On Day 2, She’s Still Toast of Washington

As the official House photographer snapped the last shot of the freshman class of the 105th Congress early Saturday morning, the Washington press corps swarmed around Democrats Loretta Sanchez and Carolyn McCarthy, the New York congresswoman-elect whose husband was killed and son critically injured in the 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre.

The two women smiled and posed until Sanchez finally asked, “Got enough, guys?”

“The press never gets enough,” answered a voice from the crowd of cameras.

It was Day Two of Sanchez’s odyssey on Capitol Hill and the novelty of her possible election victory over conservative icon Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) had not faded a bit.

The irony is that had she listened to some of her biggest boosters, Sanchez would not even be here this week. She would not have run for Dornan’s seat, she says, but instead would have tried again for the City Council in Anaheim, where she lost a bid in 1994.

Some supporters call it tenacity, confidence, idealism or even naivete that drove this Republican-turned-Democrat to the congressional race. The reality is that the 36-year-old financial advisor is now waltzing through official Washington. She is the belle of the ball honoring the newest members of Congress, and everyone wants to get on her dance card.

There are people with rosy outlooks, and then there is Loretta Sanchez.

In her first run for office in Anaheim two years ago, she finished eighth out of a pack of 16 candidates vying for two council seats. Here is how she now describes her effort: “I didn’t have a lot of money. . . . I decided to run eight months out, which was very late in the game. But I did very well. Literally, I did very, very well.”

Who is going to argue with her now, her friends say? She is on the verge of shooting down “B-1 Bob” Dornan.

“Sometimes you attribute it to idealism,” said Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), who gave Sanchez moral and financial support for the City Council race and was the first to suggest that she run for Congress. “It’s almost like you see that twinkle in someone’s eyes. They want to [run for office] and there’s a greater goal than personal aggrandizement.”

Though outsiders may be surprised by her apparent victory over Dornan--she leads by 665 votes, with provisional ballots still to be counted--her family had expected it for years.

In fact, success was expected of all seven of the children born to Ignacio and Maria Sanchez, Mexican immigrants who came to Los Angeles in the late 1950s.

“No one is surprised in the least,” said Linda Sanchez, Loretta’s younger sister and a lawyer in Los Angeles. “Loretta is the most shining example of the work ethic that was instilled into us by our parents.”

Said their mother, Maria Sanchez: “When Loretta was young, she was always taking the lead. She was always independent. I knew something like this would happen.”

Loretta Sanchez’s parents met at a plastics and rubber manufacturing plant in Los Angeles, where her father was a machinist and her mother, then a secretary, was helping the union organize workers at the plant.

They married and had a son. As they awaited the arrival of their second child in 1960, they hoped for another son and planned to name him Loreto, after Ignacio’s father. Instead, Loretta was born.

Soon after, the family moved from Compton to Anaheim.

The Sanchezes spoke Spanish at home, but the parents tried to ensure that the children did not feel “different” because they were Latinos in a white, middle-class suburban neighborhood. Only years later was Loretta told by her mother that when the family moved in, the next-door neighbors moved out.

The three-bedroom home on Center Street was cramped. The four brothers shared one room, the three sisters shared another. And all nine family members shared one bathroom.

“I wore hand-me-downs and what Loretta sewed for me,” said Linda Sanchez, who was once voted the “best-dressed” in school.

The influence of the Sanchez parents was strong, their children said. Their mother was active in the PTA, their father coached Little League and was a Scoutmaster. Together, they pushed their children to excel in school.

“My father always told us, ‘We are not going to have enough money, so you better go out and get a scholarship,’ ” said younger sister Martha Cannady, a stockbroker in Long Beach. “I think we all did.”

Of the seven Sanchez children, six are college graduates. Loretta Sanchez won a scholarship to Chapman University, studied for a year in Rome, and earned an MBA from American University in Washington. Before this year’s election, she ran her own firm, AMIGA Advisors Inc., a financial consulting firm for public agencies and private businesses.

Maria Sanchez also furthered her own education. She came to the U.S. with a second-grade education. Now a third-grade teacher at Gates Elementary in Lake Forest, she is one course shy of earning a master’s degree.

She saw her eldest daughter’s leadership potential early on. And just as Loretta had been guided by her older brother, she would instill some of her ambition in her younger siblings.

When Linda Sanchez was weighing plans for college, for example, it was Loretta who urged her to apply to the country’s most prestigious universities--not to the local community colleges, as her guidance counselors had suggested.

“When you’re a Latina, a lot of people assume you are just going to stay close to home,” said Linda Sanchez, who attended UC Berkeley. “Loretta told me to aim for the stars.”

For her part, Loretta Sanchez was never starry-eyed about a political career.

In fact, early in her six-year marriage to Stephen Brixey III, a bond trader, her career moves were dictated by his job transfers to San Francisco and New York.

Her decision to seek an Anaheim council seat was motivated by Mayor Tom Daly, a longtime friend from the days when he was an aide to a county supervisor and she worked for the county transportation agency.

She thought about running again for the council until Becerra suggested the Dornan seat. She found out that the Anaheim neighborhoods she had carried in her first campaign also were part of Dornan’s 46th Congressional District.

Daly was not enthusiastic, he recalled.

“Frankly, I encouraged her to start at the local level,” he said.

The view was shared by Wylie A. Aitken, an attorney and major Democratic Party fund-raiser who would become Sanchez’s political guru for the congressional race.

Opinions began to change last March, when Sanchez unexpectedly won the four-way race in the Democratic primary. Then, in July, a Democratic Party pollster surveyed the district and found Dornan’s rating below 40%, dangerously low for an incumbent.

A top Democratic National Party official said he initially had doubts about Sanchez’s chances, mostly because previous Orange County candidates had traipsed through the headquarters claiming to have a shot at Dornan.

“I came into this thinking, ‘Write it off. My job is to stay focused on the seats that we can win, and don’t go crazy,’ ” the strategist, who asked not to be identified, said. But the polling numbers and Sanchez convinced the party to donate $61,000 to her campaign.

Until then, Sanchez was “considered by many to be tilting at windmills,” said Rosemary Dempsey, a vice president for the National Organization for Women, a group that would team up with labor unions, environmentalists, gay and lesbian rights groups and others to try and defeat Dornan.

Should Sanchez be certified the winner of the 46th district race, she will be learning from scratch the rough and tumble world of Washington politics.

As she ran into a House office building on Friday for one of the freshman sessions, Sanchez spoke of how she became a Democrat in 1992 because of the GOP’s “extremism . . . spearheaded, of course, by Bob Dornan.” But when a reporter asked if she voted for Clinton in 1992, she replied: “I’m not going to answer that.”

Sanchez has promised to vote against the Democrats in the House if she thinks their position is wrong. She is looking for the middle ground, even when both parties are far apart, as they were in the debate over making English the official language.

“I have no problem with making English the official language, if that’s what we want to do,” she said. “But I would have a problem saying it’s the only language we use” on such democratic necessities as election ballots.

Friends and family warn not to underestimate her.

“Loretta is like a pit bull,” said her sister, Linda Sanchez. “When she wants something, she just grabs a hold of it and won’t let go.”

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Robert Rosenblatt.