Dellums, Fazio to Retire From Congress

Two of California’s longest-serving and most revered congressional Democrats--Reps. Vic Fazio and Ronald V. Dellums--announced their impending retirements Monday, further eroding California’s clout in Congress and dampening their party’s hopes of recapturing the House next year.

Fazio of West Sacramento, third-ranking in the Democratic leadership, and Dellums of Oakland, a former bell-bottomed antiwar radical, have during more than two decades in Congress become powerful insiders with invaluable connections for the state that will not be easily replaced.

“This is a huge loss for California,” said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento). “It will take us years to recover from this. We’re just going to have to cope with it.”

Their departures, along with the recent death of fellow Democratic Rep. Walter Capps of Santa Barbara, mean that three California congressional seats are now in play--two of them considered vulnerable to a GOP takeover.

Capps’ widow, Lois, announced her candidacy for her husband’s old seat Monday, enhancing Democratic prospects for hanging on to the Central Coast district against a divided Republican field.

Dellums is expected to leave Feb. 6 to take a job outside of government. Fazio has been mentioned as a candidate to succeed White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. He has spent seven months denying that rumor, which one of his aides says started at a cocktail party, but Capitol Hill sources insist that his name is very much in the mix.

At a Sacramento news conference, the 55-year-old Fazio cited personal reasons for his decision not to seek reelection next November, ending what will be a 20-year career in the House.

“I have come to a season in my life when I believe it is time to prioritize what matters most to me: the need to put aside the relentless pace of congressional service so I can give more time to family life,” Fazio said.

Colleagues said he was profoundly affected by his daughter’s death of leukemia on New Year’s Day. And last week at the funeral of Capps, who died last month of a heart attack at 63, Fazio was struck that his colleague had a career as a religious studies professor before coming to Congress, while all of Fazio’s professional life has been politics, an aide said.

“Vic and I talked about that months ago,” said Matsui, also a career legislator. “Being in Congress, dying in Congress, having seen nothing else is not necessarily a whole life for somebody.”

Life in the House is something that must be renewed every two years and the task was getting harder each time for Fazio, whose district was redrawn in 1990 with a Republican edge. Targeted by GOP leaders as a redwood they wanted felled, he held on to his seat last time by 13 points, but only after raising $2 million to do it.

A moderate with excellent relations with Republicans, Fazio was seen as a key to helping California hold its own in an often hostile congressional environment. As a ranking member of his national party, he raised large amounts of money and was a strategist in the grand plan to reclaim the House.

His increasing national presence gave him what was considered a solid chance of eventually replacing House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).

Although Fazio’s announcement came as a surprise, political insiders had been expecting Dellums would soon end his nearly 30-year career. Citing “a personal decision” that will allow him “to do other things,” Dellums leaves as the fourth-longest-serving African American.

A product of the anti-Vietnam War movement and a staunch liberal, Dellums spent much of his early career working against military spending. He rose to become chairman of the committee handling most military affairs and emerged as an unlikely consensus-builder on a panel of hawks. It was a position of great influence, but he remained ever the radical, once shunning his Oval Office access to be arrested with other demonstrators outside the White House gates in protest of U.S. policy toward Haiti.

The Republicans’ congressional campaign committee celebrated the news of both resignations with a press release headlined: “Last Democrat Out of the House Please Turn Out the Lights.”

“Senior Democrats are having a going-out-of-business sale,” Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.) the committee chairman, chortled in a statement. “As leaders in their party, Congressmen Fazio and Dellums were expected to help Democrats try to recapture the House. Their departure shows they concur with political consultant Dick Morris’ [recent statement]: ‘The 1998 races will be a disaster for the Democratic Party.’ ”

*

Dellums’ district is a slam-dunk for the Democrats, but Fazio’s has long been borderline, like Capps’s Santa Barbara seat. Political observers on both coasts expect those two races to be among the nation’s hardest-fought, along with that for an open seat created by last week’s resignation of Rep. Paul McHale (D-Pa.).

“These developments will make the House exponentially more difficult for Democrats to pick up,” said independent analyst Charles Cook. “You’ve got a string of three setbacks for Democrats. It just makes the incline that much steeper.”

Fellow analyst Stuart Rothenberg agreed the resignations “hurt the overall momentum” for Democrats. On a brighter note for the party, Capps’ widow will apparently have the field to herself on the Central Coast, where Republicans are bracing for a bruising three-way primary fight that could undermine their hopes of reclaiming a seat that had been held by the GOP since World War II.

In the 10 months her husband served before his fatal heart attack, “I saw the kind of trust that he had established” with voters of the 22nd Congressional District, Lois Capps said in an interview Monday. “That needs to be continued.”

A Santa Barbara resident for more than 30 years, Capps, 59, worked as a school nurse and played an integral part in her husband’s two congressional campaigns, both his losing effort in 1994 and his successful 1996 race.

During the latter contest, Walter Capps was nearly killed in a car crash and his wife acted as campaign surrogate during the many months it took him to recover. After his election, Lois Capps remained heavily involved in his work on Capitol Hill.

Republicans contenders for the seat are state Assemblymen Brooks Firestone of Los Olivos and Tom J. Bordonaro Jr. of Paso Robles, and former Santa Barbara County Supervisor Mike Stokes.

A special election is scheduled for Jan. 13, with a March runoff to follow, if necessary.

Times political writer Mark Z. Barabak contributed to this story from San Francisco.