This ‘Victory’ Celebration Took Chutzpah

Susan Brooks told them the bad news before she hopped the flight to Washington.

House Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich’s office had called after Election Day inviting her to the Capitol to revel in the Republican rout with seven other new members of Congress.

They were to be showcased as newly commissioned lieutenants in the battle to install Newt’s new American order, bright and shining symbols of imminent sea changes in the way Congress does business.

(In the post-election lexicon, all changes are sea changes , please.)

“It was a very exhilarating experience,” recalled Brooks, somewhat wistfully, this week.

The only problem was that in the weeklong interim between phone call and boarding pass, the Rancho Palos Verdes councilwoman’s skinny 93-vote lead over Rep. Jane Harman (D-Rolling Hills) had slipped to a 260-vote deficit.

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Right before Thanksgiving, Harman finally declared victory when her advantage climbed to nearly 800 votes, apparently recapturing the South Bay 36th District she had won two years earlier.

The official count is now an 812-vote bulge, and Brooks’ forces are poring over the ballots for possible irregularities. She still hasn’t conceded defeat.

“I felt strange about it from the beginning,” said Brooks, “but they said they wanted me to come out anyway. Newt--he campaigned for me, you know--told me he wanted me to just talk about the issues.”

Brooks said that the untoward development in the vote tally made her “a little hesitant to speak out.” But no one observing her in Washington could have guessed.

Indeed, she came on with the kind of chutzpah that seems to push politicians to take their pratfalls in public--like flying across the country (out of her own pocket, she says) to perform in a highly visible celebration of a victory that was not yet hers.

There she was on CNN, talking the talk, likening Washington to the planet Saturn: “And we (in California) like to think that the ring around it is the Beltway. The Beltway is the ring around Saturn. So, it really helps to bring the real world to Washington and that’s what we want to be able to do.”

The appreciative Capitol Hill TV reporter threw it back to the studio “ . . . showing once and for all that these new members already have a way with the sound bite.”

No higher praise.

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There she was on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour--introduced as a “newly elected Republican”--taking the federal government to task for botched immigration policies. (Consistent with the show’s serious mien, it subsequently ran a correction about that representative-elect reference.)

There she was at the top of an article in the insider-ish Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, jockeying for position as freshman class president no less. A Brooks aide was quoted as “stressing her career of local and grass-roots activism and her ability to overcome the odds in the bid (for the leadership post).”

If this were hesitancy, what might Brooks have done with a sure victory in her pocket?

But as her three days of ersatz Washington hoopla recede toward the political horizon, that boiling Brooks personality has cooled.

“I was really honored to be chosen as a potential congressman,” she recalled. “But I was very careful to avoid representative-elect . Maybe it’s the Italian in me--superstition, cautiousness, not wanting to jump the gun. Expect the worst and hope for good luck. It would have been much easier to walk away from this if it had been a landside (loss). Do you know what this is like? It’s like three weeks of labor. Well, I guess you couldn’t know.”

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Undaunted GOP House leaders invited her to come back for freshman orientation, but Brooks demurred, citing a need to pursue her civic duties in Rancho Palos Verdes.

She promises to run again in ’96 and plans to keep in touch with those ebullient GOP strategists who issued the original invitation to Washington, sensing in Brooks a comer who nearly knocked off a far-better-financed woman Democratic incumbent.

“I hope to maintain my ties and continue to participate in implementing the ‘Contract With America’ as a citizen and a member of my congressional district,” Brooks said this week.

Meanwhile, her attention is focused on the ongoing search for possibly suspect ballots. Brooks contends there’s evidence that some ballots seem to be linked to abandoned homes, businesses or vacant buildings. But she cautions that she’s making no accusations of vote fraud.

Just like a candidate who took a Washington victory lap with an asterisk behind her name.