How to Dominate a District

In the 50th Assembly District, where more people speak Spanish than English, private meetings held months before any ballots were printed appear to have decided the outcome of next month’s Democratic primary.

One candidate, Marco Antonio Firebaugh, a former legislative aide with close ties to Senate Democratic Leader Richard G. Polanco (D-Los Angeles), managed to secure the endorsement of nearly every Latino politician on the Eastside.

“I’ve been blessed,” said Firebaugh, an earnest 31-year-old who has never held elective office, having spent most of his professional life as a Polanco staffer. “I have tons of help.”

Firebaugh’s ability to dominate the race illustrates the embryonic fragility of the political process in a district where California’s future Latino majority is cutting its teeth.

Rapidly increasingly numbers of newly naturalized immigrants in the 50th District are eager to put their stamp on civic life. Yet from the perspective of Sacramento and Washington power brokers, this and other heavily immigrant districts are easily manipulated empty shells, where the money and influence of outsiders matter as much, if not more, than the still-small local electorate.

“We have a long-standing Mexican American political establishment moving into what is primarily an immigrant district,” said Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy. “Even as it increases the number of Latino representatives, it impedes the formation of more organic local leadership.”

Although Firebaugh lives in the 50th District, which covers part of southeast Los Angeles County, he admits that his roots are in the San Gabriel Valley community of Baldwin Park. And, like other candidates running for state office in southeast L.A. County, he has relied almost exclusively on money from outside the district. About twice a month he shuttles back to Sacramento for fund-raisers.

As of March, his campaign records listed only two donations from district residents--including one from the Commerce Club casino--but he was still well on his way to raising his goal of $100,000. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Al Checchi kicked in $30,000 for a joint Firebaugh-Checchi get-out-the-vote effort.

Faced with such a well-funded and well-connected opponent, some potential candidates with far deeper ties to the 50th District chose to bow out of the race.

Polanco’s Support

Firebaugh, a law school graduate who has yet to take the bar exam, has never held a position higher than mid-level legislative staffer in Sacramento. He readily credits Polanco--one of the main architects of the Democratic resurgence in the Legislature, including the election of two consecutive Latino Assembly speakers--for helping him muster thousands of dollars in contributions and endorsements of 21 of the 35 City Council members in the district.

“Richard Polanco has always been a guy who’s willing to step up and say, ‘You need to help this person because it’s the right thing to do and he’s a good guy,’ ” Firebaugh said.

Firebaugh’s critics say Polanco and his allies have made it all but impossible for anyone to run against Firebaugh, in part by monopolizing the available political resources.

“If you run against their candidate, you’re going to be alienating them,” said one City Council member from a Southeast city, who requested anonymity: “And their attitude is it’s either us or them.”

Both of Firebaugh’s opponents, J. Alfredo Hernandez and Elvira Moreno de Guzman, are part of the first generation of Latinos to be born and raised in southeast Los Angeles County.

Hernandez, a 26-year-old South Gate schoolteacher, said Firebaugh’s political consultant, Leo Briones--the husband of incumbent Assemblywoman Martha M. Escutia (D-Bell), who is giving up her seat to run for the state Senate because of term limits--tried to persuade him to leave the race.

“He warned me that my political career would be at an end if I stood up and challenged the heir apparent,” Hernandez said. “My response was that there is no one who owns this seat. This district belongs to the people, and they will make the decision.”

Said Briones of the encounter: “I gave him words of wisdom, and he was not wise enough to follow them.”

The political consultant acknowledged that there were potential candidates with good qualifications who were scared off by Firebaugh’s support.

“There were others who were probably better candidates waiting in the wings, looking at this race,” Briones said. “They saw what Marco put together and didn’t have the nerve to run against him.”

South Gate Councilman Hector De La Torre considered running, but dropped out, Briones said, because “the people in charge of getting resources together weren’t going to be with him.”

De La Torre, 30, has a slightly different version of his decision to drop out of the race.

Although several people in political circles, whom he chose not to name, “tried to get me out [of the race] with very strong language,” this only strengthened his resolve to run. He dropped out only after meeting privately with Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), who told him to look at the race in the larger context of the Democratic Party’s fight to retain control of the Assembly.

“I decided that a divisive primary fight that would take Democratic resources and use them in an internal struggle would not be beneficial to the main goal,” De La Torre said.

De La Torre said Firebaugh is by far the best qualified of the three candidates seeking the Democratic nomination.

Opponents’ Efforts Small by Comparison

Guzman, 30, a Maywood City Council member, is among those in the 50th District who wonder why supporters of a genuinely qualified candidate would resort to hard-ball tactics.

She said two Firebaugh supporters on the Cudahy City Council prevented her from passing out her campaign material at an anti-crime “community watch” meeting in that city. Firebaugh had been allowed to speak at another meeting of the group, she said.

“I felt so intimidated being there, but I stood my ground and I said no, this is not right,” Guzman said.

The homemade, low-tech campaigns of Firebaugh’s two opponents bear little resemblance to Firebaugh’s effort, for which a team of volunteers staff a dozen telephones in a nightly phone bank operation.

Schoolteacher Hernandez works on his campaign nights and weekends. Guzman, a homemaker, has received no campaign contributions, according to the latest state-required spending report. Both candidates said no one had agreed to endorse them. The first noteworthy event of Guzman’s campaign consisted of a “home hosting” at the Maywood home of supporter Virginia Alba.

Alba, 54, saw dark forces at work behind the scenes, supporting Firebaugh. “They get their little clones and set it up so that anybody from the community doesn’t have a chance,” she said. “It’s all prearranged. It’s like they think the people don’t have a brain.”

During the hour a Times reporter spent at the event, Guzman sat on Alba’s front lawn under a campaign sign--”Elvira!”--and waved to a couple of neighbors walking past on the nearby sidewalk, but talked to no voters. Envelopes for campaign contributions sat on a table, unused.

By contrast, one of Firebaugh’s first events was a $500-per-ticket breakfast at Virga’s restaurant and bar in Sacramento, just east of the Capitol, that raised $8,000.

Despite his relatively weak opposition, Firebaugh said he is determined to run an “aggressive campaign” with “an aggressive voter outreach program . . . and an equally aggressive mail program. It costs money to do that.”

When he has tried to drum up contributions inside the district, however, local business owners have given him a perplexed, you’ve-go-to-be-kidding reaction.

“They haven’t been approached before and brought into the political process,” he said. “Part of the process is participating on a financial level. You have to introduce them to the political dynamic.”

Campaign records show that many of Firebaugh’s early supporters were far removed from the mom-and-pop businesses of Southeast cities like Huntington Park and Bell.

Instead, they were companies and individuals with long-established political connections, including the Los Angeles Turf Club, the Ladbroke Racing Corp.--a British gaming giant--and O’Brien Kreitzberg, a firm that is overseeing more than $1 billion in Los Angeles Unified School District repair work.

Other contributions came from Polanco chief of staff Bill Mabie and Vivian Castro, an aide to Assemblywoman Escutia.

Backing of Political Elite

Besides Escutia, other Firebaugh endorsers include Assembly Speaker Villaraigosa, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles).

It is not the first time the Latino political elite has lined up behind one candidate in southeast Los Angeles County.

When Gloria Molina resigned her seat in the state Assembly to take a spot on the Los Angeles City Council, Eastside power brokers gathered in a private meeting to decide who would succeed her. They picked Roybal-Allard, the daughter of respected Rep. Edward R. Roybal.

Like Firebaugh, Roybal-Allard had never held elective office and had recently moved into the district. She won the seat in a special election, outpolling her nearest rival by more than 3 to 1.

For his part, Firebaugh sees his candidacy as the logical next step to a career that began when, just after graduating from college, he joined Polanco’s staff.

A Tijuana native whose mother was a seamstress, he proudly recalls his ascension from Sacramento political intern to presumptive nominee. He tells it as a Horatio Alger story that could just as easily describe a young man’s rise from the mail room to the board room of a major corporation.

A key, Firebaugh said, was realizing that Polanco was an early riser and that, if he wanted to impress him, he would have to get to work even earlier. “I’d get in before him, get my crazy ideas together to show them to him,” he said. “It was the only time you could get alone with him.”

He worked for the Latino Caucus and got to know most of the members. The contacts helped when he decided to run for office and met with several of the leaders, asking for their endorsements. Among the most important meetings was with Roybal-Allard, who represents much of the area in Congress.

The backing of local leaders soon followed.

“The fact that Martha’s on board with me has opened tremendous doors,” he said. “All the local folks who didn’t know me have said, ‘Well, if Martha’s with you, then we’re with you.’ And those folks who have remained skeptical still have said, ‘Wow, so now Lucille’s on board, and now Xavier’s on board, and Antonio’s on board.’ ”

If Firebaugh wins the primary, he is virtually assured victory in the general election--Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district by a margin of 4 to 1.