House Vacancy Sparks Republican Feud

Like most family feuds, this one is messy and nasty, and not really about the subject at hand.

Republicans--cherishers of the vaunted 11th Commandment, the one that says don’t speak ill of another GOPster--are clashing along California’s Central Coast about, of all things, phone calls.

These were powerful phone calls, to be sure. Phone calls placed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), former President Gerald Ford and others, all to entice Assemblyman Brooks Firestone to run for the congressional seat made vacant by the death of Democrat Walter Capps.

The phone calls have sparked outrage among some Republicans in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. In the party that wants to get government off its back, there’s nothing quite like a little meddling from afar to get the juices flowing.

“We don’t need to be told who should represent us,” said a fund-raising letter sent out on behalf of one of the two other candidates, former Santa Barbara County Supervisors Chairman Mike Stoker.

Granted, there is some real consternation about long distance candidate selection. But as in any family fuss, much of the heat and fury stems from what is just below the surface--in this case, the continuing clash between conservative and moderate Republicans, each vying for supremacy as the 1998 elections approach. So blistering is the battle that many Republicans are assuming the worst about the Jan. 13 special election to fill Capps’ seat.

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“The unfortunate thing is that we basically could see a murder-suicide come out of the Republican campaign,” said political consultant Kevin Spillane. “Everyone is trying to make this into a precursor for what will happen in the general election in 1998. . . . If there’s a divisive, nasty primary, the Democrats could win the seat.”

Leave it to politicians here, in the 22nd Congressional District, to try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For six years, it has been a killing field for political aspirations. First the two-decade incumbent Republican, Robert J. Lagomarsino, was thumped into retirement--not by a Democrat but by one of his own, the moneyed Michael Huffington.

Then, two years later, Huffington abandoned ship to challenge U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). His successor, Andrea Seastrand, barely defeated Democrat Capps in that boom Republican year, but Capps came back in an outlandishly nasty 1996 race to top Seastrand.

A few lesser-known Republicans were planning to challenge Capps in 1998 when the former religious studies professor suddenly died. Chaos erupted.

Firestone was running for lieutenant governor when the phone calls started coming. An entreaty came from Gingrich, whose phone call “startled” him, Firestone said. U.S. Rep. John Linder of Georgia--head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, whose poll of the district found Firestone to be the most popular Republican around--also made a call.

Still, Firestone, a political moderate, refused to run. Then, after a few days of telephonic softening by local and national figures, Republicans sent in the closer--a Firestone friend for 30 years, former President Ford.

“Brooks, you have a responsibility to do this,” Ford told Firestone. Moved by Ford’s sentiments and believing that Republicans had cleared the field for his candidacy, Firestone jumped in.

Conservatives, including members of the California congressional delegation, scorned the national types for meddling. Conservative Assemblyman Tom Bordonaro Jr. (R-Paso Robles), whose seat encompasses more than half of the congressional district, leaped into the race. Not willing to burn bridges, he said in an interview that it was “just an oversight” that Firestone got the calls. “They just picked the wrong horse to clear the field,” he said.

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Firestone, a bit shellshocked by now, contends that the phone call furor is “manufactured anger” obscuring the reality that most of the entreaties for his candidacy came from local activists, not long distance courtiers. “There’s a group on the far right, and I’m a centrist and there is an element of that in this,” he said.

Bordonaro says that Firestone’s social views--which include support for abortion rights--are central to the campaign. “There are controversial votes out there,” Bordonaro said.

The bloodshed is not expected to abate even with the specter of handing the election to the Democratic candidate, Capps’ widow, Lois. After all, Republicans very nearly lost the governorship of New Jersey a few weeks back, in large part because of conservative animosity toward incumbent Republican Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate.

The race is certain to draw national attention, in part because the district flip-flops between Democrats and Republicans--making it fodder for early 1998 momentum for both sides--and also because of the animosities that are already obvious.

The third Republican candidate, Stoker, is openly campaigning as a compromise between Bordonaro and Firestone, and has been endorsed by former Rep. Lagomarsino. Eight months after he entered what he thought would be a race against a Democratic incumbent, Stoker finds himself largely ignored while passions rage around him.

“I don’t offend people on either side,” he said. “Which sometimes is the best kind of candidate to be.”