O.C. GOP: Setting Sights on the State

Out on Orange County’s hot political blacktop, Republicans play hard and for keeps. No sissies or whiners allowed. Payback is hell.

Just ask Todd R. Thakar. Back in 1992, the Republican attorney had the temerity to challenge state Sen. John R. Lewis, a GOP fixture in America’s conservative heartland. Thakar, a moderate, was warned to stay out. He ran anyway and lost big.

Lewis didn’t forget Thakar’s impudence. Two years later, the Orange conservative engineered a measure of revenge, thwarting confirmation of Thakar’s mother, a wealthy GOP donor, to the California State University board. Concluded a Republican colleague: “Lewis is mad at the kid.”

Such hardball tactics are de rigueur in Orange County, where a cadre of conservatives so dominate politics that outsiders stand virtually no chance. Foes call them a machine, the “Orange County Mafia,” and bitterly assert that their methods often cross the line, restricting political participation to handpicked loyalists. But even their harshest critics can’t dispute their success.

Now, these conservative forces are extending their influence throughout California, providing the muscle for a Republican resurgence and branding the state GOP with a mix of free market philosophy and conservative social values. Already, many analysts describe the Orange County squad as perhaps the most potent force in state politics today.

Just look at the people who occupy California’s political power slots.

There is Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, whose tenacity and ambition finally landed him the Assembly’s top job--the speakership--this year. In the state Senate, manufacturer and evangelical Christian Rob Hurtt, also representing Garden Grove, is the upper house’s GOP leader and, with Pringle, commander of Republican strategy heading into November’s election. Michael J. Schroeder of Irvine, an attorney and aggressive conservative activist, is expected to ascend to the chairmanship of the California Republican Party next year.

“Right now, the center of the political universe is Garden Grove,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the Claremont Graduate School. “It’s quite astounding. They are driving the political and policy agenda of this state.”

Orange County, birthplace of anti-illegal immigrant Proposition 187 and the backbone of the volatile school voucher initiative, also is an invaluable gold mine for Republican candidates up and down California.

Hurtt, together with Irvine banking scion Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. and a few like-minded Southern California friends at the free-spending California Independent Business PAC, has given $8.6 million to GOP candidates and causes since 1991.

Their reach has been wide. Almost two-thirds of the Republicans in the Assembly have received significant financial help from Hurtt or the political action committee, which has become a pillar of the religious right. In the state Senate, half the Republicans have benefited from their largess.

And there is no secret about their ultimate goal--control at all levels of the political pyramid.

Already, they have torpedoed the Democrat flotilla that ruled the Assembly for a quarter of a century. Next in the periscope is the Senate, which conservative lawmakers hope to control by 1998.

If they succeed, California could become a very different place. Among their top priorities are cutting regulations on business, slashing environmental laws, pushing for school choice, reforming welfare, slicing taxes and shrinking government.

“The goal is to pass the Republican agenda,” Schroeder said. “That’s what this is all about.”

Schroeder and his cohorts are confident. And no wonder. Their formula was hugely successful in Orange County, where Democrats have been virtually routed from office.

In the post-Watergate year of 1978, Democrats actually had a slight edge in registration. But today, Republicans outnumber them 52% to 32%--more than 230,000 voters. That huge margin makes Orange County the great GOP hope in statewide elections.

“We are the anchor to the right of the California ship of state,” said Thomas A. Fuentes, the county’s ebullient GOP chairman. “We add balance. . . . We challenge Willie Brown in San Francisco. We challenge the philosophical leftists in West Los Angeles.”

The voter registration bulge gives the GOP a stranglehold on elective offices in Orange County, where Democrats don’t hold a single federal, state or county post other than a few judgeships. The last elected Democrat was Robert L. Citron, the erstwhile county treasurer-tax collector whose risky investments brought on the the county’s 1994 bankruptcy. In the county’s 31 cities, four of every five council members are Republicans.

But if success comes at a price, then Orange County conservatives are paying it.

They have been roiled by a disturbing scandal involving the race to replace Doris Allen of Cypress, the longtime Orange County lawmaker who was recalled after she outraged GOP colleagues by using the Assembly Democrats to seize the speakership last year.

In March, a grand jury indicted Allen’s replacement, freshman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach), on four felony counts connected to his election. Baugh was further tainted by a Republican scheme to put a ringer Democrat, Laurie Campbell, on the ballot to ensure a GOP win. And though his victory gave Pringle the GOP loyalist he needed to become speaker, the imbroglio has nipped at the Assembly leader’s heels.

Even some Republicans are griping about Orange County’s Republican elite:

* Party leaders have been criticized repeatedly for putting the squeeze on moderate Republicans who dare challenge conservative incumbents. The message is typically short and direct--drop out or face certain defeat and political purgatory.

* Outsiders who dare to run can see funding sources frozen. Others complain that they became pariahs in Republican social circles. Some say they faced threats of a business blackball, although there are no documented examples of it being carried out.

* Loyalty is a key litmus test, and mavericks who stray are punished mightily. Orange County was the seedbed for successful recalls last year against Allen and former Diamond Bar Assemblyman Paul Horcher, who helped Willie Brown retain the speakership even after Republicans captured an Assembly majority in the 1994 election. County activists also helped lay the groundwork for a stealth campaign in March’s GOP primary that toppled Brian Setencich (R-Fresno), Allen’s successor, who also won the speakership with the help of Democrats.

* The county is increasingly cosmopolitan, but minorities and women often find themselves out of luck. Women hold two of the 30 or so elective county, state and federal posts.

The only minority lawmaker is Rep. Jay C. Kim (R-Diamond Bar), a Korean American who owes his election more to voters in San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties than to those in Orange County.

To some longtime Republicans--including a few who have served for years on the Orange County Central Committee--the leadership is out of touch.

“They represent the religious right wing of the Republican Party,” said William A. Dougherty, an ex-Marine colonel and committee member. “They are a very small and well-organized group. They are all antiabortion and super pro-business. I am pro-business, but these guys want to go back to the days of the robber barons.”

Conservative standard-bearers such as Schroeder aren’t buying all the bluster.

“The people complaining about Orange County Republicans are the same types who gripe about the Yankees or Atlanta Braves,” he said. “They don’t like ‘em for one simple reason: They win a lot.”

*

Mom, apple pie and Orange County conservatism. It seems the county has been the most Republican of places since its days as a citrus center on the two-lane road from Los Angeles to San Diego.

Political extremists have regularly captured the headlines, coloring the view from outside.

Before Mickey Mouse, the Ku Klux Klan dominated Anaheim; in 1924, klansmen swept all the City Council seats, held sway at the Police Department and mounted the largest white supremacist rally in California history.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, Orange County was a focal point of the John Birch Society and its authoritarian agenda. The county also spawned fervent anti-communists such as John G. Schmitz, the former state and federal lawmaker who denounced Richard Nixon’s trip to China as a betrayal.

But the county’s rank-and-file brand of Republicanism is hardly so extreme. Forged during the development and aerospace boom that began sweeping the Southland in the 1950s, Orange County lured Midwestern Republicans and moderate Southern Democrats along with refugees from the urban tension of Los Angeles County.

They came for stable neighborhoods and good schools, to rear families or seek a fortune. Their goals were comfort, not ideological confrontation. Many embraced the small government philosophies of libertarianism.

Orange County “evolved as a place that was politically conservative but tolerant,” said Kevin Starr, state librarian and a California historian. In fact, the Democrats actually got a toehold in the late 1970s. They held five Orange County seats in the Statehouse and two in Congress. Three of the five supervisors were Democrats. And registration stood 45.8% Democrat, 45.5% Republican in 1978.

It was a painful embarrassment for the GOP, but it didn’t last long.

Proposition 13, the watershed 1978 property tax measure, shifted the tide back toward conservatism. The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, who launched both his successful presidential campaigns in Orange County, cemented the region’s Republican rebirth.

The battle since has been between dueling establishments within the GOP, pitting the social conservatives against developer-backed moderates who long dominated the Board of Supervisors.

Time and again, conservatives prevailed, tapping a loyal band of like-minded constituents who vote more dutifully than moderates. Today, nearly every Republican holding an elective state or federal office in the county is a devout conservative. They control the county GOP Central Committee and are attempting to extend their grasp to the Board of Supervisors. School boards are being targeted by conservative Christian candidates.

Moderate Republicans, meanwhile, have flopped in Orange County.

“To a certain extent, we have become road kill,” said Mark Ishimatsu, Orange County president of the moderate California Republican League. “We’ve been flattened because we couldn’t motivate people to get up and vote. Conservatives have a fire in the belly that moderates don’t.”

*

So who are these guys anyway?

Well, for starters, they’re mostly guys. And white. And friends.

The core of the county’s conservative Republican leadership is a tightknit pack of lawmakers, some of them old college chums, devoted to the practice of politics and the conservative cause. Though hardly the monolith that opponents picture, they are indisputably close.

Pringle, Lewis, Fuentes, state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) and U.S. Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) have worked together for years, united as much by collegiality as a shared ideology. With his money and relatively new entry to the political universe, Hurtt has an orbit all his own, but the gravitational tug of conservatism unites him with the rest.

Many got their start in Young Americans for Freedom, the party’s brashly conservative kiddie corps.

To Stu Mollrich of Newport Beach, a veteran GOP political consultant, the political precept that rules in Orange County can be traced to the swampy campus politics of the Vietnam War days in the 1970s.

“The game was ‘Beat the Left,’ and it was almost an obsession,” said Mollrich, who was a member of YAF. “They were the guys in the black shirts, and we wore the white shirts. Some of the guys have never gotten beyond that.”

Mollrich said politics in Orange County today is largely driven by “the whole mentality of good guys versus bad guys. If you are a friend, they will do anything for you, and if you are an enemy, they will destroy you. And you can become an enemy in an instant.”

Harriett M. Wieder, a former supervisor who broke ranks with the GOP in 1992 to support Bill Clinton, became such a foe. Today, she bristles over a “fraternity mentality” among Orange County’s Republican leaders.

“They have no respect for the decision-making process,” she said. “It’s their way or no way.”

Time and again, the label “true believers” is attached to the conservative leadership by friends and foes alike. That’s fine with Fuentes, who believes that their lock-step approach to core conservative issues illustrates a “mutual commitment to continuing the Reagan revolution.”

It hasn’t been a bloodless revolution. Both Lewis and Pringle have been wounded by legal problems during political battles.

Lewis got into trouble while serving as the tactical brains of the conservative legislative klatch known in the 1980s as the “cavemen.” In 1989, a Sacramento grand jury indicted him on forgery charges for sending out scathing campaign letters bearing the phony signature of Reagan. Lewis contended that the case was political, arguing that Democratic Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp selectively prosecuted him but ignored dirty tricks by Democrats. A state appellate court threw out the indictment on the grounds that Lewis was not seeking financial gain.

Since then, Lewis has worked to build a policy wonk image, taking on the powerful South Coast Air Quality Management District and other bastions of big government.

Pringle, too, has evolved since his first term, when he got a reputation as a rigid ideologue and was hounded by scandal.

During his 1988 triumph, the county GOP posted uniformed guards at heavily Latino polling places in Santa Ana with signs warning illegal immigrants not to vote. Democrats complained that the guards helped Pringle by intimidating legitimate voters.

In a subsequent civil lawsuit, Pringle first took the 5th Amendment and then repeatedly displayed an inability to recall events when he began answering questions. The suit was settled out of court for $400,000.

But as a top Republican leader, Pringle has shown a ready grasp of the Capitol’s nuances, the ability to control the reins of power and an increasing willingness to compromise.

Pringle and Lewis have long tried to put the scandals behind them. But the indictment of Baugh has foes crowing anew.

“What’s wrong with them is what’s wrong with every political machine,” said Howard Adler, a former county Democratic Party chairman. “They think they’re above the law and can get away with anything.”

Though few suggest this is Tammany Hall, many outsiders compare the Orange County bunch to the liberal Democratic powerhouse created by Reps. Howard L. Berman of Panorama City and Henry A. Waxman in West Los Angeles, or the one in San Francisco created by the late Rep. Phillip Burton and inherited by Mayor Willie Brown.

“They certainly play hardball politics in Orange County, but no harder than any other one-party operation does,” said Tony Quinn, a Sacramento-based Republican political analyst. “If you crossed Phil Burton in the old days, they took after you and ran you out of office. The Orange County group seems to be more of a bugaboo, because it’s a right-wing group, as opposed to a left-wing group.”

Fuentes flatly denies all notions of a machine.

“It is not that we get together, it is not that. It is just that we are of one heart,” he said. “The people who are in leadership, as individuals, are driven by the same values, the same commitment to cause, just like all those soldiers on the battlefield in the movie ‘Braveheart’; and they are prepared to die for it if they have to.”

*

On election day in Orange County, the drill is always the same.

They gather the troops at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel in Costa Mesa to rally them into action against the Democrats. The effervescent Fuentes runs the show. He starts by introducing himself and then points to another person. That person must state his or her name and then point to another person who can vouch that he or she is, indeed, a registered Republican. The ritual continues until the last person has been introduced and vouched for.

“It’s kind of creepy,” said one party member. “There is a tone set right then. You better be one of us. Infiltrator beware.”

There is indeed a style, a set of mores in the Republican world of Orange County. But loyalists such as Fuentes see nothing but good, decent democracy in action. Just look at the participation, he says.

Sixty volunteer clubs. Sixty! There’s the 400 Club, the Silver Circle, the ballyhooed Lincoln Club, the many units of the Republican Women Federated. There are also ethnic clubs--the Republican Hispanic Committee, the Iranian-American Republican Club, the Asian-Indian Republican Club. Then there’s Young Republicans, College Republicans, Teenage Republicans.

Fuentes contends that the enormous involvement demonstrates a devout loyalty to the Republican cause, a love of party that is stronger perhaps than anywhere else in the country. “That emotion doesn’t resonate” elsewhere, Fuentes said, “the way that it does here.”

It extends to all aspects of life--business, community, society. The Republican Party embodies Orange County, Fuentes concluded. “What is civic involvement? What is philanthropic, charitable, civic, community leadership? It is the Republican Party of Orange County.”

This, after all, is a land where those who go against the party are politely shunned--and sometimes not so politely--on the cocktail circuit

Kathryn G. Thompson, a Republican developer and former Lincoln Club member who outraged party leaders in 1992 by backing Clinton, won’t talk about her ostracism. But it’s no secret that she does not get as many invites these days on the social circuit.

Democrats need not even try. Tom Umberg of Garden Grove, the county’s last Democratic legislator, was always bemused by the slights, particularly in 1991 when the county threw a huge victory parade for troops returning from the Desert Storm campaign in the Persian Gulf. Republican politicians were welcomed in droves. Umberg, an Army reservist called back into active duty during the conflict, wasn’t invited.

Then there is the religious right. There’s an old joke about how you can tell the difference between the GOP Central Committee members in Los Angeles and Orange counties. When members walk into meetings in Los Angeles, they carry the Wall Street Journal. In Orange County, they’ve got the Bible.

Jokes aside, conservative Christians are a political force in Orange County. The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is based here. So is Ahmanson, a wealthy philanthropist and major contributor to conservative Christian organizations and politicians. The county GOP Central Committee is packed with religious conservatives. Abortion is a litmus test in almost every race.

More than anything, the religious right has proved to be a willing election army for staunchly conservative candidates. And some volunteers fight rough if they believe the end justifies the means.

Assemblywoman Marilyn C. Brewer, a Newport Beach Republican and the Orange County delegation’s only abortion rights supporter in the Statehouse, endured getting a particularly overt message. Amid her successful 1994 campaign, someone stuffed an early-term fetus into her mailbox.

It is not clear who planted the fetus or where it came from.

“There is a faction out there,” Brewer said, “that is way over the edge.”

*

The practice of politics is like a marathon--you don’t want to burn your reserves too early. That, members of Orange County’s GOP elite say, is what drives them to warn against challenging incumbents. An “unnecessary” campaign wastes money better spent to defeat the Democrats, Fuentes explains. “We don’t have the luxury of internecine warfare.”

But challengers see it differently. In their view, such methods are exclusionary and end up squeezing qualified, deserving people out of the democratic process.

“They basically have closed down the party to anyone who isn’t like them,” said Eileen Padberg, a political consultant long at odds with Orange County GOP leaders.

Some prospective challengers are chased off by the scare tactics. Others buck the pressure and run. Most are moderates, many of them women. All have failed, among them Evelyn R. Hart.

Hart, a former Newport Beach mayor and council member, challenged then-Assemblyman Gil Ferguson in 1988, despite warnings from Fuentes to drop out.

“He told me I was off base, that the party stands behind the incumbent,” she said.

The toughest talk came after her loss. As Hart recalls it, Fuentes told her: “You are washed up in Orange County. You have thrown away your future.”

Some challengers say party leaders have threatened their businesses. In 1992, former Superior Court Judge Judith Ryan waged a bitter GOP primary fight against Rep. Robert K. Dornan, the colorful and conservative congressman from Garden Grove. Fuentes, she said, told her to get out of the race, threatening to “ruin” her court mediation business and her husband’s law practice if she didn’t.

Fuentes dismisses Ryan’s charges as “ridiculous,” but does not deny that he tries to dissuade people from running against GOP officeholders. “I am staunchly loyal to incumbents,” Fuentes said. “I make no excuses for that.”

“I told him I thought this was America, where people have a right to run for any office they want,” Ryan said. “I was taken aback.”

Ryan ran anyway, but lost. As for the alleged threats, they were never carried out.

When Brewer first ran for her Assembly seat in 1994, Fuentes tried to talk her out of the contest. Two antiabortion candidates were the favorites of the GOP elite.

“He was not happy,” she recalled. “He suggested that I use my [campaign] money to go shopping, to remodel my kitchen or take a nice trip.”

Brewer won the race. And in the last two years, she has been embraced by colleagues as a “team player.” Though disturbed by Fuentes’ tactics at the time, Brewer feels differently now. “I failed to recognize, as a political neophyte, that Tom was just doing his job.”

In some instances, party leaders seem ready to exact revenge for even the tiniest infractions.

When local business executive Peter Swan publicly criticized county treasurer candidate John M. W. Moorlach in early 1994 for his remarks about the county’s crumbling finances, Fuentes did not forget. Later that year, Fuentes helped draft a party loyalist to challenge Swan for his seat on the Irvine Ranch Water District board. Swan won, but Fuentes made his point.

“Peter Swan is an ultra-liberal, tax-and-spend Clintonite,” Fuentes said, “a Republican in disguise.”

When colleagues of public relations executive Bob Nelson began working for the GOP convention in San Diego, Fuentes torpedoed the deal. After all, Nelson was a prominent “Republican for Clinton” in 1992, “a traitor to the Republican Party,” Fuentes concluded.

No stone is left unturned. Last year, it became apparent to the conservative elite that several Orange County chapters of the California Republican Assembly, an organization that gives bellwether endorsements in GOP primaries, were firmly in the clutches of less conservative opponents. So they mounted a hostile takeover. Staff members, family and friends flooded the annual election meeting of the Corona del Mar chapter, voting in a slate of loyalists.

Or consider the campaign high-wire act Lewis performed in 1991 when he was first elected to the Senate. It was a special election, so under those rules of engagement Democrats and Republicans all vote in the same primary.

Rumors swirled that moderate Republican challenger Dana Reed, a Newport Beach attorney, might snag enough Democratic votes to pose a serious challenge. Anxious Lewis staffers surreptitiously phoned likely Democratic voters and urged them to cast ballots for a small-fry Democrat who would not be a threat. Lewis sailed to a comfortable victory and Reed finished fourth.

Westminster Mayor Charles V. Smith, campaigning for a supervisor’s seat this November, is the latest to wrestle with the GOP power brokers. Dubbed a “Big Government Republican” by opponents, Smith is irked that the leadership gave its nod to Mark Leyes, a Garden Grove councilman who is his opponent for the 1st District supervisorial seat. Until 1995, Leyes was a Democrat. He is also Pringle’s longtime best friend.

“The ultimate goal of the leadership is control,” Smith said. “They control the Assembly, and now they want to control the Board of Supervisors. What they want are good soldiers . . . who will take orders without questions.”

Some of the biggest fights occur over campaign money. Without cash, it is impossible to finance a modern campaign. And without the endorsement of key GOP leaders such as Pringle or Hurtt, it is nearly impossible to get the funds.

“Those without the endorsements cannot raise money,” said consultant Gerry Pierson of Santa Ana. “People who may support them normally find out the gang is going the other way, and they sit on the sidelines because they don’t want to get sideways with the leadership.”

Cypress Councilwoman Cecilia L. Age saw that in her campaign this March to challenge Baugh in the 68th Assembly District. Even with felony indictments pending against Baugh, several previous supporters did “not want to have problems with the GOP leadership in the Legislature: Curt Pringle and Rob Hurtt.”

“I don’t blame them,” she said. “If you give money to a candidate that they are not backing, you could lose more than it’s worth.”

Democrats say Hurtt and Pringle also are intent on draining the pool of campaign money controlled by influential Sacramento lobbyists. Those contributions have helped keep Democrats in power. Now the Republicans want it to be their exclusive watering hole.

Pringle worked to that end recently by dabbling on the other side of the aisle in the hotly contested fight for the 56th Assembly District seat in southern Los Angeles County.

Republicans worried that the more conservative of two Democratic contenders, Michael Vicencia of Lakewood, could present a formidable challenge to the GOP nominee. Using his new clout in Sacramento, Pringle worked quietly to dry up contributions that lobbyists promised Vicencia.

Vicencia lost, and his consultant, Gale Kaufman, blamed it in part on the efforts of Pringle, who cost them from $20,000 to $30,000 in donations. “It demonstrates a level of sophistication on the part of the Republicans I had not expected,” Kaufman said. “It was impressive.”

Statewide forays by Orange County conservatives aren’t new.

Lately, a political action committee with ties to Orange County conservatives has been wading into City Council campaigns in Stockton. Democrats theorize that it is planting seeds to produce a challenger for Democratic Assemblyman Michael J. Machado’s seat. Citizens for Responsible Representation, which got money from Pringle and Hurtt last year, also paid for a series of radio attack ads against state Sen. Patrick Johnston (D-Stockton), who is being targeted by Hurtt.

Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Matt Lait and Gebe Martinez.

NEXT: Orange County money flows to “think tanks” that are reshaping Republican thought in Sacramento.