On the Street, a Matter of Mutual Distrust

The biggest wave left a little after 8 in the morning, dozens of people heading south down Broadway and crossing Civic Center Drive toward the seat of local government and what they believed was history in the making. Convinced that Loretta Sanchez’s congressional victory should stand and that they had a stake in it, they weren’t about to let Bob Dornan or anyone else get in the way.

Usually when people take to the streets with an attitude like that, you wait for the sparks to fly. Especially when you know the opposition awaits two blocks away.

And so they marched--mostly Latinos and a sprinkling of whites--in a phalanx of mothers and fathers and children. They were told to expect some vocal opposition (“professional agitators,” as one Latino activist wryly put it), but their orders were clear: avoid confrontation.

A couple years ago, the crowd might well have carried Mexican flags. But mindful of the public relations nightmare that the televised flag-waving caused during the caustic debates over Proposition 187, the group that left Hermandad Mexicana Nacional under cloudy skies Saturday morning carried tiny American flags. Not to mention red, white and blue balloons.

“Good touch,” I thought. “Who could scream at someone waving an American flag?”

At the Civic Center, I got my answer right away.

“What are you going to do when America collapses?” shouted an white man, who approached the Latino marchers as if hawking wares. “There is going to be no America and what you’re fighting for today is just foolishness. America is broke. You come here thinking you have a land of opportunity, but we’re broke.”

On another day, it might have been the perfect kindling for your classic street confrontation. On this day, however, the crowd seemed more amused than insulted. “Go take your medication,” one man retorted.

While I listened to the man lecture the crowd, a Latino man came up to me and said, “Tell that gentleman talking to the crowd that my dad fought in World War II.” The man identified himself as Louie Olivos, a 57-year-old Santa Ana playwright.

I asked if he was insulted by the man’s condescending tone, and Olivos said, “No, this is America. Everyone has the power of speech, but let me have a rebuttal. He has a right to say anything he wants, but so do I.”

In another section of the courthouse plaza, a group representing the politically conservative Young Americans for Freedom talked to the Latino crowd over bullhorns. “It’s not about Bob Dornan and Loretta Sanchez,” one young man said. “It’s about voter fraud. It’s about illegal voting, noncitizen voting.”

Again, the heavily Latino crowd mostly listened with relative calm.

Perhaps emboldened by that, he continued: “It’s not about politics. If you like Mexico so much, you can return. You can always go back. How far do you think you would get if you protested in another country? You’d be shot dead. This is America. This is a democracy. But we do have rules.”

I asked one of the YAFers if he and his friends weren’t goading the crowd. No, said Brian Park of Santa Ana, who identified himself as state chairman. Besides, he said, he was miffed that the group carried American instead of Mexican flags. “They don’t show their true side,” Park said. “They’re showing their fake side.”

Later, I saw Park was standing in front of a sign and smiling. The sign read: “Welfare Recipient: Line Forms Here.”

Park crystallized for me the single unifying theme of the two sides: mutual mistrust of the other’s true agendas.

Most Latinos I talked to didn’t believe the other side’s chief concern is illegal voting, not when they see signs like the one reading: “One nation, one language, one flag.”

While conceding that some people may have voted illegally, they believe the numbers had no real impact on the outcome and that the hidden agenda is to strip a minority candidate of a seat in Congress.

“We’re tired of being kicked around,” said Latino activist John Palacio. “First, Prop. 187, then 209, then English-only, school choice, welfare reform. These have been wedge issues of us versus them. This just intensifies it. It’s insulting to say that Latinos couldn’t win fairly, that they had to cheat to win.”

Conversely, many on the other side are not convinced the Latino agenda is limited to the Dornan-Sanchez race. Glenn Spencer, who heads a group called Voices of Citizens Together and came down from the San Fernando Valley for the day, told some supporters that Mexicans want to reclaim the Southwest. “What’s going on here today is only representative of a larger issue,” he said.

He referred to the public fighting that broke out in Los Angeles over Prop. 187 in 1994 and said, “Some who injured us that fateful day are here today, but we’re back, because we’re not giving up, are we?”

“No-o-o-o-!” the crowd responded.

Standing in the middle of this bubbling caldron and holding the power to cool it is the Honorable Mr. Dornan.

After spending all day Saturday watching and listening to the two sides demonstrate their distrust of each other, I have an idea for how he can go out in style.

He said Saturday that the voter issue is bigger than his race with Sanchez, and he’s right. Yet, he reduces it to that by virtually every other thing he says. For starters, even though he cannot account for enough known illegal votes to overturn the election, he claims his “victory” over Sanchez was “trumped by fraud.”

The only reason he can’t prove his case, he argues, is that he doesn’t have enough information. Mind you, he isn’t saying that his case will be proved if he does get the information--only that it might.

If this truly isn’t about his race with Sanchez--and given that the ongoing challenge will further polarize Orange County and needlessly intrude on some innocent citizen’s lives--why not concede the race but continue the effort to rectify voting irregularities in the future?

The two sides agree on only one thing--that illegal voting is wrong.

That’s where the common ground--minus hidden agendas--lies in this squabble. Both sides would support a clean-up of the mistakes that led to that happening.

Sanchez gets the victory that most likely will never be taken from her, anyway. Dornan stops the hometown civil war and gets credit for drawing attention to a potential problem. That’s a worthy legacy, especially if the issue is bigger than any one man, right?

Meanwhile, Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi continues the investigation into possible criminal conduct growing out of the election. If he finds something, he knows what to do.

If Dornan balks, maybe his fellow Republicans can talk him into it.

“If Mr. Dornan believes he’s done a favor for the Republican Party, he’s wrong,” Soledad Alatorre, a middle-aged woman and one of the marchers, told me Saturday. Many Latinos, she said, interpret his challenge as an affront to their integrity.

Maybe that’s why Loretta Sanchez, who has gone from an Orange County unknown to a Beltway media darling, was in such an ebullient, borderline cocky mood Saturday. She knows what the Republicans haven’t figured out: namely, that Bob Dornan may be the best campaign asset she ever had.