GOP Race Is a Bitter One for 2 Ex-Friends in Republican Bastion

The race to succeed the retiring Rep. Ron Packard in this most heavily Republican of all 52 congressional districts in California has become a bitter fight between two former friends and ideological soul mates.

The race’s leading candidates, state Sen. Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) and car alarm magnate and failed U.S. Senate candidate Darrell Issa, are spending their time and money questioning each other’s honesty and credentials.

Morrow claims that Issa is a closet liberal. Issa responds that Morrow is sneaky and two-faced.

So it goes in the 48th Congressional District, composed of portions of southern Orange County and northern San Diego County and a smidgen of southwestern Riverside County.

During the nine-term reign of the mild-mannered Packard, the GOP primary was always a civil affair. This year it could be called the Fighting 48th.

Fellow candidate Mark Dornan, son of former Rep. Robert Dornan, calls the Morrow-Issa bash a case of “two Republicans tearing each other’s hearts out.”

Dornan the younger, a teacher from San Juan Capistrano, is making his first run for office and is among a 10-candidate field, Morrow and Issa included, seeking the GOP nomination. He jumped in when his father opted out.

Unless the GOP nominee is hit by a late-breaking scandal, he will emerge from the March 7 primary as a near sure bet to win the sweepstakes in November.

Republicans hold a 53% to 27% registration edge over Democrats, as of October. Only the 47th District in the heart of Orange County, represented by Rep. Chris Cox of Newport Beach, comes close to that kind of lopsided Republican advantage.

In 1998, the Democrats didn’t bother fielding a candidate in the 48th.

This year there are two Democratic hopefuls--Peter Kouvelis, 33, a former Marine captain, and Richard Maguire, a mortgage broker, both of Dana Point--but neither could be called a liberal.

The only candidate in the entire field to have a strong media visibility is Issa, 46, who has used his personal wealth to mount a major television ad campaign touting his military and business credentials and tearing down Morrow.

Destined to be outspent by five times or more, Morrow, 45, a lawyer by trade, has lashed back with news conferences brimming with accusations.

Press coverage has been skimpy--which gives further advantage to Issa’s extensive campaign of hard-hitting television commercials.

Republican politics in the 48th is played out on the right-hand portion of the GOP spectrum, with a heavy rhetorical emphasis on God and country. This is not a district for moderate Republicans.

It takes a well-calibrated micrometer to find many policy differences among the GOP candidates. “Most of the candidates are running on their resumes,” Issa said.

Take a recent luncheon forum at the Shadowridge Country Club here sponsored by a Republican women’s club. The moderator, a retired judge, asked the candidates to name their top political priority.

Seven said bolstering the military, one said promoting a national referendum to give states supremacy over “family” issues such as abortion and gay rights, and one said “re-enthroning the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.”

Seven of the nine candidates at the forum are military veterans. All uniformly cite their military service as a major factor in shaping their values and views of life and politics. Two have children attending U.S. military academies.

Even the two Republican candidates who are not veterans come from families with proud military traditions.

Kim Debow, 39, of Oceanside, a defense researcher for a management consulting firm, is the wife of a Navy officer and the daughter-in-law of a Tuskegee airman. The other non-veteran is Dornan, 40, whose hawkish father was known as B-1 Bob and whose campaign material boasts that he has “visited more military bases than most sitting members of Congress.”

At the Vista forum, which was open only to Republicans, all the candidates agreed that the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts should be abolished.

“From a Marine’s point of view it’s simple on both issues: lock and load,” said candidate Joe Snyder of Capistrano Beach, 55, a retired Marine Corps colonel who flew helicopters in Vietnam.

In this type of district, Morrow and Issa are front-runners by dint of money, name identification, organization and conservative credentials.

Both jumped into the race within days of Packard’s surprise announcement that he planned to return to Carlsbad after 18 years. He was a dentist and mayor before being elected to Congress as a write-in candidate in 1982.

Both front-runners are known quantities, particularly in the San Diego County portion of the district.

Morrow’s Senate district covers three-quarters of the 48th Congressional District. “People are comfortable with me,” he said.

Issa’s home and business are in Vista, and he handily carried the district in his losing bid against then-state Treasurer Matt Fong for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 1998.

In that race, Issa spent $9 million of his own money, a record for a self-financed primary campaign.

This time Issa has already reported spending $1.5 million--with ads continuing to roll on San Diego and Los Angeles TV stations. Morrow, by mid-February, had raised only about $200,000.

Morrow is a former Marine Corps major and attorney turned officeholder. Issa is a former Army captain and now multimillionaire business entrepreneur and GOP fund-raiser.

Issa supported Morrow’s successful race for an open Assembly seat in 1992 and then for an opening in the state Senate in 1998. Morrow supported Issa over Fong in 1998, and was a force behind Issa being named citizen of the year by the Southern California branch of the Boy Scouts of America.

Morrow and Issa both oppose an international airport for the closed El Toro Marine base; both support Proposition 22, which would ban recognition of same-sex marriage; both oppose gays in the military; both promise to lead search-and-destroy missions against taxation and government regulation.

And neither plans to move his family to Washington.

Issa says his wife, Kathy, will remain in Vista; the couple has a son at the University of Colorado. Morrow, who is divorced and has custody of his 4-year-old son, says the boy will remain in Oceanside with a live-in nanny.

Issa’s main hit on Morrow is that he has proven untrustworthy because he broke a pledge not to take a pay raise in the Legislature and took a gift of scuba diving gear from a lobbyist.

As proof of the no-raise pledge, the Issa campaign cites a 1993 newspaper quote. But a fuller reading of the context surrounding the quote suggests that the Issa interpretation, at the very least, is highly debatable.

A Morrow handler says the diving gear allowed Morrow to get a firsthand view of the fish population off the coast to study an issue before the Legislature involving fish depletion.

Morrow, in turn, has charged that Issa is anti-Israel (because he backs President Clinton’s drive for Palestinian self-rule), that Issa is not a real tax fighter (because he backed a San Diego County ballot measure for a library tax), and that Issa is not a faithful Republican (because he gave a $1,000 in-kind donation of office equipment to a Democrat in a congressional race in Santa Cruz in 1993).

In a news conference, Morrow noted that the Democrat, who lost, had a list of liberal affiliations and sympathies that included the ACLU, the Black Panther Party, the United Farm Workers union, and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

“This was like a contribution to Jane Fonda,” Morrow said of Issa’s assistance.

Issa later told reporters that the Democrat in question is his wife’s cousin and that the donation was a matter of familial loyalty trumping political differences. “I married into a family of Democrats,” Issa said.

Other Republican candidates are William Griffith, 44, a mathematics teacher in Carlsbad who attended West Point; James Luke, 48, a roofing contractor and former deputy sheriff from Temecula; Kevin Mahan, 54, a “country lawyer” and talk-show host from Valley Center; Ed Mayerhofer, 35, an electrician from Laguna Niguel, and Dr. Don Udall, 62, of Newport Beach, a urologist specializing in vasectomy reversals.

Running unopposed for their party’s nomination are Libertarian Joe Michael Cobb, 56, a personal finance consultant from Dana Point; Natural Law candidate Sharon Miles, 47, from Laguna Niguel, and Reform Party candidate Eddie Rose, 61, an engineer from Laguna Niguel.

Rose has suggested a swap between the United States and Cuba: The United States keeps 6-year-old Elian Gonzales, and Cuba can have U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

“I’ll even throw in a few draft choices,” Rose said.