Star on the Rise : Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez Weighs Future

The teen-agers are a tough audience. They have a look of boredom on their face, much as they do when any adult, especially one dressed in a suit and tie, comes to address them.

Sensing their initial disinterest, Orange County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, the son of an apostolic minister, abandons the podium and takes to the aisles, talking as he paces back and forth, Phil Donahue-style.

For the next hour or so, he has the 200 students at Capistrano Valley High School, many of them Latino immigrants who speak only a little English, laughing or looking pensive. Moving adroitly from Spanish into English and back, Vasquez tells the students how the son of migrant farm workers who toiled in Watsonville made it to the chairmanship of Orange County’s Board of Supervisors, the only Latino, and its youngest member ever.

“My parents never graduated from high school, because they were very poor, but they had a lot of love, and they always said education was the most important way to climb out of poverty,” he tells them. “You have a great school, you have people who care about you, your future, and you can make something of your lives.”

When he is done with his speech, a few students raise their hands to ask questions. When the questions wind down, Vasquez fires up the group again by asking: “How many of you were born in Mexico?”

Vasquez is comfortable in front of a crowd. At 36, he is said to have limitless potential as a politician. He is young, Republican and Latino. He has a wealth of public service experience and he is an outstanding public speaker.

Vasquez has just completed his fourth year on the Board of Supervisors, and is serving this year as chairman of the five-member panel. He was appointed to the board in 1987 by then-Gov. George Deukmejian to fill a vacancy and was elected to the post the following year. These days Vasquez is constantly dogged by the question: What does he want next?

Last year at a Miami gathering of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Vasquez captivated an audience when he spoke, said Harry Pachon, association executive director.

“People kept coming up to me afterward and asking, ‘Who is he?’ He’s such a good speaker. Gaddi is one of the rising stars in California,” Pachon said. “He joins the ranks of Hispanic candidates that you can count on one hand in California . . . who are being touted for higher state office.”

Late last year, he was rumored to be on a list of candidates that Gov. Pete Wilson considered to name as his replacement in the U.S. Senate.

“Had Gov. Wilson appointed Gaddi Vasquez to the U.S. Senate, he could have had one of the best recruiters of Hispanics into the Republican Party,” said Richard Martinez, regional director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. “It would have put terrific pressure on the Democratic Party.”

Martinez said Vasquez is impressive on the stump. “He talks about his farm worker past, and picks up on the cultural affinity, the emphasis on family. He . . . has a Henry Cisneros-style to him.”

Vasquez makes no secret that he would consider running for some post beyond the Board of Supervisors, but for now he will say only that he is happy there.

“I don’t have any long-term vision of where I’ll be,” he said recently as he sat in his corner office at the Hall of Administration in downtown Santa Ana. “It wasn’t too long ago that I was driving a patrol car on the graveyard shift of the Orange Police Department.”

The talk about Vasquez’s future has been mostly of potential, and his year as board chairman is expected to test his leadership abilities as never before. It will be a time, those who know him and work with him say, in which he can prove whether his substance can match his style.

Stuart Spencer, a prominent political consultant on both of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns, also worked for Vasquez during his campaign for supervisor. Although Spencer said Wilson did consider Vasquez as his replacement, the decision was made that Vasquez needed seasoning.

“It was a tempting offer and Gov. Wilson gave it some serious consideration,” Spencer said about Vasquez. “But Gaddi just didn’t have the experience yet. He needed one more level yet to be material for the U.S. Senate.

“He should take the chairmanship of the board this year and show some leadership,” he said. “This is nothing I haven’t talked with Gaddi about myself. It’s time he demonstrated some leadership and he has the opportunity now to do that.”

As board chairman, he is credited with instituting policies that have considerably shortened the supervisorial meetings. But even his supporters are hard-pressed to come up with programs or policies that show he is willing to break away from the pack.

Republican Party leaders in the county say that Vasquez is not a grandstander but is an important component in the GOP’s plans to attract more Latinos to its ranks.

“He is more cautious than we’d like him to be,” said William (Buck) Johns, a member of the influential Lincoln Club, a GOP support group in Orange County. “I’d like him to wear a big S on his chest and fly out of windows. But that’s not his nature. I just have great expectations and great hopes for Gaddi, but doggone it, I’m very pleased with him.”

Vasquez insists that he constantly hears more compliments than criticism of his performance, and says he is proud that he is deliberate in the stands he chooses to take.

“I am consistently cautious, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “George Bush has been called cautious, and George Deukmejian has been called cautious. Pete Wilson has been called cautious. And Gaddi Vasquez has been called cautious. I feel that that’s the proper way to operate. And this is a conservative county, where people expect reasonable and cautious and deliberate leadership on issues.”

Vasquez represents a crescent-shaped district that is only 15% Latino. But he apparently is so used to hearing that he has not done enough for the Latino community that he begins to defend himself even before he is asked about such criticism.

“I’ve heard the criticism, ‘He ought to be doing more for Hispanics.’ Yet that wall (in his adjoining conference room) is saturated with plaques from all sorts of Hispanic groups saying, ‘Thanks for all you do,’ ” he said.

He also said: “I did not run as a Hispanic supervisor, but as a supervisor who happened to be Hispanic. All combined, it proved to be a success.”

Amin David, director of the Anaheim-based Los Amigos of Orange County, said Vasquez has missed some opportunities to speak out for the Latino community. David cites the 1988 Election Day incident in which the Republican Party placed guards outside voting places in Santa Ana. Latinos complained that voters had been intimidated by the action in the heavily Democratic area. Vasquez responded with little more than the party line.

“He doesn’t take a stand on these hard-core issues--my God, he doesn’t even dance around them,” David said. “But overall, by God, he’s doing a good job, and we support him and we point to him with pride to our little ones.”

Vasquez has moved up quickly. While he was working for the Orange Police Department, Vasquez attended night school to earn his bachelor’s degree in public service administration at the University of Redlands. He left police work in 1979 to join the Riverside city manager’s office, and the following year he became executive assistant to Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande.

In 1984, he took a job with Southern California Edison, but Deukmejian soon beckoned him to Sacramento to work on his staff and in 1987 he appointed Vasquez to the Orange County board.

It has been heady stuff for a man who spent the first five years of his life in the farming fields of Watsonville and Sanger, waiting for his parents to work their way through the rows of strawberries and green beans.

These days, he and his wife, Elaine, a nurse, and their 11-year-old son, Jason, live in Orange, not far from where he was raised. He and Elaine met through church when Vasquez was a boy. His father is still a pastor at a small apostolic church in Orange, which Vasquez and his family attend every Sunday.

“I’m fortunate and blessed because I live in Orange County,” he says. “I was raised here. I’m a product of the school systems here. To be able to achieve this office in your own back yard is a real unique experience. I have to pinch myself sometimes to remind myself that it’s real.”