Congress Gets an Earful From the Folks at Home

Not as accurate as polls but still useful in taking the nation’s heated temperature, constituents’ phone calls, letters and town-hall turnout have been streaming in to the offices of California members of Congress.

* Brad Sherman, the Democrat from Sherman Oaks, says pointedly that he is “detecting a less jingoistic, a more humane and sophisticated and cautious approach than I see in the country when I watch the Fox News Channel.” A town hall meeting in his district drew some 300 people, and although most supported military retaliation, they do so somberly. “It’s a grimly resolved, nuanced desire to hold accountable those who should be held accountable,” he said. “It’s not a ‘Let’s go nuke Afghanistan. USA! USA!’-chanting crowd.”

* In Democrat Howard Berman’s Mission Hills district, in the upper reaches of the San Fernando Valley, the phones have not been frantically ringing. Berman himself, one of the longest-serving of California’s congressmen, says he is guided more by his foreign policy experience as a member of the House International Relations Committee than by constituent comments. “My district elects me to use my best judgment in these things,” said Berman.

Berman backs the notion of a worldwide anti-terrorism coalition. “I’m not a pacifist,” he said. “There is evil out there that needs to be confronted or more innocent people will die.”

* In Orange County, Huntington Beach Republican Dana Rohrabacher was completely bowled over by a barrage of “vile and abusive” phone calls and e-mails after he criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for not having anticipated attacks like the ones on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, ripping the agencies for “a catastrophic failure of American intelligence.”

“We got the most nasty, hateful e-mails in the first hour [saying] how could I even think of ruining their sadness with anger,” Rohrabacher said. “After an hour, it began to change. When what happened started sinking in, people have been saying thank God you’re going to hold people accountable for not protecting us.”

* Rialto Democratic Congressman Joe Baca said the angriest calls have been demanding an immediate military strike against “anyone from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or Iraq.” Baca, who served in the 101st Airborne in 1966, said, “I try to calm people down. I tell them we can’t just go out on a rage killing everyone in sight.” Two of his constituents died on Sept. 11: one in the Pentagon and another in a jet that hit the north tower of the World Trade Center.

* In Republican David Dreier’s congressional office in Covina, a man walked in the day after the attack, wanting to reenlist. George Tripodi is 75. He landed at Normandy in 1944, was wounded and captured in the Battle of the Bulge and spent the rest of the war in a German slave-labor camp. He won 30 medals in the war, and lost all of his teeth in the camp. “I don’t care if others don’t like America. I do. It’s the best country on Earth.”

A Discordant Note at Memorial Service

Six days after the terrorist attacks, California’s political aristocracy gathered in critical mass in San Francisco for a memorial service: Gov. Gray Davis, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, Mayor Willie Brown, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, among others.

Early in the three-hour service, Davis and Feinstein presented flags that had flown over the U.S. Capitol to friends of two Bay Area men aboard the hijacked plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field, perhaps because passengers reportedly voted to overpower the hijackers.

But in his allotted one minute, Amos Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church, began asking what the United States had done, “intentionally or unintentionally,” to “set up this climate,” citing among other issues global warming and the World Conference Against Racism.

Davis and Feinstein walked out during his remarks--perhaps because of scheduling demands, perhaps not. Pelosi, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, scrapped her prepared remarks to address Brown’s.

Coming after remarks about faith and love, “it was really unfortunate,” said Pelosi, who said she knows and admires Brown.

She said that though she and many at the memorial share concerns about such issues, “What happened in New York placed the terrorists outside the circle of civilized human behavior. . . . The motivation for terrorism is to instill fear. This isn’t about issues, it’s about fear.”

Pols Lower Their Rhetorical Standards

In Orange County, county supervisors evidently were matching something other than wits in squaring off over a proposed airport at the abandoned El Toro Marine Corps air base.

Anti-airport Supervisor Todd Spitzer said that his “probing questions” about the airport prompted fellow Supervisor Chuck Smith to use a vulgarity as a verb. Spitzer later apologized for making the remark public, and then puckishly corrected himself on how Smith had used the word. “I was amped and [Smith] was amped,” Spitzer said, “and it was the passion of the moment.”

Spitzer, who has a reputation for an emery-board personality and aggressive temperament himself, won his supervisorial seat in 1996 after his challenger, Assemblyman Mickey Conroy, lost his temper and, at a GOP election event, publicly and angrily flipped off Spitzer with both hands.

Quick Hits

* On the day of the World Trade Center attack, Fresno agreed to let the California Army National Guard expand its aircraft repair depot at the Fresno Yosemite National Airport.

* To an e-mail notice about its meeting with former state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, the Valley Democrats United group appended a reminder that “Items for the Garage Sale may be brought to the meeting for pick-up”--an Oct. 6 sale benefiting victims of the attacks of Sept. 11.

* Since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the office of Modesto Democratic Congressman Gary Condit has not received a single news media inquiry about missing intern Chandra Levy, Condit’s chief of staff, Mike Lynch, told Scripps-McClatchy Western Service.

* A 3-year-old yellow Lab named Roselle was being praised in Santa Barbara, where she was trained as a guide dog, after she led her blind companion, Michael Hingson, down to safety from the 78th floor of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

* In May 2000, Michael Bustamante was pulling down $102,348 a year when he quit as press secretary to Gov. Gray Davis to work at Voter.com, and soon thereafter at a Sacramento PR firm before he was rehired last week as a senior advisor to Davis at an annual salary of $122,000.

* The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors votes Tuesday on a measure to condemn the attacks of Sept. 11, to support bringing the perpetrators to justice, and to recommend that Angelenos give blood.

Word Perfect

“Intercepting Air Force One with a plane is totally unbelievable. . . . If you were going to do something like that, you would camp out where the president was going to take off.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from Vista, quoted in the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call questioning whether Air Force One was indeed a target of terrorist attacks.

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Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Faye Fiore, Sue Fox, Dan Morain and Jean O. Pasco.