It’s Gloating Of Partisans for O.C. GOP

On Tuesday, Republicans swept the Congress, kicked the daylights out of Democratic icons and made history. On Wednesday, they gloated.

There was no better place to see it than in Orange County--the most Republican urban county in California and a place nationally known for its boisterous GOP partisanship.

It is the birthplace of Proposition 187. It is the home of fiery Republicans like Rep. Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove, the angry emperor of the C-SPAN airwaves, who now has a chance to chair a House Armed Services subcommittee and perhaps, finally, pass a bill. And it is the place where the members of an Assembly delegation, once called “the Cavemen” for their conservative stands, now may be in line for committee chairmanships.

Oh, how they’re licking their chops in Orange County.

For so long the outcasts, now Republican politicos are fielding fawning phone calls from admirers across the country. “You really want to know what they say?” crowed Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach before heading out for an afternoon of celebratory surfing. “Yeee-ha!”

After wandering for 40 years in a political desert where leadership of Congress was always a mirage, some Republicans said God is finally smiling. “There’s a sense for all these years that we have offered this message and it’s been so gratifying to see that now the entire county, the entire state, the entire nation receives and accepts it,” said Thomas A. Fuentes, longtime Orange County Republican Party chairman. “Perhaps the response we wanted was a little long in coming.”

For the county’s long-suffering Democrats, meanwhile, the election results went far beyond the usual humiliation. Longtime Democratic stalwarts Howard Adler and Richard O’Neill count themselves among the bloodied survivors.

“At the end of 1984, there were two Democrats left, me and Dick O’Neill,” Adler said. Defeated attorney general candidate “Tom Umberg’s back here now, so now I guess there’s three of us.”

Local Republican consultants who for years have seen their Orange County candidates returned to office, but with little power, were unnerved by the prospect of their clients actually having any.

“I hope they take the responsibility seriously so they don’t embarrass us all,” said Eileen Padberg, an Irvine campaign consultant. “If I were them I’d be saying, ‘Holy Moses, what am I going to do now?’ ”

Perhaps no politician was rolling in post-election glory Wednesday more than Dornan.

“For a backbencher, this is really sensational stuff,” said Dornan, starting his ninth two-year term in Congress. “Most other people would have had an ulcer by now or a heart murmur. Luckily I’ve got a strong constitution.”

He’s also got a strong memory for years of slights by local political pundits, particularly digs that he would never sit in the Speaker of the House’s chair. Not so, Dornan chortled at high volume: “Bob Dornan gets to sit in the Speaker’s chair and tap gently with the opposite end of the gavel and say, ‘Will my colleagues please take their conversations into the cloakroom?’ . . . See? I’ve got all the dialogue in my head and I’ve never been able to use it.”

Republicans also will be able to lay claim to the Hill’s prime real estate, offices lavishly redecorated by the Democratic leadership, Dornan said.

“We all voted against (the redecorated offices), but now they’re all ours,” Dornan said. “We are going to own all those little hideaways with their marble floors, tea rooms and ceilings painted by an Italian master.”

And when Sen. Ted Kennedy comes back to the Hill, added Newport Beach Assemblyman Gil Ferguson, with more than a touch of spite, he will find “his magnificent chambers are now located in a broom closet.”

For Ferguson, who’s spent 10 years on the conservative front line in Sacramento, it’s pay-back time.

“We were constantly belittled. We were constantly being treated as second-class citizens. . . . The ones from Orange County almost to a man were always denigrated,” Ferguson said. “You couldn’t explain it to anybody because you didn’t want to be a crybaby.”

Things will be different now, vowed Ferguson, who plans to vie for the state Senate seat vacated by Marian Bergeson, who will be installed as a member of the county Board of Supervisors in January.

And those “weak” Republicans who cooperated with the Democrats? “Crushed” underfoot by the new conservative force, according to Ferguson.

“That’s why I want to go up and win the Senate seat to pay them back,” he said. “I’ll be their worst nightmare.”

But it won’t be just the Democrats having bad dreams. Once the initial shock of Tuesday’s political earthquake wore off, many Republicans got worried.

“None of us were around when we had control of both houses,” fretted Buck Johns, longtime member of the executive board of the conservative Lincoln Club. “None of us has ever been in this position. As a result we have no idea of what we’ve got ahold of here.”

It’s the classic be “careful what you wish for” situation, Johns said. “These guys are going back not as bomb throwers but as the government.”

Johns said he’d been receiving faxes and phone calls all day. “The first (comment) is congratulatory. The second is, ‘What do we do now?’ ”

For all his glee over the nationwide victories, Fuentes was equally concerned: “The task of being the opposition is easier than the task of governing.”

Many local congressmen agreed. After all, few have ever passed a bill.

“For all these years, we’ve been thinking and strategizing on how to bring about these changes,” said Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad). “But never in our wildest dreams did we think we’d have the chance to do it.”

Packard and others in the Orange County delegation expect their new majority status to translate into leadership roles on influential committees and subcommittees. None is likely to be senior enough to chair House committees, but several local congressmen, including Packard, Dornan and Rohrabacher, are in line to head subcommittees when the new Congress meets next year.

Packard, for instance, is hoping to win the chairmanship of the subcommittee on the legislative branch, which funds various agencies on Capitol Hill, including the Congress and the Library of Congress. Rohrabacher will most likely head the Science, Space and Technology subcommittee, and Dornan says he expects to chair the House Armed Services’ Personnel subcommittee.

“That is an honor to be Chairman Dornan for two years. It is deee-lightful,” said a gleeful Dornan, who also serves on the Intelligence Committee.

Added Rohrabacher: “Orange County held on to its Republican principles, even at the expense of having some clout. Because of that we now have enormous leverage. . . . People say Bob Dornan never passed a law. Well, the Democrats never allowed Republicans to even get votes on their laws.”

Now, Rohrbacher said, voters can expect the Orange County delegation not only to author bills, “but to actually get the votes to pass them.”

Packard also hopes to retain his spot on the “committee on committees,” which under Republican leadership is expected to shrink the House committee structure even before Congress resumes in January.

Some Republicans could hardly wait to start cleaning the House. So eager was Rep. Christopher Cox that he canceled three weeks of appointments here Wednesday and hopped a noon flight back to Washington.

“We’re reorganizing the Congress after 40 years,” Cox (R-Newport Beach), said just before racing out his office door. “I’ve got to get back there as quickly as I can.”

Both Cox and Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), said they have discussed other ideas with the new Republican leadership of the House, including inviting a major accounting firm to go over the books and slash congressional staff.

But UC Irvine political science professor Mark Petracca provided a reality check for the rambunctious Republicans: Washington runs on seniority and none of them has it.

“On a strictly seniority basis, we’re out of it,” he said.

In fact, with the Republican sweep, California lost positions that its senior Democrats held on many key House committees, Petracca said. Among Orange County Republicans, he said, Cox may be the most likely to do an end run around the seniority obstacle, earning a leadership role based on his expertise on budget issues.

None of this cheered the county’s sad-sack Democrats, however.

They’ve become accustomed to losing over the years, but the drubbing at the polls this time ranked right up there with the worst ever, several doleful party leaders said Wednesday.

“What does this mean?” mused Adler, former Orange County Democratic Party chair. “It means we start all over again. This is kind of like ’84 when Reagan was reelected. It’s really just as bad.”

O’Neill, the former state Democratic Party chair and longtime patron of local Democrats, said it was pretty tough to find a bright spot, with not a single Democrat elected from Orange County.

“The more you think about it, it only gets worse,” O’Neill said. “I think the thing to do here is to sort of lie low and maybe catch them somehow when they’re not looking.”