

Three Republican challengers have taken out papers to run against Hunter. They are Sue Reeves, a Poway resident who serves on the Pomerado Hospital board of directors; L. Ned Kohler, a senior vice president for Great American First Savings Bank, and Connie Younkin, an anti-abortion activist who recently served 40 days in jail for demonstrating outside of a medical clinic.

The trio is now holding meetings to decide who will emerge as Hunter’s primary opponent, said Barry Jantz, a San Diego political consultant who serves as treasurer of the county’s Republican Central Committee.

“If one of these candidates gets in and wants me to be involved in the campaign, I will definitely be involved in the campaign against her,” Jantz said.

Hunter’s supporters, however, argue that her views are well-matched to her district and that abortion will not be a major stumbling block. She has taken care to tend to the anti-crime sentiments of the district by reviving a bill, sponsored by her predecessor, the late Bill Bradley of San Marcos, to guarantee the death penalty for anyone convicted of killing a child.

The Assemblywoman also says that there is no erosion in her political finances, the overwhelming amount of which came from nurses around the state.

Those interested in gun control, meanwhile, note that Hunter was strongly opposed by the National Rifle Assn. last year because of her endorsement of the assault-weapons ban.

While Hunter maintains that it was her endorsement of the assault-weapons ban that won her the race, she added that she’s made her opposition to the 15-day waiting period no secret. She is touting, instead, a computer system that can make instantaneous background checks on a prospective gun buyer. And then there’s the fact that she has owned a .22-caliber handgun ever since the night somebody tried to run her off the road on Interstate 5, near Palm Avenue.

She mentioned the incident in only her second speech ever on the Assembly floor, a disclosure that surprised some colleagues, who had her figured for a blanket gun-control supporter.

“There was dead silence,” she said. “That was a little intimidating.”