Foes for Senate Wright, Birke Are Poles Apart and Proud of It

She’s on the Republican right, he’s on the Democratic left. Their only common ground is that they both like to rumble--verbally, that is.

“Sure I’m feisty,” said state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley). “I guess I browbeat everybody. I’m very careful, though. I don’t push things I don’t believe in.”

John Birke, a Chatsworth attorney and her Democratic challenger, also considers himself confrontational and combative. “What really bothers me,” he said, “is that I don’t see enough Democrats challenging the right wing of the Republican Party. I’m willing to do that.”

Indeed, he is.

Birke has been leveling sharp criticism of Wright for months. He is even waging battle in cyberspace. His campaign Web page accuses Wright of taking “close to $75,000 from the tobacco industry’s merchants of death.”

It features a picture of Wright’s smiling face that transforms into a skeletal death mask.

“I’ve had people say, ‘Isn’t that going too far?’ ” said Birke, an anti-smoking activist. “But my view is that nobody told Cathie Wright to sell a state Senate office to the tobacco companies and other special interests.”

Wright dismisses any notion that she is beholden to tobacco firms and shrugs off her opponent’s high-tech attack.

Moreover, she dismisses Birke as a political pest--unworthy of the attention of the voters in the 19th state Senate District that stretches across most of Ventura County and includes portions of the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys.

“He doesn’t impress me as Senate material,” Wright said. She recounts how Birke lashed out against business interests during his recent speech before a chamber of commerce group. “He’s got his ducks turned around.”

Wright and Birke do not see eye-to-eye on much. The two candidates cling to distinctly opposing views on most issues and, unlike in most races, have shown no interest in competing for the middle ground.

Wright, for instance, wants to ban abortions, while Birke favors abortion rights. She wants to end affirmative action programs; he is a strong proponent to keep them.

Birke wants to boost the minimum wage; she opposes any increase. He opposes the San Fernando Valley seceding from the rest of Los Angeles; she favors it. He supports gun controls, helmet laws and restrictions on smoking in public. She vigorously opposes all of those.

Wright explains her philosophy this way: “I don’t believe we are supposed to micro-manage everybody’s life: Don’t smoke. Put on seat belts. Put on helmets. This is a matter of personal decision.”

Mostly, she touts her pro-business record during her 16 years in the Legislature, ticking off her votes to cut taxes and efforts to make environmental rules and other regulations more palatable to various industries.

She bets that her conservative views will easily sweep her to reelection in a Senate district that has 21,000 more Republicans than Democrats. Wright is coasting through the race for her last term in the state Senate--a marked departure from her usual pattern of intense campaigning and fund-raising.

“I don’t believe in wasting money,” she said, “so I’m not going to run a campaign as if I were 2 [percentage] points behind.”

Birke acknowledges that he has an uphill fight.

“I know I sound quixotic and idealistic,” he said. “Ventura county is considered a Republican stronghold.”

Yet he intends to run what he calls a “confrontational campaign to engage the voters and get them thinking.”

Birke portrays himself as the candidate who will stick up for working people, not big business. He said he wants to make sure workers can earn earn a living wage, have the right to collectively bargain for better benefits, have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink.

He insists that businesses should invest more in worker training, health care and pensions.

“It is so revolting to see the Republicans prostrating themselves before the altar of business and mouthing the mantra of freeing the marketplace,” Birke said. “I believe just the opposite. I believe that unrestrained capitalism does not ensure social justice or economic equality.”

Birke, who is mounting his first campaign for public office, has a remarkably different background from his opponent, who is more than twice his age.

Born and raised in Northridge, the 32-year-old Birke graduated magna cum laude from UCLA before earning his law degree from UC Berkeley. He now practices law in Woodland Hills.

He had dabbled as a volunteer in some Democratic campaigns but has gained most of his political experience as a street activist. Sometimes it has led to a run-in with the authorities--experiences that he wears like a badge of honor.

Birke said he was detained by security guards after he joined pickets in front of the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas in 1991 during a strike by workers. The guards thought they had videotaped him shouting obscenities at casino patrons who crossed the picket line, he said. They released him a couple of hours later, he said, after realizing they had the wrong person.

Birke was arrested in 1994 in Sherman Oaks during an angry confrontation with supporters of Proposition 187, the ballot initiative to deny social services to illegal immigrants.

Birke said he was punched in the jaw and slammed against a wall, but found himself the only person escorted away in handcuffs after a teenage boy accused Birke of shoving him. Authorities ultimately declined to press charges.

During his political campaign, he accused Simi Valley police of “tailing” a racially mixed group of teenage volunteers who were carrying Democratic literature door-to-door.

In a letter to Police Chief Randy Adams, Birke also insinuated a connection between the surveillance and the chief’s “personal attitudes toward the Latino immigrant population of Simi Valley.”

That prompted a blistering response from Adams, who wrote that the letter contained “egregious allegations” that were “preposterous and potentially libelous.”

Birke delights in such responses, saying it shows his tactics are working.

“I’m not a nihilist,” he said. “I really believe to get people engaged in politics, you have to challenge them and confront people who vehemently disagree with you.”

Wright, the 67-year-old veteran lawmaker, grandmother and former Simi Valley City Council member, also has earned a reputation for a pugnacious political style.

But hers comes from aggressive, bare-knuckled maneuvers in the halls of the Capitol rather than on the streets of Simi Valley.

A cardboard cutout of an elephant displayed in her Sacramento office sums up her statecraft: “It’s Better to Be a Stomper, Than a Stompee.”

Last year, she temporarily slashed the budget of the local office of the California Department of Fish and Game, whose wardens had angered some Ventura County farmers with their enforcement of environmental laws.

“It got their attention,” Wright said. “They were being very arrogant in the way they were treating people. It brought them back to reality.”

This year, she erupted angrily when two of her neighboring lawmakers, Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos) and Sen. Jack O’Connell (R-San Luis Obispo), proposed opening a state university campus at Camarillo State Hospital.

Largely to appease her, Gov. Pete Wilson appointed a task force to study the fate of the hospital he wants closed because of extraordinarily high overhead costs. He also named her as one of the group’s leaders.

Over her objections, a consultant has recommended that the 20-member task force push a Cal State campus as the best use of the hospital’s 85 buildings spread across hundreds of rolling acres.

Wright has yet to give up. She sees herself as the protector of the hospital’s 800 patients and 1,500 employees. “I really feel that in a year or two, we are going to be very sorry that we closed the hospital,” she said.

The hardened conservative and unabashed budget cutter has a soft spot when it comes to taking care of mentally ill and disabled people.

Her advocacy dates to 1984, the year she wrote legislation that created a program to aid emotionally disturbed children in the juvenile justice system.

The Ventura Project brought together different agencies to provide counseling, medication and other support for troubled youths and keep them out of juvenile hall. The project has spread to 19 other counties, and Wright is trying to take it statewide. Wright has extended the same concepts to the treatment of emotionally troubled adults.

Most recently, Wright focused on welfare reform as one of the 21 bills she wrote and shepherded through the Legislature this past session.

Her reform bill would have enabled Ventura County officials to combine money and staff for welfare and return-to-work programs to help nudge people off the welfare rolls and back into the workplace.

Gov. Wilson vetoed the bill last week.

But the ever-tenacious Wright immediately vowed to reintroduce the bill and slap on an urgency clause to get it through the Legislature and back on the governor’s desk early next year.

“No, I don’t give up,” Wright said. “I just push harder.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

19th State Senate District

State Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) is making a bid for her final four-year term allowed under term limits. She faces Democrat John Birke in the Nov. 5 election.

John Birke

Age: 32

Occupation: Attorney

Residence: Chatsworth

Party: Democrat

Education: Bachelor’s degree in communications, UCLA; law degree from UC Berkeley

Background: A native of Northridge, Birke has been practicing law for seven years, specializing in patents, copyrights and trademarks. As a Democratic activist, he has worked on various political campaigns and volunteered his legal expertise to anti-smoking campaigns and to court challenges of Proposition 187, which cuts off benefits to illegal immigrants. This is his first bid for public office.

Issues: Birke wants to increase school funding for new buildings, after-school programs and other improvements to restore quality in California’s schools. He strongly supports affirmative action programs, hiking the minimum wage and making it easier for workers to collectively bargain for better wages and benefits, particularly in high-tech and service industries. He wants to reform HMOs and work toward universal access to medical care.

*

Cathie Wright

Age: 67

Occupation: State senator

Residence: Simi Valley

Party: Republican

Education: Two-year degree, Lackawanna Junior Business College in Scranton, Pa.; attended drafting and surveying classes at Scranton University

Background: A Simi Valley resident for 30 years, Wright was elected to the City Council in 1978 and served as mayor in 1979. She was elected to the state Assembly six times, serving from 1980 to 1992, when she was elected to the state Senate. She is one of the Legislature’s most conservative members. She wrote a law creating the Ventura Project to aid emotionally disturbed children.

Issues: Wright wants to make California more attractive to business by streamlining the process to get permits and making environmental rules more balanced between protecting public health and making them more practical. She seeks statewide expansion of the Ventura Project, a program to aid emotionally disturbed children and reduce recidivism in the juvenile justice system. She wants to continue to explore innovative ways to implement federal welfare reforms. She supports Proposition 209, the initiative to end affirmative action.

19th Senate District

District At A Glance

* Party Breakdown

Republican: 45%

Democrat: 39%

Other: 16%

*

* Ethnic Breakdown

White: 66%

Latino: 24%

African American: 3%

Asian: 7%