Seeds for Brulte’s Rise Were Planted Along the Potomac : Politics: GOP leader honed skills in low-level posts. Now, he tries to parlay that into Assembly speakership.

In the 1980s, Jim Brulte was the quintessential Washington advance man, always working behind the scenes.

As a logistics specialist for then-Vice President George Bush, Brulte helped put together an Oregon river-rafting trip and a Dodger Stadium stopover. On an official visit to Bahrain, where it seldom rains, he was the one who found umbrellas when a storm threatened to douse the Bush entourage.

It was in the fraternity of the advance team that Brulte honed his political skills, cultivated a nationwide network of contacts and developed his ambitions for political office.

As state Assembly Republican leader, he now finds himself at center stage, seeking to topple legendary Speaker Willie Brown, the San Francisco Democrat who has held onto the gavel for 14 years. With Brulte and Brown deadlocked at 40 votes apiece, the Assembly will reconvene Jan. 4 to resume the fight for what has been the second most powerful job in state government.

“I’m going to be Speaker of the Assembly,” Brulte said in an interview. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Brulte would be the first Southern Californian in 20 years--and the first Republican since 1970--to hold the speakership.

A Gargantuan figure at 6 feet 4 and 349 pounds, he has a gift for storytelling and a self-deprecating sense of humor, but he is a private person who is uncomfortable in the spotlight and whose political opponents accuse him of having a calculating side.

Unlike many politicians at his level, the 38-year-old Brulte did not ascend to statewide prominence through a succession of election victories and powerful committee assignments. Although he does not have a long list of legislative accomplishments, there is a record here.

Before he arrived in the Capitol four years ago, Brulte’s chief claim to fame was that he had secured a series of low-level political appointments in Washington. Around his Ontario hometown, one old acquaintance recalls friends joking that Brulte was going through a job a week.

His critics say he has selectively traded on his ties to the Ronald Reagan and Bush administrations while campaigning. They contend that he dropped from his resume a potentially embarrassing eight months when he was assigned to the scandal-plagued Department of Housing and Urban Development, though there is no evidence he was caught up in the mess. It appears that he embellished a stint at the Pentagon, saying he worked for an assistant defense secretary, who today cannot recall him.

More recently, the politician has been faulted for helping to approve a large pay boost for his girlfriend, Kelli Norton, while she was on the public payroll of the Assembly Republicans. Brulte’s action was cited by Assemblyman Paul Horcher of Diamond Bar as one of his reasons for defecting from the Republicans and helping deny Brulte the speakership.

As GOP leader, Brulte acknowledges missteps but says he also deserves credit for improving Republican fortunes.

“I think I’ve done a great job here. I’ve screwed up some. Maybe I shouldn’t have dated Kelli,” Brulte said. “But I think you have to look real hard to find any mistakes that I’ve made as leader and I never wanted to be Speaker.”

Even without the title, Brulte has attracted an enthusiastic following among Republicans for having thwarted Brown.

“Because of his Falstaffian appearance some people have under-estimated Brulte throughout his career and they have done so at their own risk,” said David Beckwith, onetime press secretary for former Vice President Dan Quayle who has known Brulte since the 1988 raft trip.

Admirers praise Brulte as a straight-talking, shirt-sleeve style politician who knows how to tap into his contacts to get things done, whether it is persuading Quayle to make a campaign stop or capturing state funds to reduce traffic for his Inland Empire constituents. They characterize him as a resourceful and tireless conservative who has utilized his advance man’s skills to organize Republican election triumphs across California. He is known to pick up the phone and call associates at all hours.

Brulte still finds time to slip off to movies. Having attended a private religious school as a boy, Brulte is deeply religious, tithing 10% of his salary to his church, the Community Baptist Church of Rancho Cucamonga. He is a teetotaler, he says, because he has seen the harm that alcohol can do.

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A native of Glen Cove, N.Y., Brulte moved in 1960 to Ontario, where he and his two brothers were raised. His father was an aerospace worker. His mother later became a nurse.

Brulte paints a picture of an almost idyllic childhood living on a cul-de-sac in a suburban neighborhood, playing ball, going to California Angels games, joining the water polo team and serving as student body president at Chaffey High School.

As a boy, Brulte helped his father paint the local Republican headquarters and pasted up stickers for Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign. Recalling his father, who died in 1985, Brulte fondly describes himself as “my father’s son.”

“I’d like to tell you that I had a really rebellious period in my life,” Brulte said. “But I never really did.”

The family home, where his mother lives, remains a magnet. “My mom’s house is still the center of our universe,” he said, “because you can go back there and these are the people that knew you when you were a snotty-nosed little dirty kid.”

After graduating from high school, Brulte joined the California Air National Guard and in less than two years was named the nation’s air guardsman of the year.

With the help of a local GOP activist, Brulte obtained an unpaid internship from then-Sen. S.I. Hayakawa (R-Calif.) while he was attending Azusa Pacific College. After Brulte’s graduation from Cal Poly Pomona in 1980, Hayakawa gave him a job, which included driving the senator’s mobile office around the state.

Brulte had such a strong case of Potomac fever that he took the only job that Hayakawa had for him in Washington. He laughs now in recalling that he was the only male receptionist in the Senate at the time.

Still, the job served as a launching pad for his career.

By 1983, Brulte was tabbed as executive director of the Republican Hispanic Assembly, a group set up to energize Latino voters. Tirso del Junco, the assembly’s chairman, said Brulte’s selection was not a unanimous choice.

“Everybody didn’t want Jim Brulte because he could not speak any Spanish, but I felt this guy was very well qualified,” said Del Junco, former state Republican chairman. “He knew his way around Washington.”

In March, 1985, Brulte became an assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, James Webb--a job he also listed proudly in campaign brochures.

But Webb says he has no recollection of Brulte. “He did not work directly under me,” Webb said in an interview. “Not out of my office. . . . He was not a political appointee on my staff, I can say that.”

Brulte now acknowledges that he “did not interact with Webb” and was assigned to an office outside the Pentagon, where he worked on special projects and began to do advance work for Bush.

He explained that Bush and Reagan “relied on people in agencies” as well as individuals from corporate America to buttress the White House staff.

“This is how presidents, whether you are Republican or Democrat, you cook the book,” he said. “You always reduce the number of White House staff . . . then you just detail people from agencies.”

After six months, Brulte got a post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, helping to prepare the way for a new HUD secretary. Brulte said his political patron, Del Junco, was considered a prime candidate.

During his eight months at HUD, Brulte escaped any involvement in an influence-peddling scandal that broke into public view in 1989 when he was preparing to run for the Assembly.

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After his father’s death in 1985, Brulte decided he needed to be closer to his mother and returned to California the next year.

He contacted a longtime friend and booster, June Wallin, who was chairing the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, and persuaded her to hire him part time as the local party’s first executive director.

Using his contacts, Brulte arranged for Barbara Bush to fly out for a county GOP fund-raiser, which helped pay his salary.

Today, Wallin has mixed feelings about Brulte, praising his efforts to build up the party but faulting him for showing bald ambition.

“Jim, when he first started out (at the Republican committee), I would put my trust in him whatever he wanted to do,” she said.

But the two had a falling out. Later, Wallin said, Brulte recruited a new party chairman to replace her at the end of her term, one who would be more to his liking.

Meanwhile, he juggled his party responsibilities with duties as an aide to Assemblyman Charles W. Bader and positioned himself to succeed the Pomona Republican, who was preparing to challenge popular Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Chino) in 1990.

“When I was in Washington and I knew a lot of members of Congress,” Brulte said, “(I realized) those people aren’t any brighter than I am.”

Brulte proudly recalled the strategy he devised to dissuade others from running for Bader’s seat. With the race more than a year away, he set out to raise so much money that he would appear invincible and scare off Republican opposition.

He was particularly worried about Chino Mayor Fred Aguiar, a Democrat who switched parties in the heavily Republican district. “It was going to be a war,” Brulte recalled.

Sending out targeted fund-raising letters to community leaders and opinion-makers, he tried to create the impression that he was sending mailers to everyone in the area. Brulte says his strategy worked, but Aguiar, who now represents a neighboring Assembly district, says he pulled out of the campaign before the primary for personal reasons.

Records show that much of the money for Brulte’s first campaign came from developers and real estate interests.

With that financial advantage, he easily defeated his remaining Republican opponent, Pomona Councilman Mark Nymeyer. And he beat an underfunded Democratic county probation counselor, Bob Erwin, in the general election.

During the campaign, Erwin tried without success to make an issue of Brulte’s working at HUD and dropping mention of it from his campaign brochures. “By rewriting his resume to suit his own convenience, it showed a lack of ethics,” Erwin said in a recent interview.

To this day, Brulte lists his Department of Defense post on his official biography, but not his time at HUD. When asked if the deletion was intentional, Brulte replied: “I don’t know. I mean, my resume doesn’t tell a lot of things.”

Brulte won reelection in 1992 and again in November when he overwhelmed Democrat Richard Edwards, a teacher and salesman, who raised less than $5,000 for the campaign. Brulte raised more than $1 million in 1994, passing out most of it to other Republican candidates.

His campaign war chest relies heavily on developers. Lewis Homes, a major developer, in 1992 gave Brulte $4,500 of free campaign office space, records show. Forecast Mortgage, another major development firm, chipped in use of a private jet worth $6,000 so Brulte could fly Gov. Pete Wilson to San Bernardino County.

Brulte’s personal finances are more modest. Unlike Brown, who maintained a lucrative law practice throughout his political career, Brulte has not amassed substantial holdings. Records show he owes about $200,000 on his 3,000-square-foot house in Rancho Cucamonga. He has also held onto a small condo in Arlington, Va., which he rents out.

Last year, he borrowed $16,500 from his friend and fund-raiser Diane Stone--using the condo as security--as part of a package to refinance his Rancho Cucamonga home. For a time, he said, he found himself scraping by on his $57,750 annual salary as Republican leader as he struggled to repay Stone and keep up payments on his property.

As a legislator, Brulte has gained a reputation as a pragmatic conservative who is close to business interests. He played a role in negotiating a workers’ compensation reform package signed into law last year. He authored a bill that would have established a pilot program to assist the homeless in San Bernardino County and some others, but it was vetoed. Another bill he advanced would have provided Cal Poly Pomona, his alma mater, with some horse racing revenues for equine research.

In recent weeks, Brulte has been focused on the speakership, giving him little time to develop an agenda. His list of future priorities includes overhauling the welfare system, cutting taxes, cracking down on crime and making it tougher to file frivolous lawsuits.

Some Republican lawmakers and aides say he has unified the often-fractious Assembly Republican Caucus, which has gone through a succession of leaders over the past decade.

Brulte can also be quick to direct barbs at his own members. At a welcoming dinner for GOP nominees in June, he introduced a moderate who supports abortion rights, calling her “the baby killer from Newport Beach.”

Even some of Brulte’s GOP supporters privately criticize his leadership, accusing him of relying too heavily on a small, close-knit group of advisers, especially when Brulte appeared to have the speakership within his grasp if he had won over some Democrats.

While Brown describes Brulte as “the best I’ve seen on that side of the aisle,” the longtime Speaker said Brulte’s ambition has overwhelmed his more practical instincts.

“He really wanted and thought he would be Speaker,” Brown said, “and that’s not something I’ve seen in him before and it warped his judgment.”

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Profile: Jim Brulte

* Born: April 13, 1956

* Residence: Rancho Cucamonga.

* Education: Attended Azusa Pacific College; associate of arts degree, Chaffey College; bachelor’s degree in political science, Cal Poly Pomona.

* Career highlights: Enlisted in California Air National Guard; selected 1975 “outstanding airman of the year” in the United States. Served on staff of Sen. S.I. Hayakawa (R-Calif.) and Republican National Committee. Worked at the Pentagon and Department of Housing and Urban Development and served as a member of the White House advance staff. Returned to San Bernardino County and served as aide to Assemblyman Charles Bader (R-Pomona). Elected to the Assembly in 1990, representing the 63rd Assembly District in San Bernardino County.

* Interests: Movies.

* Family: Single.

* Quote: “I’m going to be Speaker of the Assembly. It’s just a matter of time.”