GOP Stars Stump for Two Absent Candidates

Stuck in Washington for the hectic closing days of the congressional session and afraid of being labeled derelict if they duck out early to campaign, Southern California incumbents in two of the nation’s hottest U.S. House of Representatives races have recruited prominent surrogates to stump in their stead.

Republican Reps. James E. Rogan of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena area’s 27th District and Steven T. Kuykendall of the South Bay’s 36th District don’t want to give a clear field at home to their well-positioned Democratic opponents.

So this week they did the next best thing, deploying such big names as New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole and former California Gov. George Deukmejian.

With little more than a month to go before the Nov. 7 election, Democrats are targeting Rogan’s and Kuykendall’s districts and a few others across the country, in hopes of winning enough seats to take majority control of the House this fall.

Rogan faces Democratic state Sen. Adam Schiff of Burbank, while Kuykendall, of Rancho Palos Verdes, is in a tight race with Democrat Jane Harman of Rolling Hills, who used to hold the seat.

The Rogan team secured Dole and Deukmejian as speakers at a $250-and-up fund-raising luncheon on Wednesday. Rogan, who addressed the nearly 250 diners briefly by telephone, shared the billing (and, presumably, the take) with Craig Missakian, the Republican candidate in the overlapping 43rd Assembly District.

The luncheon, at the Brandview Collection dining room in downtown Glendale, drew numerous Armenian Americans, an increasingly important voting bloc in the district.

Schiff has the endorsement of the Armenian National Committee, the best known Armenian group in the area. So Deukmejian, who is beloved by Armenian Americans, was seen as giving an especially important boost to Rogan. Dole and her husband, former Sen. Robert Dole, have long-standing ties with Armenian Americans. Elizabeth Dole teared up as she spoke of an Armenian American surgeon who befriended her husband when he was gravely wounded in World War II.

Later Wednesday, Dole joined Kuykendall’s wife, Jan, at a golf course clubhouse in El Segundo to talk about a Republican plan to help senior citizens and the disabled pay for prescription drugs.

The Kuykendall campaign persuaded Whitman to visit Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach on Tuesday, where she toured the school’s state-of-the-art technology facilities--and touted Kuykendall’s record on education.

“I support his approach to education and other legislation,” said Whitman, who is on a Western swing to campaign and raise money for Republicans.

“He’s back in Washington, doing work for his constituents and can’t be here during this crucial time in the campaign, so I wanted to help,” Whitman said.

She was joined at the school by Kuykendall’s elder son, Brent, who took the morning off from his math teaching duties at a Rancho Palos Verdes middle school. Later in the day, Kuykendall issued a statement linking Whitman’s interest in education with his own list of bills on school reform.

Schiff consultant Parke Skelton said the appearances of GOP stars won’t have much effect. “I don’t think people are interested in what someone else has to say about a candidate. They want to see the candidate and talk to the candidate, not someone else,” Skelton said.

Although the Republicans’ campaign aides say they are grateful for the help from party stars, the surrogate system does have its drawbacks.

Dole, for example, spent more of her 45-minute talk sharing anecdotes about her and her husband and pushing the Bush-Cheney presidential ticket than she did praising Rogan and Missakian.

And even enthusiastic boosts from the Republican Party’s brightest stars have their limits in districts such as Kuykendall’s, where registration is split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans and a fifth of the voters are affiliated with neither party. That is even truer in Rogan’s district, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 44% to 37%, and where Rogan’s major role in President Clinton’s impeachment trial angered many constituents.

Rogan campaign manager Jason C. Roe said it is crucial for Rogan to campaign if he is to win crossover votes.

“The strength of his candidacy is his personality,” Roe said, “and we need to get him in front of voters for that to come through.”