Democrats Attack Horn as a Replica of Gingrich

By CATHLEEN DECKER

Jan. 22, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

Along tree-shaded Abbeyfield Street in Long Beach, the bucolic mood is broken only by a bipartisan glare that accompanies the mention of almost every politician. Seated in his living room as dusk falls, David Odom, a 31-year-old engineer who voted mostly Democratic in 1994, scolds lawmakers twice his age for “behaving like kids.”

Down the street, Republican Carl Cowan fumes that Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich are “selling their souls to the devil” and bemoans his party’s turn to the right.

But one politician escapes their ire: Republican Steve Horn, the two-term congressman representing the 38th District, which arcs from the palm-studded coasts of Long Beach and San Pedro to the comfortable, middle-class neighborhoods of Downey.

And therein lies the rub for the Democratic Party, which has set Horn in its sights for the 1996 elections, targeting him as part of its effort to chip away at the new GOP majority in the House. He is vulnerable, Democrats claim, because he has traded in his moderate garb for a Gingrich-inspired wardrobe of conservatism, and done so in a district that is Democratic by registration.

So far, it is tough to find many in the district who buy that line as anything more than a sign of Democratic desperation.

When the Horn-as-Newt argument is put to Odom, he raises his eyebrows skeptically. “I think it’s a bit of a reach,” he said.

“I know Steve Horn,” added Cowan, a consultant who goes on to employ words rarely used in these politician-bashing days: “Steve Horn is an honest man.”

In some ways, targeting Horn is logical: His district is 35% Republican and 50% Democratic, even if it has leaned to the GOP lately. But it is also a measure of how deeply Democrats must cut into the Republican incumbency if they are to break the GOP’s stranglehold on power in Congress, given the vulnerability of some Democratic seats elsewhere in the nation.

By the Democrats’ own figuring, Horn was the least likely of all California Republicans in Congress to go along with Gingrich last year. While he voted with Gingrich 83% of the time, Democrats say, several of his colleagues sided with the speaker 97% of the time.

Horn’s positions on major issues also splay across party lines. He has always been firmly in the conservative camp on fiscal issues, but he backs abortion rights and the opportunity for gay men and lesbians to serve in the military. In 1994, he earned the enmity of conservatives for backing the federal ban on assault weapons, and he calls any GOP effort to revive that issue “crazy.”

He won his seat for the first time in 1992, one of few Republicans to prevail against the Democratic tide. Now he plays against incumbent stereotypes.

His campaign is run out of his son’s apartment, and all its principals are volunteers. He refuses to accept donations from political action committees and has about $93,000 in the bank--about a third of what Democrat Rick Zbur, his best-financed challenger and one who takes PAC money, has collected. Horn’s campaign manager and son, Steve Jr., assumes that the Republican effort will probably be outspent--perhaps by as much as 4 to 1--by the Democratic nominee.

Horn’s record has not stopped his Democratic challengers from blasting him as a Gingrich clone.

“Horn was someone who ran telling voters that he was going to be moderate and independent,” said Zbur, an environmental attorney who moved to the district last year to challenge the incumbent. “Since the beginning of the year, he has had a voting record almost in lock-step with Gingrich.”

Peter Mathews, the 1994 Democratic nominee who is making his third congressional try, offers a similar critique. “In 1995 he became a Gingrich clone,” he said.

Horn professes not to care what the Democrats, who pick their candidate in the state’s March 26 primary, throw at him.

“I hope they use that because they’re not going to gain three votes by it,” he said recently while driving across his district in his two-door sedan. “People are not stupid. They assume people are stupid. That’s the problem with them. They think they know it all and that anything they tell the voters they will believe.”

Such bluntness got Horn in trouble during his 18 years as president of Cal State Long Beach, a term marked by disputes with a faculty that branded him arrogant and distant. But in the world of politics, where positions can change with the winds, his certainty can come across as a positive.

At the Bellflower Lions Club, Horn stood before the lectern in his gray suit, slightly stooped as if he was still a professor loaded down with a satchel of term papers. One man asked his views on the flat tax, the latest snazzy idea to gain ground in GOP circles. Horn exuded skepticism.

“The flat tax seems to be everybody’s popular sort of demagogic issue,” he said. “ . . . What you have with the flat tax are a lot of people who are bringing numbers out of the air with no basis, and we really don’t know what the implications are.”

To a questioner who said the Democrats are “winning the P.R. race” by casting Republicans as willing to stiff the poor to grant the rich a tax break, Horn agreed, and expressed his own druthers--that the tax-cut dollars be used instead for deficit relief.

Horn is fully aware that his votes under Gingrich will be the main focus of the campaign. He defends the GOP’s “contract with America,” which he campaigned on in 1994, and praises Gingrich as a true reformer, even if the speaker’s rhetoric does “scare people a little.” Ultimately, Horn hopes to be judged by a simple maxim: “We made promises, and we kept them.”

Exactly, said Tricia Primrose of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We have a real clear choice between a Horn and a Democratic candidate.”

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Looking for Trends

Can freshman Republicans who stormed into the House in the 1994 elections remain in office, particularly in districts with a Democratic tilt? Will moderate Republicans who have thrived in Democratic-leaning districts overcome discontent with the GOP’s agenda? And can Republicans capitalize on their growing Southern strength to win seats that Democrats are giving up? Here is a look at three districts where these questions come into play.

California’s 38th: GOP Centrist at Risk?

Republican Steve Horn bucked the Democratic tide that swept California in 1992 to win his Long Beach-based seat, largely on the strength of his centrist image. But now, Horn’s part in the GOP “revolution” virtually assures he will face a well-financed Democratic foe.

THE DISTRICT: Includes most of Long Beach, Lakewood, Paramount, Bellflower and Downey.

White: 58%

Black: 8%

Asian: 9%

Latino: 25%

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‘92 PRESIDENTIAL VOTE

Clinton: 44%

Bush: 33%

Perot: 22%

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‘92 CONG. VOTE