Sanchez Receives a Hero’s Welcome

The cheers and the nonstop standing ovations continue to delight U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove).

And at the California Democratic Party convention here this weekend, where top party officials put a spotlight on the young freshman congresswoman, fellow Democrats could not get enough of her.

They stopped her as she moved through the halls of the Sacramento Convention Center. They sought her autograph. Others posed beside her for a keepsake snapshot, as if she were a California treasure.

No one else drew this level of spontaneous adulation from the party’s hard-core following--not Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, not Party Chairman Art Torres, not U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein.

She pushed former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan out of a job.

And they love her for it.

In the next-to-last speech at the endless Saturday morning convention session, she fed off the energy coming from the crowd. No matter that most of the nearly 2,000 delegates had drifted away before the freshman congresswoman took the stage. The 400 remaining were revitalized merely at her introduction. They rose as she walked to the podium in a red power suit.

“If I’d known it was this good I would have come more often here,” she said, before turning to her text and jabbing at Dornan once again.

“I can’t wait for 1998, because the only thing better than beating Bob Dornan once, is beating Bob Dornan again,” she said. “Of course, the next time he’ll probably blame his loss on space aliens and probably subpoena NASA.”

It was a reference to Dornan’s asking the U.S. House of Representatives to overturn Sanchez’s election, while serving subpoenas on dozens of people and organizations in Orange County and contending the balloting was tainted through voting by noncitizens and other irregularities. Secretary of State Bill Jones has said that some 721 people registered to vote before they completed the citizenship process, and that 442 of them voted in the November election. A spokesman for Jones said the secretary of state has not yet been able to determine the number of illegal votes that were cast in the 46th Congressional District that Sanchez now represents.

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In explaining the high-profile role for Sanchez at the convention, Torres said that the party wants to highlight the three seats taken from the Republican congressman this past fall. Thus, he persuaded Sanchez to come to Sacramento.

“We want to buttress her support,” he said. “It is important we make sure the Republicans know we are behind Loretta Sanchez in this [current] fight to hold onto her seat and make sure they know we are not abandoning her in 1998.”

To that end, Sanchez, 37, spoke twice to the convention Saturday. Only one other member of the California congressional delegation spoke at all to the full gathering: U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Walnut Creek), who also took over a Republican seat in November.

Sanchez’s 20 hours in Sacramento were a whirlwind. Arriving about 6:30 p.m. Friday, she made the rounds of the caucuses: the Latino Chicano group; the Young Democrats; the labor caucus; the business and professional group. The only break was a 10 p.m. stop for dinner at the Hyatt.

By 8 a.m. Saturday, she was co-hosting a breakfast with Tauscher, then it was on to the morning address and in the afternoon, a short speech to the convention lunch.

“She had what it took to bring down the dragon,” was the way Mark Takano of Riverside, who was chairing the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus, introduced Sanchez Friday night to the group.

To each of the caucuses, she delivered an off-the-cuff tailored message. Sometimes the themes overlapped.

“The face of the future is our face,” she told the Latino caucus. “It has begun to show up in the Assembly, the Senate, the Congress and it is soon to show up in the White House.”

She asked Asians to turn out in force at a congressional hearing in Orange County on April 19 to show that “when you attack one [minority group], you attack us all.”

She told the business and professional group to “work in the Democratic Party” and to not to not yield to the GOP on such issues as capital gains tax cuts, job creation and access to capital.

She told the Young Democrats that while she wasn’t going to make it to the White House, “one of you is going to be our president and it will be just as easy for it to be a woman as a man.”

In between, she mixed in some high-level political strategy. State Senate President Bill Lockyer stopped her outside the Young Democrats’ caucus Friday night, telling her he is trying to persuade former Orange County Assemblyman Tom Umberg to run against Senate Minority leader Rob Hurtt (R-Garden Grove). Hurtt’s district overlaps Sanchez’s district.

“He could beat Hurtt,” Lockyer said.

“I would love to see it,” Sanchez said. “We could have a strong ticket top to bottom” in 1998.

Umberg, who is a lawyer in private practice, acknowledged Lockyer has been urging him to run but said right now he is “happy practicing law.”

Later, Sanchez acknowledged the heady feeling that comes with having an auditorium cheering the mention of your name.

“It’s pretty neat,” she said. “I am having fun.”

But to the crowds, she concentrates on delivering the Democratic message.

“I realize that I will probably always be the woman who beat Bob Dornan, but that victory was not about Bob Dornan and Loretta Sanchez,” she said on Saturday. “By winning Orange County, we have proved that people everywhere reject the right-wing extremism of the Republican Party. My victory over Bob Dornan was the ultimate validation of the core values of the Democratic Party.”