GOP Freshman Walks Political Tightrope

The door bursts open and Andrea Seastrand blows from the bitter cold into a Washington office that smells of pine needles. She is wearing a red wool scarf, a pair of blue jeans and loafers with socks. It is not exactly congressional attire, but there will be no business conducted in the House this afternoon, it being just three days after Christmas.

She flew all night from San Luis Obispo to get back to Washington in time to resume her place in a budget standoff that has Congress at war with the president and the government shut down for the second time in two months.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich had been on the verge of striking a deal with the White House that would have had the government up and running, and put off budget talks until early January. Seastrand would have been free to spend this post-Christmas lull in her two-bedroom condo on an ocean cliff near San Luis Obispo, listening to the crashing waves.

But she and her 72 GOP freshmen comrades refused to compromise their demands for a budget balanced their way, so she gladly will rattle instead around the deserted Capitol halls and write thank-you notes in her empty office.

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This former fourth-grade schoolteacher, widowed at 49, has emerged in her first year in Congress as a most loyal and conservative soldier in the rogue army that Gingrich created, but that lately seems to be telling him what to do.

She is also one of several House freshmen to recently embark on a media campaign to distance themselves from their beloved leader, whose bleak popularity ratings have them worried about their own political futures.

“Mr. Gingrich sparked the revolution . . . but he is not the only one with the fire in his belly,” she asserts, sitting in the middle of a congressional office still enough to hear a clock tick. “The speaker may come and go, but what we see in the grass-roots of America, what we hear people saying, is bigger than the speaker, bigger than Andrea Seastrand, bigger than the 73 members of the freshman class.”

Critics say that’s a nice way of divorcing the unpopular Newt while taking custody of everything he stands for: smaller government, lower taxes, tougher rules for the poor. The Democrats are sure to use Gingrich’s tarnished image to try to stain Republicans in unsafe seats, and Seastrand may be among the most vulnerable.

“She wouldn’t be on my list of the 100 most secure congressmen,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “Gingrich will be a factor in some campaigns next year and particularly in any district that is moderate in character and which has a conservative Republican House member who has backed Gingrich solidly.”

The definition fits Seastrand to the letter. A devout Roman Catholic and staunch conservative, she is fiercely opposed to abortion, gay rights and gun control. At the “Contract With America” ceremony last year, she was one of three candidates to present the “Personal Responsibility Act” that would strictly reduce aid to welfare mothers. A framed photograph in her office shows the grinning 5-foot-1 congresswoman wrapped in the burly embrace of right-wing guru Rush Limbaugh.

But she won the seat vacated by Republican Mike Huffington by a sliver--fewer than 2,000 votes in a moderately conservative district that includes San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. There, where Bill Clinton won a 41% plurality in 1992 and Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans, Seastrand will again face the Democrat who nearly beat her--Walter Holden Capps, a professor of religion who endorses abortion rights and gay rights and stricter environmental regulations.

Capps dismisses Seastrand’s efforts to delicately distance herself from Gingrich. “That’s a difficult position to defend. She voted with Newt Gingrich 96% of the time. Gingrich came to the district and campaigned for her. . . . She has no voice of her own because the Gingrich philosophy so dominates what she says,” said Capps.

Sabato sees a spirited rematch. “Capps is a strong candidate. Given his showing last time, he will be well-funded,” Sabato said. “The Republicans have problems there. She has to be concerned about her future.”

Which is likely the reason Seastrand has joined one of the so-called freshman “tiger teams” that are going to the news media with this mission: dissolve the impression that they blindly follow Gingrich-the-man while holding ever tightly to the mission he crystallized.

It is a political tightrope for the freshmen trying to walk it, Seastrand among them. She lauds the speaker as “brilliant,” yet does not want to be seen as his clone. She is hard pressed to come up with examples where she disagrees with his thinking, yet does not want to be regarded as his unquestioning apostle.

“Just because I admire him . . . does not mean I should be morphed into him, because I am still an individual,” the congresswoman says. “People will talk about the freshman class being Newt’s clones, yet in the last week supposedly we are telling him what to do.”

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At 54, Seastrand is no stranger to what might appear to be conflicting images. Her husband’s death from colon cancer in 1990 left her alone to finish raising her son and daughter, now 26 and 23. Her stand on welfare reform is one of the harshest--to deny payments to teenage mothers, end benefit increases to welfare mothers who have additional children and cut off benefits altogether after two years.

“It’s not about government,” she says. “It’s about people helping people at home.”

Saying it “didn’t pass the mother’s test,” she resisted the president’s decision to send troops to Bosnia. Yet she wants to overturn the federal ban on the possession and sale of military-style assault weapons here at home. “It’s not the gun,” she says, “it’s the person who pulls the trigger.”

Seastrand sees no contradiction. She regards herself as a consistent, solid supporter of the GOP revolution--even when that means being the only Republican woman in the California delegation.

Looking back on 1995, she is pleased with Year One: “I’ve kept my promises.”