Incumbent Dodging Bullets Left and Right

It’s open season on Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) this primary campaign as opponents from both major parties blast him as a do-nothing legislator whose ultraconservative views are out of step with the coastal district.

Rohrabacher, seeking his sixth term in Congress, fires back from his position on the right, saying his anti-tax views and opposition to new federal programs are the way to cut government and save money.

The twin attacks on the 50-year-old congressman are the most serious challenge since he moved from the Palos Verdes Peninsula after the 1992 redistricting.

The June primary pits him against two Republicans: Charmayne Bohman, 61, a Cal State Dominguez Hills professor and former Westminster councilwoman, and Long K. Pham, 47, a nuclear engineer at Southern California Edison.

Democrats seeking the seat are Patricia W. Neal, 67, a Realtor and past president of the California Assn. of Realtors, and Lud Gerber, 87, a lawyer who worked in the Truman administration.

Unopposed are Natural Law Party candidate William Verkamp Jr., 55, an Anaheim businessman, and Libertarian candidate Don Hull, 61, a Costa Mesa marketing consultant.

Rohrabacher is facing GOP opposition for the first time in the heavily Republican 45th district, which includes all of Huntington Beach and most of Westminster, Costa Mesa, Seal Beach and Fountain Valley and parts of other cities.

His challengers are emboldened by the perception that he is vulnerable after his wife’s felony conviction in 1997 for helping recruit a spoiler candidate to siphon votes from a Democrat in a 1995 Assembly race won by Rohrabacher protege Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach).

Rohrabacher, who would not be interviewed for this story, has said that he warned his staff to have nothing to do with a Republican effort to recruit a spoiler candidate. He has acknowledged, however, that his then-campaign director and now wife, Rhonda Carmony Rohrabacher, 27, played a “peripheral role” in the misguided Republican ploy.

“To me it is a big deal,” Neal said. “It raises issues of leadership and judgment as far as exercising control over his staff. It is a matter of saying, ‘Do not do it, or you will not work here.’ You belly them out the door; you don’t marry them.”

His Republican opponents are equally critical.

Bohman said that after “10 years and $10 million of taxpayer money keeping him in Congress,” Rohrabacher has passed “just one piece of legislation” and is one of the leading junketeers in Congress.

“He does not spend any time in the district dealing with policymakers or talking to constituents,” said Bohman, who was a Westminster councilwoman for four years and a Huntington Beach Union High School District trustee for five.

Pham, who also runs an engineering business, said Rohrabacher has done nothing to show local entrepreneurs how to get a piece of the billions spent by space and defense agencies.

Jim Righeimer, Rohrabacher’s campaign director, said the congressman is in the district almost every weekend but travels widely as a member of the International Relations Committee.

As chairman of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, he said, Rohrabacher wants to get private industry involved in space exploration to make it commercially self-sustaining instead of dependent on government funding.

Bohman also accused Rohrabacher of being a phony patriot. “Why would you falsify your medical condition to stay out of the draft but then call yourself a patriot?” she asked. “When he had a chance to fight communism, he opted out.”

After his graduation from college in June 1969, Rohrabacher has said, he used X-rays of a high school hip injury to win a physical deferment at the height of the Vietnam War.

“Those were very confusing times for a lot of people,” Rohrabacher has said of the decision. “Today, I respect those guys who went a lot more than I respect myself for showing that X-ray.”

During his 10 years in Congress, Rohrabacher, a former speech writer in the Reagan White House, has earned a reputation as an iconoclast and ultraconservative. His voting record since 1994 has won him high ratings from the Chamber of Commerce, the American Conservative Union and the Christian Coalition, while he gets poor grades from the Consumer Federation of America and environmental and labor lobbies.

He is against abortion rights and backed the repeal of the assault weapons ban. In the most recent term, he has voted in favor of vouchers to help pay for private schooling, more B-2 bombers, a 2.3% congressional pay raise and constitutional amendments that would limit members to 12 years in Congress and require a two-thirds majority to increase federal taxes.

He voted to terminate the National Endowment for the Arts and weaken the Endangered Species Act. He opposed the minimum wage increase, most-favored-nation status for China and reduced funding for antimissile defense.

Rohrabacher counts among his major achievements securing a reduction in flood insurance premiums for residents in his district who live near the Santa Ana River, Righeimer said.

Neither of Rohrabacher’s GOP opponents has raised much money--Bohman had $13,120 and Pham had $408 in cash as of March 31, the end of the recent reporting period. Rohrabacher’s campaign reported about $75,872 in hand. He held a fund-raiser in Orange County May 2 with Speaker Newt Gingrich as the drawing card.

Most political observers agree that it will be difficult for such meagerly funded campaigns to beat Rohrabacher, who won with 61% of the vote in 1996.

“Voters do not fire an incumbent without cause, and it takes more than one mailer to convince voters of that,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a veteran California political analyst.

Ideally, the Bohman strategy calls for mailing not only to Republicans but also to independents and Democrats to persuade them that the only way they can get new representation in the GOP-dominated district is to back a mainstream Republican in the primary.

“I am the candidate of the moderates on both sides,” she said.

Bohman supports abortion rights and opposes school vouchers. She would limit the sale of some assault weapons. She supports a ban on soft money in politics. She favors a flat tax but would like to preserve the home mortgage deduction. A psychologist, she is both a professor and administrator at Dominguez Hills, and she has taught in both elementary and high schools.

Pham, who is campaigning mostly through the Internet, opposes abortion rights, supports school vouchers and would back privatizing public schools. He would ban all semiautomatic rifles and soft money in politics. He calls the current tax system “a disaster.” He would consider a flat tax or national sales tax, but he worries about their impact on home sales.

Pham ran for the state Senate in a 1995 special election and finished last among eight candidates.

On the Democratic side, most observers believe Neal will defeat Gerber, who admits his campaign is not a serious political undertaking.

Neal is endorsed by the state Realtors political action committee and has raised $52,000. She also has hired the consultants who helped U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) upset Robert K. Dornan in 1996.

Neal, who has run her own real estate business locally since the 1970s, was in Washington last month wooing political action committees and raising money, with her eye on the fall.

“I really feel I don’t have any representation in Congress,” she said about Rohrabacher’s tenure. “He hasn’t done very much, and I don’t feel he is supportive of the defense and aerospace industry. He has voted against [most-favored-nation status] for China, and that affects Boeing, which has major business there.”

Neal supports abortion rights and bans on assault weapons and soft money in politics. She backs a tax credit for payroll taxes, but she opposes a flat or national sales tax as regressive, saying it would hurt California and would eliminate the mortgage deduction.

Gerber, who helped create the GI Bill and was legal counsel to the Federal Power Commission, admits his campaign has no funds and is not a serious effort.

“At this point in my life, I need a raison d’etre,” he said. “I need something to live for.”