Sanchez, Dornan Reverse Roles in O.C. Rematch

The challenger is talking strategy in his Garden Grove headquarters with a top advisor. “Dad,” the advisor asks, waving a sign, “should we put another one up on the door outside?”

Two miles away, in the incumbent’s local campaign office, the political operatives are too busy to worry about signs. What’s more important is this week’s media buy. And there are key calls to make: to singer Jackson Browne’s agent, the campaign consultants, the pollsters.

It is another day in the battle to represent California’s 46th Congressional District in central Orange County, one of the most closely watched and most expensive races in the country this fall.

But in the topsy-turvy rematch between conservative career politician Robert K. Dornan and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who beat him two years ago, nothing is as it seems.

It is the Latina political newcomer who is backed by a political machine made up of Washington insiders and big money. And it is Dornan, with 18 years of right-wing oratory in Congress under his belt, who is playing upstart--his budget thin, his campaign operation loose, his loyal children lined up behind him like a phalanx.

“It’s not even two campaigns. It’s a campaign and a crusade,” said Paul Herrnson, a University of Maryland professor and expert on congressional elections.

“Loretta Sanchez is running on incumbency and a carefully calibrated set of issue positions,” he said. “She has a brain trust of political pros. She is the establishment candidate. She is doing it the way it is normally done.

“Dornan is definitely the underdog. He’s got a family operation. Given their respective backgrounds, it’s an ironic switch, to say the least,” Herrnson said.

Sanchez scored one of the most unexpected upsets in congressional history in 1996 when the then-political novice defeated the 10-term Garden Grove Republican known for his vitriolic attacks on President Clinton, homosexuals and various others. The rematch promised to test the mettle of each politician and also serve as a referendum on Orange County’s shifting political scene.

Back then, Sanchez was such a new commodity that at the Democratic National Convention a group of well-heeled Orange County Democrats had to “tow her around meeting everybody, hoping somebody would take her seriously,” recalled Laguna Beach lawyer Howard Adler, one of those backers.

These days, Sanchez, with more than $1.1 million in her campaign war chest, is all business. The congresswoman, buffed to a fine political sheen by two years as the latest star of her party, had raised more money by the end of June than any Democrat in the House except Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri.

With her campaign a top priority for Democratic organizations nationwide, the Sanchez operation is “a tight ship,” said a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises and funnels funds to campaigns across the country.

Then there is the Dornan campaign.

Son Mark, 39, a commercial property manager by trade, is campaign manager. He sleeps on a futon in the campaign office. Daughter Theresa Cobban, 40, helps out with the prodigious Dornan direct mail fund-raising effort in between chasing her kids at her suburban Virginia home. Robin Dornan, 42, puts together fund-raisers for her father from a cramped desk in her San Juan Capistrano house.

Kate Dornan, 37, handles the contributions that trickle into the campaign’s coffers in increments of $10 to $50 from conservatives, mostly from out of state.

By the end of June, the campaign had raised almost $1 million, but spent much of it on a direct mail operation. It had less than $4,500 in the bank. Dornan received $320,526 from a House committee this month to cover the costs of his failed bid to overturn his 1996 election defeat, yet he still holds less than a third of the money Sanchez has.

“Given her track record, which is not very deep, [Sanchez] is probably much more amenable to taking counsel from professionals that she’s hired, which means a lot more style and a lot less substance,” said Mark P. Petracca, a UC Irvine political science professor.

“Dornan, like him or not, is what he is. He’s the real McCoy,” Petracca said. “You know, you may not like the real McCoy, but he’s entirely authentic. Sanchez is a creation of her consultants and her advisors.”

A Substantial Difference in Style

In the political style war, Sanchez, 38, is hard to beat.

Starting with Sanchez herself, accustomed now to hobnobbing with the President and Hollywood stars, her campaign is suffused with a Washington insider been-there, done-that attitude.

Two years ago, her campaign had no press secretary, one paid staff member and, until late in the game, neither much money nor much support among nationally recognized Democrats.

“It was a different world,” recalled John Shallman, her campaign manager and jack of all trades that year. “We spent most of our time just trying to convince Democrats that our race was winnable.”

This year, the Sanchez campaign has more than a dozen paid staff members and many more volunteers.

There is Stuart Durst, her wiry, chain-smoking campaign manager imported from West Virginia by way of more than a decade in Washington. He has run 19 campaigns since 1982 for candidates from coast to coast. He knew next to nothing about Sanchez until he was hired, and encamped in a furnished apartment near the campaign headquarters a few months ago.

There is the campaign press spokesman, Lee Godown, who doubles as press secretary for Sanchez the congresswoman and who has worked for four different members of Congress. The screen saver on his computer repeats the political professional’s mantra: MESSAGE. “You know, in Washington, the message is everything,” Godown said, grinning.

With that mantra constantly playing in their minds, the political professionals are shaping every Sanchez utterance with care.

“Stuart and I know when our candidate should shut up, and that’s half the game,” Godown said.

“If Loretta starts going down a road that’s like, ‘Danger, danger Will Robinson,’ all of us go, ‘Danger, danger Will Robinson,’ and she thinks about it,” Godown said, referring to the cautionary words from the family robot in the 1970s sitcom, “Lost in Space.”

The professionals have wasted no time enlisting the moneyed and the famous in making the Sanchez operation big time.

There are deep-pocket contributors such as sports agent Leigh Steinberg and big-screen TV king Paul Goldenberg, celebrity supporters such as Jimmy Smits of “NYPD Blue” and singer Gloria Estefan, and campaign operatives, pollsters and consultants with more than 100 years of experience among them.

A sophisticated direct mail and telemarketing operation capitalizes on the congresswoman’s celebrity status to raise money across the country. Sanchez is so popular, in fact, that she has traveled nationwide to help draw funds to other Democratic candidates.

“House races aren’t always the most glamorous things going on, but people are sort of passionate in their defense of Loretta,” said Olivia Morgan of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In Sanchez’s case, the positions are reversed: the junior member of Congress is raising money for more senior colleagues.

Some things, though, haven’t changed.

Her campaign’s principal office is the same tiny storefront Sanchez rented two years ago. On a recent day, the lights were off and the computers sluggish from the heat. Volunteers worked alongside seasoned pros. Durst dragged a phone to a rickety plastic chair outside to work and smoke.

But the alcove-like office is just temporary. More emblematic of the Sanchez style is her congressional office a few blocks away, a pristine, smoothly organized place where the congresswoman works when she is in town.

For Dornan Family, Campaign Is Personal

Bob Dornan, 65, has never tried for smooth, and he’s not about to start now.

In jeans and a T-shirt, he roams his campaign headquarters like a caged bear. He often works late into the night, his wife, Sallie, by his side.

With all his time and attention devoted to full-time campaigning, the voluble former congressman tends to accost reporters as soon as they come in to view, gesturing animatedly over reams of campaign literature on a coffee table before him.

As for campaign consultants, media specialists and pollsters, there are none.

Instead there is the Dornan clan, the perfect political accessory for the ultimate family-values politician. The family is out to save not only their father’s reputation, but their own, to rejuvenate not only what they see as his conservative legacy, but the legacy they want to hand down to their children.

From the family’s perspective, that legacy was brought to an abrupt end when Dornan twice lost to Sanchez--first in the 1996 election and then earlier this year when the House of Representatives rebuffed Dornan’s claim that enough noncitizen votes were cast in that election to overturn it.

The devoutly Catholic family believes so fervently that the election was stolen that they pray about it.

“There’s a lot at stake for our family,” Kate Dornan said, after a night spent sleeping in the office on a mattress. “There’s family pride. It’s about the family winning another battle, proving against all odds that it has been wronged. It’s about my name and that of my children.”

Still, the pros are not entirely absent from the Dornan campaign.

The Republican Party, which distanced itself from the volatile candidate in the primaries and put its muscle instead behind lawyer Lisa Hughes, is taking Dornan back into the fold as the election nears.

A spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, which like its Democratic Party counterpart can spend up to $67,000 to support individual congressional candidates, said it is likely the organization will spend that much to put Dornan back in office this fall.

Michael Schroeder, chairman of the California Republican Party and the lawyer who represented Dornan in his election challenge in the House, said the state party plans to do likewise.

“People pretty much close ranks” in the general election, Schroeder said. “We’re going to put a ton of work and money into Bob’s campaign.”

The Dornan direct mail operation, which draws on a list of more than 25,000 mostly longtime supporters across the country, is operated by a Virginia company called Response Dynamics Inc., one of the biggest direct mail operations in the country.

The company oversees creation of mailing lists, printing, mailing and telemarketing for Dornan and other conservative candidates.

As for the Dornan children, they are not newcomers to the political scene. Raised as bleeding-heart conservatives, they grew up gleefully immersed in the fray surrounding their controversial father. As teenagers, they stuffed envelopes, walked precincts and, with a loyalty they say is part of their Irish heritage, defended a father who inspires hate along much of the political spectrum.

For the key positions they hold in his campaign, the Dornans each make from $1,500 to $4,000 a month--cheap, political experts allow, by campaign standards. They share lunches from fast-food restaurants and burn the candle at both ends. Their preteen children also stuff envelopes and talk up their adored grandfather at school. After midnight, the Dornan children drive their mother to the door of the Dornans’ Garden Grove home.

“Most politicians keep their families out of their campaigns, except by using them in the most superficial ways, because they think it’s quite a stress on family life,” said Jonathan Krasno, a senior policy analyst at New York University Law School and an expert on congressional elections.

“But in Dornan’s case,” Krasno said, “he’s a cause, both inside and outside the family.”