Throwing a Curve in Capitol Game

Rod Pacheco’s arrival as a freshman Assembly member a year ago gave new meaning to the term political maverick.

A former prosecutor from Riverside, Pacheco came to Sacramento as California’s first Republican Latino legislator in 115 years.

It was not a perfect fit for the rookie Pacheco, then 38 and new to elective office.

He sensed that “different animal” look from fellow Republicans. He got a cold shoulder from the Assembly’s 13 other Latinos--all Democrats, some seeing him as a traitor.

Today, however, as with a man in a new suit after a season of wear, the legislative fit has much improved for Pacheco, and in some circles appears tailor-made.

Looking back over the 1997 session, he can tally a string of modest legislative successes. Legislators who were slow to adjust to him have been put at ease, he feels, “now that they have gotten to know me.”

Pacheco, a smoker, admittedly overweight, with a friendly, informal manner, seems to move effortlessly now among four separate worlds: Republican colleagues who have welcomed him; at least some Latino Democrats who find him selectively reasonable, even likable; his old pals from the Riverside County district attorney’s office; and a cherished home life shared with three young children and Rebecca, his pregnant wife.

Perhaps more importantly on the career front, the California Republican Party looks to Pacheco as the most effective voice within its ranks to start attracting, instead of alienating, growing numbers of Latino voters.

The chunky, broad-shouldered ex-prosecutor “has become the de facto spokesman for the Republican Party on Latino issues,” said Mike Madrid, the state party’s deputy political director.

Pacheco accepts the role, but only if the party takes him for the nuanced individual he is, ethnicity aside, and not a token vote-getter based on the color of his skin.

“I am not one thing,” said Pacheco in his Capitol office. Wary of a party he believes in but that he also believes has a poor record of embracing the Latino community, Pacheco said he will help the GOP reach out to Latinos but strictly on his terms.

He will give the speeches, said Pacheco. “But if they want to hold me up and say, ‘See, Hispanics should like us because we’ve got a Hispanic friend here,’ I’m not comfortable with that. I’ve made that clear to folks I’m supporting.”

So why is Pacheco a Republican in the first place?

Because, he said, he believes that Latinos, himself included, mirror Republican core values--family, church and safe streets.

Latinos, he said, are against granting tax-supported benefits to same-sex partners, “as am I,” he said. They favor severe punishment for violent crime; Pacheco sent five men to death row as a Riverside County prosecutor.

He is a practicing Roman Catholic, yet he and the church differ on abortion. While he would never condone abortion within his own family, Pacheco said, he takes an abortion rights position politically because he doesn’t like government telling people what to do.

None of that, he said, “is the Democratic Party.”

Still, he said, Democrats have done a better sales job in extending the hand of friendship to Latino voters, with glaring results.

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Studies by the nonpartisan National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Los Angeles show that, of the 19,000 Californians holding elective office, 730 are Latino and of those, just 42 identify themselves as Republicans; 310 identify themselves as Democrats. The rest are independent or of unknown affiliation in nonpartisan offices.

Of those elected to partisan legislative and congressional offices, the California numbers are also lopsided: Latino Democrats, 21; Latino Republicans, Pacheco.

Overcoming those numbers, Pacheco said, will take time. Strategies should not “be about the next election.” A Latino swing to the GOP will mean “turning around the aircraft carrier; you need three miles of ocean.”

Those long-term themes emerged at what amounted to a major coming-out event for Pacheco at the California Republican Hispanic Summit held in September in Los Angeles.

In contrast to a tough-talking Gov. Pete Wilson, who in a speech defended Proposition 187, which sought to deny public services to illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in the public sector, was Pacheco.

Latinos and the Republican Party need “to find and hold onto our commonality,” he told the gathering.

He spoke of “shared values . . . hard work . . . the ties that bind us.”

Pacheco said later that he voted for Proposition 209 but against 187, since overturned by a federal judge and now on appeal.

He opposes illegal immigration, Pacheco said, but both he and his Republican mother were “offended by the campaign for 187 . . . and felt betrayed in a sense. What are they doing, picking on us?”

However, Pacheco said, he remains a solid supporter of Wilson.

“I think he is doing a tremendous job,” Pacheco said. “We disagree on 187,” but disagreements on some things are to be expected with “everyone I can think of,” he said.

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Pacheco said he would vote against the proposed ballot initiative to severely restrict the use of bilingual education in public schools. Bilingual education of non-English-speaking schoolchildren needs reform but not through the “meat cleaver” approach of a state mandate, he said.

“I believe in local control,” he said. “Hey, I’m a Republican.”

Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), former speaker and ex-GOP Assembly leader, said Pacheco does not hesitate to voice his unorthodox opinions in private meetings of Assembly Republicans.

They are views, said Pringle, “that a lot of Republicans have not heard for a long time.”

As a Latino, Pacheco said, he is aware of the “little slights, the bigger slights” that still bedevil minority individuals, himself included.

“Three different reporters have asked me how long my parents have been in this country. That’s a stereotype that’s offensive to me and I let them know it. I live it.”

In fact, he said, both his parents come from northern New Mexico, where the two families go back “a hundred years.”

“My grandfather fought in World War I,” Pacheco said, “for the United States.”

The importance of ethnic pride, Pacheco said, is something that the Republican establishment “hasn’t figured out, but they’re trying to figure out. They’re trying to be more sensitive to it.”

They should be, he said, because California’s Latino population is expected to constitute the largest ethnic group during the next decade and jump to two-thirds of the state’s population by 2040.

Unless the state Republican Party starts pulling in Latino votes, Pacheco said, it could wind up the minority party “in perpetuity.”

Democrats say Pacheco is embarked on a lost cause.

“After Propositions 187 and 209,” said state Sen. Richard G. Polanco (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the legislative Latino Caucus, “Republicans should not be surprised by the Latino community’s wholesale rejection of their party. You reap what you sow.”

Among Latino Democrats in the Assembly, assessments of Pacheco range from criticism by the blunt-talking Diane Martinez of Monterey Park--”he sold out his roots”--to the more modulated Denise Ducheny of San Diego.

“It’s not like we can count on his vote for everything, but he’s somebody we’ve learned to work with on bills in committees,” Ducheny said, although “not everyone in the [Latino] caucus feels that way.”

Ducheny said she has attempted to include Pacheco in purely social gatherings of other Latino legislators--a potluck dinner, for example, that Pacheco attended and to which he brought a dish of flan--”my favorite dessert,” he said.

As a new assemblyman, Pacheco vigorously pursued anti-crime legislation--but promptly ran into trouble as a member of the minority party.

To his chagrin, he was removed from the Assembly Public Safety Committee when the panel was reduced in number by Democratic Speaker Cruz Bustamante of Fresno and committee Chairman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks).

Hertzberg said the rookie Pacheco was dropped in favor of more senior committee Republicans.

“But I liked his approach,” Hertzberg said. “He was a hard-driving prosecutor, a straight shooter, extremely tenacious and smart.”

Pacheco dismisses talk of rising to higher office.

“I just got here,” he said, and appears on track to stay in the Assembly at least through 2002.

He won election easily against a weak Democrat in November 1996, after a tough primary in which he went up against the district’s Republican establishment, and won by 13 points in a district that is 70% Anglo.

And yet:

“I am sensitive to Hispanic concerns because I am Hispanic. . . . I know what Hispanics go through in the society. But I don’t want . . . the only thing [known] about me to be that I am Hispanic.”