Issa Unleashes Fierce Senate Bid

Darrell Issa is discussing the market value of intimidation. His business, after all, is fortifying the autos of America.

“A guy violates your car,” he says, “you want something ferocious, one step removed from vengeance.”

And so his line of car alarms fairly bristles with menace. There is the Viper, the Rattler, the Python, the Wasp and the Hornet. The brand names all tap the same feral instinct to strike out. Collectively, they have made Issa one very, very rich man.

Now, at 43, Issa (pronounced ICE-uh) wants to be the next U.S. senator from California. And he is approaching the campaign with the same philosophy of ferocity he brought to foiling the prowlers of the nation’s parking lots.

More than a year from the election, before most Californians have even heard of him, Issa has established himself as a fixture on the airwaves of conservative talk radio with a $2-million ad blitz remarkable for its relentlessly negative tone.

“I’m Darrell Issa and I’m running for the United States Senate for one reason,” the candidate said in his very first spot last summer: “Barbara Boxer is one of the worst senators in California history.”

Since then, a fusillade of faxes has attacked the incumbent Democrat for everything from her record on taxes and affirmative action to misspellings in a fund-raising letter and a typo on her official Senate Web page.

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The antics have thrilled many of the Boxer-haters in the Republican Party, of which there is no lack. For a first-time candidate, Issa has done well, picking up endorsements from several state lawmakers, including GOP Assembly Leader Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino), and activist groups such as the California College Republicans.

Others, however, are less impressed with his campaign’s frat-house foolery, questioning the sophistication of Issa’s rambunctious campaign team--and, by extension, the political judgment of its boss.

“It’s important for a political newcomer to have a campaign with a weightier feel than some of these sophomoric pranks suggest,” said Charles Cook, publisher of the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan guide to races across the country. “A first impression should involve more substantive things than typos.”

Many fellow Republicans believe Issa has been staking out dangerously narrow ideological turf.

“This is a battle that will not be decided on the flanks,” said Tony Quinn, one of the state’s leading GOP analysts, who fears the fiercely anti-government Issa, as the party nominee, could wind up being “pigeonholed on the extreme.”

“This is a battle that will be decided at the center,” Quinn said.

Issa, naturally, has a different take. The problem, he suggests, is that the Republican Party has lost its way, becoming too tentative, with a risk-averse, incremental approach that has done nothing to shake Washington from its fossilized foundation.

“I can’t find a single federal program that I can tell you is properly run,” said Issa, vowing to hit Capitol Hill with all the subtlety of one of his shrieking security systems.

“I will make a huge difference when I arrive in the Senate.”

For all the verbal swagger, however, and his campaign’s cargo bay full of anti-Boxer bombast, Issa comes across in person as an exceedingly charming and easy-to-like fellow.

He is the picture of graciousness on a tour of Directed Electronics Inc., his antiseptically orderly San Diego County firm, and follows up with more than half a dozen phone calls in a week, trying to shake a reputation for inaccessibility.

Inevitably, Issa has been compared to the notoriously press-shy Michael Huffington, the last multimillionaire upstart to finance, unsuccessfully, a big splurge on a U.S. Senate race.

Unlike Huffington, says Issa, he won’t try to buy his way into office, though with a personal fortune estimated at upward of $200 million, he could surely try.

“If I sat home, ignored the press and just had [an ad] campaign and wrote checks, I think that’s buying a race,” Issa said. “I’m out seeking endorsements, meeting with people, telling them what I believe and why I believe it.”

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The tour of the company Issa built from the ground up (no inherited wealth here!) seems as much a part of the Huffington exorcism as his wife’s reluctant cameo appearance during an interview. “We always break Kathy out so everyone understands she’s no Arianna,” Issa says cheerfully (no scheming spouse here!)

If any comparison holds, the most apt one, philosophically, may be to Bruce Herschensohn, the GOP nominee who lost a bitter contest to Boxer in 1992. Not coincidentally, the Issa campaign includes several grudge-harboring alums from that race, including campaign manager Scott Taylor.

Like Herschensohn, Issa calls for a drastically downsized federal government. He suggests that anything beyond the functions specifically enumerated in the Constitution--such as providing for the national defense, printing a unified currency, administering patent and trademark requirements--is frivolous, or worse.

If elected, Issa would start by voting to cut taxes, then seek to drastically curtail the government’s role in education, eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, partially privatize Social Security, work to outlaw most abortions and abolish affirmative action programs nationwide--all in two terms, the maximum he pledges to serve.

“I can find very few areas in which the federal government has gotten involved where they needed to in my lifetime,” said Issa, a lifelong Republican, Ohio-born, who moved to California in 1985.

Of course, the political environment has changed since Herschensohn gave Boxer such a tough fight back in 1992. Good economic times have taken the edge off much of the anger that stoked such virulent anti-Washington attitudes. Two government shutdowns ended up backfiring on Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries.

“In a war on government, government won,” said state Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), who supports state Treasurer Matt Fong in the Senate race. San Diego Mayor Susan Golding is also seeking the GOP nomination.

Even pollster Frank Luntz, the marketing maven behind the GOP’s famous “Contract with America,” has taken to using words like “belonging” and “community” when he coaches Republican candidates.

But Issa--he of the Viper, Python and Hornet--gives no quarter. He suggests that the mistake the GOP made was not waging the wrong fight, but surrendering too soon.