Dornan’s Battle Cry: ‘I’m Coming Back’

B-1 Bob is still running. Hard.

Here he is on the porch of his suburban Virginia home, working with son Mark on campaign brochures. There he goes, flying coach around the country to call attention to alleged voter fraud, his latest cause celebre--at a Christian Coalition dinner in New York City, before that a conservative forum’s fund-raising breakfast in Cincinnati, next month in the vaunted halls of Harvard Law School.

Now he’s back on Capitol Hill, holding court last Wednesday at a corner table in the members-only dining room over scrambled eggs, bacon and rye toast.

“We miss you,” a Republican staffer calls across the restaurant to Robert K. Dornan, who had R-Garden Grove after his name back when he held political office.

“Thank you, it’s mutual,” the fiery redhead chortles.

“I’m coming back,” he adds quickly. “Second session.”

More than 10 months after Dornan’s defeat at the hands of Democrat Loretta Sanchez in Orange County’s 46th Congressional District, he still hasn’t gotten a new job. That’s because he’s counting on getting his old one back.

And soon. He fully expects the House Oversight Committee to overturn Sanchez’s 984-vote victory on the grounds that noncitizens voted illegally. So he’s gearing up for a special election in December. Only it hasn’t been scheduled, and whether one will remains an open question.

The committee, which has been probing the election since December, has a meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Some on the Hill expect an announcement that the GOP-controlled panel has identified enough illegal voters to invalidate Sanchez’s victory, although staff members insist they are still sorting through data.

Democrats on the panel contend that the databases from the Immigration and Naturalization Service being compared with Orange County’s voter rolls are too sloppy to be reliable. “There’s absolutely, positively--in my heart and in my head--no way in a million years that they can use INS data to make their case,” one aide said. “There’s no way they have an ironclad case. They can’t, using the data we have.”

Regardless of the committee’s findings, any special election would require the full House’s approval. And as recent events made clear, Dornan may not be able to count on help from his former GOP colleagues.

Responding to insults Dornan had directed at a Democratic lawmaker, the House on Thursday took the unprecedented step of banning him from the chamber until the election investigation is settled. Some insiders say the motion’s overwhelming passage--111 of Dornan’s fellow Republicans joined with Democrats in supporting it--bodes badly for his chances if the question of overturning the election ever makes it to the full House.

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And on the political front, the news gets worse for Dornan: High-ranking Republican sources say a party poll conducted earlier this month shows Sanchez would beat Dornan in a special election but is vulnerable to other GOP candidates. The poll also showed that more people in the urban district spanning parts of Santa Ana, Anaheim and Garden Grove think negatively about Dornan than think positively, the sources said.

With that in mind, some Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and in California are trying to convince the conservative Dornan that should a special election be set, he should step aside in favor of a more moderate and perhaps female or Latino candidate who could better address the backlash that Republicans would face for throwing Sanchez out of office.

Some are even suggesting that the oversight committee should let the election stand, simply to thwart a special election that these GOP leaders presume would allow Sanchez to shore up her position by beating Dornan.

“Bob’s own constituents don’t want him,” one Republican lawmaker said. “I run into people all the time who say, ‘Gee, it looks like there’s a lot of fraud in that election, I hope there’s not enough so we get Bob Dornan back.’

“The story of Bob Dornan is over,” he added. “. . . It’s just not realistic to talk about him having a future in elective office.”

Don’t tell it to Dornan. Or to his wife, Sally, who said Friday she will quit the Republican Party because of the bipartisan ouster of her husband. But she’s still his campaign manager.

“I’m no longer a Republican,” Sally Dornan said. “I’m absolutely sick to my stomach watching friends not fighting [for her husband]. When the dust settles, there’s going to be a lot of really sorry people.”

For now, Dornan is a man without portfolio. He is on the road, on the airwaves, on TV--anywhere he can go to bad-mouth Sanchez, indict California’s voter-registration procedures and pump up his accomplishments.

“He definitely is interesting to the Harvard community right now. It’s an interesting issue, an interesting allegation he’s making,” said Andrew LeBlanc, a third-year law student who invited Dornan to the Cambridge campus. “He would, obviously, have some time on his hands as well, which helps.”

With a barrage of direct mail solicitations, Dornan raised nearly $700,000 by July to support his crusade, according to federal campaign reports; since then, he says, he has collected about $200,000 more. But Dornan has already paid lawyers $250,000 for the Sanchez inquiry, and says he owes $150,000 more.

He says he could be a millionaire within a year if he accepted one of several offers to host political talk shows on radio or TV, but for now is living mainly off of his $70,000 government pension.

“My life is on hold. I’ve got a PhD in voter fraud from the school of hard knocks,” says the former Air Force pilot. “Every time I pull up in front of that Capitol building--it hit me again this morning--what a great place to defend your beliefs. What a great job.”

At home, he is hyperkinetic, scrawling comments in red pen on newspaper clips, then calling reporters to spew bombastic monologues that flit from Sanchez’s personal life to President Clinton’s “draft-dodging” to abortion and immigration and back to Sanchez.

Scratching numbers in felt pen on the back of a manila envelope, he seems close to desperation in his disjointed calculations: 984 more votes for Sanchez than Dornan, according to the California secretary of state; minus five that the county’s registrar of voters has already nullified; 372 illegal voters found by documents obtained during a raid on an Orange County civil rights group; 5,468 noncitizens whose names and birthdays seem to match those on the local voter rolls.

He scribbles more numbers: 4,119. 1,349. 521. 458. But he cannot explain what each means, or how they add up.

“I feel ashamed that I didn’t have a big enough buffer to overcome the fraud,” Dornan allows. “I will not lose that special [election].”

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On the Hill the day before being banned, he was all hugs, greeting elevator operators, security guards and waitresses by name--a habit his father passed down to show the importance of treating everybody equally.

“Hello, Rosa, how you doing?” Dornan chirps, smooching a cheek. “Long time no see.”

“I am Elena,” the woman says, tugging on her name tag with its big block letters. (The man Dornan calls “John” a few minutes later answers politely even though his name tag says Elmo.)

Finishing his breakfast, he pays the $4.75 bill--plus $2 tip--with an American Express card he pulls from a stack wrapped in rubber bands. He then adjusts his suit jacket over the pants, whose back pocket is starting to rip, and strides down the Capitol corridors like the congressman he used to be.

“We need you back here, Bob,” says fellow Republican John Fox of Pennsylvania, a friend who nonetheless joined the lopsided vote a day later to shut Dornan out of the House chamber. “We need your leadership, we need your experience, and we need your courage.”

“I’m coming back,” Dornan keeps saying to whatever friendly faces he sees. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m coming back.”