24th Congressional District

The 24th Congressional District, as it has been for the last three election cycles, is something of a political OK Corral where well-financed candidates gun it out in races with national ramifications.

That’s because Republicans think the district, which encompasses wealthy neighborhoods in the West Valley, Malibu and Ventura County, should be theirs. Instead, the Democrats have held sway for years, with Anthony Beilenson and most recently Brad Sherman.

This year’s race is no exception. Sherman, targeted by the GOP as one of the top 10 incumbents they want to defeat, faces a strong challenge from Randy Hoffman, a dapper millionaire from Thousand Oaks who turned a small high-tech company into one of the nation’s most successful producers of personal satellite navigation systems.

Hoffman has stressed his success in the competitive high-tech industry as evidence of smart business sense and accountability sorely needed on Capitol Hill.

For his part, Sherman, a former tax attorney and member of the State Board of Equalization, has emphasized his votes in favor of a balanced budget and his success in landing federal money for more parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Both have raised nearly a million dollars to finance their campaigns.

The Times recently interviewed the candidates on issues that shape both the local and national agenda.

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Question: If you were a member of the House of Representatives, would you have voted for or against the Clinton impeachment inquiry?

Answer: I would have voted for moving forward with the investigation. When you take a look at how the votes were cast in Congress, the tally showed that 430 of the 435 members of Congress voted in some way to move forward on the process. They quibbled about the details, but as far as moving forward with the process we had what I would call almost a unanimous decision. [Rep.] Henry Hyde has said that he wants to expedite this process, he wants to bring it to a conclusion by the end of the year. That’s clearly the appropriate thing to do so we can get on with business.

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Q: As you campaign, do you sense that there might be some backlash against the Republican party in regard to the Clinton / Lewinsky matter?

A: It’s clear to me that people want to move past this. This is something that they’re tired of hearing about because people are trying to raise families, they’re trying to earn a living and they don’t see this as impacting their daily lives. I think most people realize that Congress has a responsibility to complete the investigation but in a less high-profile way unless there is something that comes out of the investigation.

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Q: What about tax reform? Do you favor a national sales tax or a flat tax?

A: I do not support a national sales tax, it is basically a value-added tax such as they have in Europe. The IRS is a huge, out-of-control bureaucracy, but if you want to see something worse than the IRS, look at the European value-added tax system. It is huge, bureaucratic and it wastes a ton of money. I’m for common-sense tax simplification. We don’t need 600 forms to collect the money that we need to run the government. I think it is a crime. Take, for example, our daughter’s nursery school teacher. Here, we have a college educated woman who is so intimidated by the IRS--she gets her income off of a W-2, has no deductions and goes to a tax preparation service to get her 1040 E-Z done. That’s basically a day’s wages for this woman because she is intimidated and she is afraid she is going to make a mistake and then the IRS is going to come in and take whatever she has. The way you reign in the IRS is you simplify the tax code.

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Q: What about the flat tax?

A: I don’t support the flat tax. It would eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction. I think that is an institution in the United States and I don’t think politically you could do it. We have complicated the world with all of these IRS regulations. I’m a former CPA and everybody says your taxes must be easy to do if you’re a former CPA and you understand all of this kind of thing. I say, hey, I’m right there with everybody else in terms of trying to fill out all of these forms. We can do this with a two-page form for an individual. We can maintain the home mortgage interest deduction, we can have room for medical deductions and some charitable contributions and leave it at that. Very, very straightforward.

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Q: What do you think we need to do to upgrade the educational system in this country?

A: Our education system doesn’t reward excellence and doesn’t punish failure, and we wonder why our education system is failing. I mean, in your jobs today, you get merit pay. If you are doing a good job and you are performing in your job, you expect to get more pay than somebody else does. That is what you see in private industry. You don’t see that in government anywhere. I would require a formal review and merit system in the education system to get federal tax dollars. I would have to have a merit compensation program for teachers and also for administrators. We also need to to end the tenure system. You have got to have the ability to remove people who fail our children. You have to be able to hire and fire and reward or you don’t get a result. I was a schoolteacher in 1981, 1982, 1983. After I got out of graduate school, I had all of these loans and I was working full time and I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton in night class. I remember being just stunned at the lack of reading and writing skills that these freshmen and sophomore students had in college. You fast-forward 17 years later and it has gotten worse. We talk about equal opportunity. We can only offer children equal opportunity if we offer them a quality education. You bring accountability in the classroom and you will see a major improvement in education.

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Q: Do you support use of a budget surplus to fund the Social Security system?

A: I support the use of the surplus, assuming that it is there. Most government projections have been wrong, so before we spend the money or commit it to anything, we have to make sure that it is there. I believe the appropriate thing to do is to rebuild the Social Security trust fund. My mom just turned 65 this year, and I think it is a crime that after working 50 years, she should worry about her Social Security check. There was a vote in Congress to provide a tax break. That vote was to put 90% of it into Social Security and 10% into a tax break. I would have voted for that because 90% is better than 0% or better than 50%.

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Q: You have advocated privatization of the Social Security system. How would that work?

A: “Privatization” has actually become a dirty word. People think it means you are going to take Social Security funds and you are going to put it into a high-tech initial public offering NASDAQ stock, and the market goes down 500 points in one day or 100 points on the NASDAQ, and you are wiped out. The government has come in, taken money from the Social Security trust fund, money that should be earning some return as it sits there and waits for people to retire and to draw on it. Instead, it has been taken away, and there are IOUs there. I’m a firm believer that we should give people the choice, as you pay in, of whether or not to put one-tenth of what you pay in and what the your employer pays into a passbook account at 4% or 4 1/2%, high-grade municipal bonds, long-term, safe as can be. And because it is yours, no matter how bad the government wants to touch it, they can’t come after it. It is our money. That is the thing that really gripes me. It is our money that we have been paying in for decades, and the government doesn’t look at it that way.

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Q: What about secession in the San Fernando Valley?

A: If enough residents of the city of Los Angeles want to put it on the ballot, then let them put it on the ballot. I haven’t taken a position on secession, other than the fact that if residents want to vote on it and enough say “yes,” it should be put to a vote of the people. I do think it is wrong for Sacramento to interfere and through all of the bureaucratic wrangling and rules and regulations to keep it off the ballot. Let local people, local residents, decide how they want to be governed locally. My opponent has applied to Housing and Urban Development, the federal government, for funds to study the breakup of the city of Los Angeles. It is an appropriate study but not to be funded by people who live in Orlando, people who live here in Ventura, or Chicago. I mean, as a resident of Thousand Oaks, I don’t want to be writing a check to the city of New York so they can decide how many cities may want to break up.

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Q: What needs to be done in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area and what would you do to get that done?

A: The Santa Monica Mountains is a real gift to our district. It is beautiful property. I think there are a number of things we need to do there. We’ve been fighting for about 20 years to complete the Backbone Trail. I think that is something we should do.

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Q: You and Brad Sherman are offering yourselves to the voters as moderates. How do you see yourself differing from him in regard to political philosophies?

A: I am running as a moderate. I am moderate. Brad Sherman ran as a moderate in 1996. He said he was pro-business. When you look at his voting record, he has voted with Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman and Howard Berman 80% of the time. I’ve never heard of those two gentlemen as being moderate or pro-business. So Brad Sherman is coming into the district saying one thing and he is going back into Washington and saying another. There are big differences in education. He doesn’t support merit pay, he does not support the end of tenure. His solution to the end of the education problem is national testing at the fourth-grade level. I’m all for standards, but national testing at the fourth-grade level is going to solve our education crisis? I think not. Accountability, holding people accountable for results, is what does that. He talks about simplifying taxes, yet he didn’t vote for the plan to bring an end to the tax code in the year 2002. My point is, in business, we set goals and we put a stake in the ground. How can you ever get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going? I learned that in navigation. First rule of navigation: You have to know where you’re going in order to get there. If you don’t have a goal to reach, then you never get there, and that is why we have had no tax reform. That is why we have no education reform. Brad Sherman has never run a business, he has never signed a payroll, he has never signed the front of a check, he has never created a job. I have. I know what it is all about. When I vote about something on the floor of the House of Representatives, I will know how that impacts people’s daily lives.