Jones’ Values, Style Show His Farm Roots

Bill Jones settles himself into the creaky seat of his old GMC Suburban. He has his aging golden retriever, Ginger, in the back and a deserted two-lane highway ahead of him.

It is here, on a flat stretch of road through some of California’s most fertile farmland, that this unlikely politician feels most comfortable. Heading out to the ranch near Fresno where he grew up, Jones is taking a short break in his campaign for governor.

He’s spent the last 20 years in state Republican politics. Now, as he aims for California’s top office, Jones, 52, views his quest with the stolid practicality of a farmer preparing a field for a spring harvest.

“Politics is like farming,” Jones says, glancing at a field of dormant grapevines. “You can do everything right and have everything wiped out by a hailstorm. It’s a matter of looking at the conditions, picking a time you can contribute and win. That’s the time we are looking at now.”

As far as Jones is concerned, this is a job he has earned. He has paid his dues, working his way up through local political committees, putting in 12 years as an assemblyman, and eight years as secretary of state. In the last few years, he has been the only Republican holding a statewide office in California.

But that has not helped him much as he runs for governor. As much as anything else, what has hurt Jones is his own behavior, particularly his penchant for treading his own path regardless of the political cost.

In the 2002 presidential primaries, while he was planning his bid for governor, he alienated the Republican front-runner, George W. Bush, by publicly pulling his endorsement and siding instead with the upstart candidacy of John McCain.

At the same time, Jones has been reluctant to expand his base of operations beyond the Central Valley. He never so much as bought a house in Sacramento, preferring to shuttle back and forth in his own plane to preserve time with his family at their Fresno home. He uses the term “Valley girl” to describe young farm women--not those hanging out in malls on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Even his authorship of the state’s three-strikes measure did little to wrest him from an anonymity that aides have long blamed on his common-as-apple-pie name.

Jones dismisses the criticism. “It doesn’t matter if you come from a rural area or a city, our beliefs are the same: safe streets, good education for our children and jobs,” he says.

Though gentlemanly and good-natured by reputation, Jones has displayed an unusual aggressiveness in the governor’s race. He has taken on his GOP opponents, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and businessman Bill Simon Jr.--as if firing his last shot. Which, perhaps, he is.

If he loses, Jones says he is “grounded” enough to recognize that there are other important things in his life. He won’t mourn. He’ll just put on his weathered cowboy boots and head back to his ranch.

Rooted in the Family Farm

For as long as Bill Jones can remember, the family farm in the San Joaquin Valley laid the groundwork for his life.

His parents met in the 1940s while attending UC Davis, and won the land in a government lottery for World War II veterans. Jones’ father, who grew up working at his dad’s Tulare County cotton gin company, fought in the South Pacific. His mother, whose family has lived outside Sacramento, in the mountain town of Placerville, was a captain in the U.S. Air Force.

It was a source of pride among the women in the Jones family that Cora Jones outranked all the men they knew. At 6 feet tall, she was a war-era Martha Stewart, organizing her household with military precision as she raised two sons and a daughter in the modest ranch house. Her son inherited her approach.

“I never saw her run out of milk, and I do that every other day,” says Jones’ wife, Maurine.

Jones’ father, also a conservative Republican, served on the local water board for 47 years, and helped develop state water policy under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

The family, middle class when the crops came in, made ends meet by herding cattle and growing cotton, sugar beets and rice on about 6,000 acres.

Bill Jones was born in Coalinga five days before Christmas in 1949, the middle child sandwiched between a sister and brother. A self-described mediocre student, he attended a five-room school the town of Las Deltas.

Although his parents did not make him work on the farm, Jones wanted his piece of it. So while most kids his age were still sleeping in, Jones was out at 5 a.m. feeding the cows.

By the time he was 11, he had bought several of his own. When still a teenager, he tooled around the farm in an old World War II jeep, like other rural kids oblivious to the strictures of the DMV. He learned how to fly a crop-duster, taking off on a ragtag airstrip near his family farm.

“I grew up with a horse, a dog, a rifle, and a long distance between neighbors,” Jones says.

Few people at the time would have predicted that he would end up in politics, although the prospect did not surprise Jones’ best friend of 40 years, Tim Ward. It wasn’t so much that Jones was a natural leader. It was that he had the natural ability to fix things--old tractors, broken fences, sick cattle and hurt feelings.

“He’s not one of these guys who thinks his opinion is the only one that matters,” says Ward, who runs his family’s fuel supply business in Firebaugh. “He can look at both sides and negotiate a solution.”

It was a skill that Jones would demonstrate as student body president at Cal State Fresno, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1971 in agribusiness.

The country was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and tensions were running high at the university. Jones, who had run for student government at the urging of his fraternity brothers, was on the conservative side, supporting the war while calling for calm at the university.

When word got out that protesters planned to march on the agriculture college, other students armed themselves with shovels and pitchforks to confront them.

Fearing the worst, Jones stood in the road leading to the agriculture school, hoping he could head off a conflict.

“Bill kept them apart,” says Maurine Jones, who was a student there at the time. “He got leaders together to sit down and talk.”

It was the first time Jones dealt with political strife.

“It as a very contentious time,” Jones says. “But it really piqued my interest in politics. I learned to listen and understand what people were saying.”

He and Maurine, a former Miss Tulare County, married in 1971. In the 30 years since, Maurine Jones says her husband has only yelled at her once--when she accidentally washed his wallet.

From the start of their romance, however, Jones made it clear that he would enlist in the Marines.

In 1971, she went with him to sign his papers. But there was a problem: Government doctors discovered that Jones had serious back problems from years of heavy lifting on the farm. They gave him a honorable discharge and sent him home.

“I remember that day so clearly,” Maurine Jones says. “I have never seen him so down and disappointed. For a wife to see that, it was devastating for me as well. On the other hand, I was happy. I didn’t want him to go. Talk about conflicted feelings.”

Jones said he wanted to go to Vietnam.

“I felt it was an obligation to the country,” he says. “And if I was going to go, I want to go with the Marines.”

But the rejection would indirectly lead him to politics.

He went to work managing the family farm, expanding its cattle operation to one of the largest in the area. Maurine taught English at the schoolhouse in Las Deltas. Soon, the newlyweds heard that President Nixon needed volunteers for his reelection campaign.

The two signed on, hooking up with political consultant Ed Rollins, who was heading up Nixon’s Central Valley effort. Thirty years later, Rollins is running Jones’ gubernatorial bid, as a volunteer.

Soon after the Nixon campaign, Jones decided to pursue politics for himself.

“I had built up my [farming and ranching] operation,” Jones says. “I was happy with how it was going, and I could have stayed there. But I felt I had something more to contribute.”

He says he liked the idea of helping people solve their problems. He lived, after all, in a place where county supervisors let their constituents into their homes to gripe until late into the evening.

“Public service is so important,” he says. “If you do it well, you take care of the people and they take care of you.”

At the time, he told his wife that he would serve two years in office--to make up for missing out on the Marines.

In 1974, he won a seat on the Fresno County Republican Central Committee. Two years later, he ran for 29th Assembly District seat, but lost.

“It was right after Watergate and you couldn’t find a Republican anywhere, it was so bad,” Jones says.

He learned a lesson: When he ran six years later, he hired the winner’s campaign consultant--and won.

As it turned out, Jones had found a job that he liked as much as farming. So every time an election approached, he would sit down with his wife and young daughters and ask them how they felt about enduring another race.

“Finally, as the girls got older . . . they would say ‘Mom, Dad really wants to talk about this again?’ ” Maurine says. “They didn’t have any understanding that it was any big deal. For them, it was just a way of life.”

Each daughter has picked half of their father’s vocation--one politics and the other farming. Jones’ younger daughter, Andrea, 24, worked as a youth coordinator on McCain’s presidential effort and headed the unsuccessful 2000 U.S. Senate campaign for Republican Tom Campbell. Now she is assisting her father.

Jones’ older daughter, Wendy, 27, is helping run the family farm with her husband, Ryan Turner.

Solidly Conservative, but Independent

In Sacramento, Jones quickly cemented his reputation as a solidly conservative member of the Assembly minority. Even so, he avoided too close a connection with a brash brand of Assembly Republicans who moved even further to the right with a take-no-prisoners approach. He was eventually rewarded for his independence.

When the moderate Republicans decided in 1991 to oust their confrontational leader, they turned to Jones.

“He’s fairly open to different ideas,” says longtime GOP strategist Tony Quinn. “He’s pretty pragmatic as to how he approaches government problems.”

As an assemblyman, he often carried measures protective of the agriculture industry. Some of his colleagues said privately that Jones’ career was so focused on the Central Valley that he had little feel for the gritty issues facing California’s urban areas.

Determined to prove them wrong, Jones broadened his focus, co-writing in 1994 the three-strikes measure that required a sentence of 25 years to life for those convicted of three serious felonies. It was the idea of Fresno resident Mike Reynolds, whose daughter was murdered in a 1992 robbery.

That same year, Jones ran for secretary of state, edging past his Democratic rival by fewer than 40,000 votes of more than 7 million cast. In 1998, he struggled again and barely won reelection.

He vowed to run his office as a “nonpartisan referee” and indeed has angered some members of his own party with his support of campaign finance reform and the so-called blanket primary, an effort to increase voter turnout by allowing all voters to vote for any candidate, not just one from their party.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have praised Jones’ performance as secretary of state, calling him one of the best in generations. Yet some have wondered if he has been too much of a maverick for his own good.

Though the secretary of state owed much to former Gov. Pete Wilson, who handpicked the Fresno Republican to lead the Assembly’s GOP caucus 10 years ago, the two men later disagreed over federal “motor voter” legislation aimed at increasing registration.

More damaging was his decision in spring 2000 to abandon his pledge to back Bush and throw his support to McCain. At the time, Jones said he was disappointed with Bush’s attempts to dissuade Democrats and independents from crossing over to vote in the Republican primary.

His political consultant, Rollins, says he cautioned Jones against changing his endorsement.

“Clearly he believed that McCain was the best guy at the time and he did what he thought was right,” Rollins says. “Bill has always done that.”

But, he says: “It’s not the sort of decision that a guy running for governor would do. Obviously these political people are significant, and they let him know they didn’t look favorably upon what he did.”

Others were particularly perplexed because Jones had given Bush his word, and the move cut against his image of rectitude.

“It makes people question his political judgment,” says veteran consultant Rick Taylor.

The uproar was somewhat lost on Jones.

“I felt strongly that the state needed someone with as broad a voice as possible,” Jones says. “I had known John for quite awhile. . . . I felt I needed to do what I felt was best for California.”

After the primary, he switched his support back to Bush. Jones still drives around with a “Bush/Cheney Farm and Ranch Team” bumper sticker on his truck.

“The day after the primary, I supported the president,” Jones says. “I raised a quarter of a million dollars for him at my home. And I will support him in the future. I’m very proud he’s a Republican.”

But Jones got his comeuppance. While the president has not endorsed a candidate in the GOP primary, he and his operatives encouraged Riordan into the race, thereby saddling Jones with a multimillionaire opponent.

At this late stage of the campaign, Jones continues to struggle to raise cash. He’s been forced to sit by as Riordan and Simon take to the airwaves.

Making matters worse, the nonpartisan nature of his job has left him without the support of various interest groups who could take up some of the slack. His campaign operation is minimal. While Riordan travels around the state in a chartered jet and a luxury bus, Jones flies himself to events in the same plane he uses to round up cattle.

Struggling to make up for funding difficulties, he has sharpened his tenor, bitterly criticizing his opponents at every turn.

Jones tells audiences that his foes can “raise money but cannot raise a record.”

“I’m the one with the experience to do this job,” Jones says. “If I thought the other candidates were qualified, I wouldn’t be running.”

At a recent stop in Irvine, at a conference of Latino business people, Jones blasted Riordan for proposing a “living wage” for workers in the state.

“The consequences of a massive increase in the minimum wage will be throwing people out of work and slamming the doors of small and medium-sized businesses,” Jones says. “Everyone knows that, at least everyone outside of Santa Monica.”

At an appearance in Sacramento, he accused Gov. Gray Davis of turning the state’s large surplus into a massive deficit.

“I’m a farmer and a rancher,” he tells those gathered to hear him. “I know the value of hard work and I know the stress and strains of meeting a payroll and staying within budget.

“The one thing I have learned both in business and politics is that to succeed one must lead and to lead one must know where one wants to go.”

Last year, before Jones made his candidacy official, some GOP strategists tried to get him out of the race, convinced that circumstances were aligned against him.

“I . . . all but begged him to run for lieutenant governor,” says Dan Schnur, a Republican consultant close to Jones. “I said, ‘you will be able to establish yourself for the future.’ ”

But Jones brushed aside the suggestion.

“He said, ‘I’m not the kind of person who runs for office as a steppingstone to the next one,’ ” Schnur says. “He believes he’ll be a better governor than the other three candidates. He said, ‘Either I’ll be governor or I’ll go home to the ranch.’ ”

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Bill Jones: His Life, His Words

* Born: Dec. 20, 1949

* Residence: Fresno

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in agribusiness-plant science from Cal State Fresno, 1971.

* Party: Republican

* Career: Cattle rancher and farmer who served in the Assembly from 1982 to 1994, including a stint as the Republican floor leader. Co-author of the three-strikes law against career criminals and supporter of the law moving California’s primary to early March. While secretary of state over the last eight years, Jones has cleansed the rolls of ineligible voters and put campaign information on the Internet.

* Strategy: Demonstrating to voters that his experience in state government would pay dividends as governor.

* Personal: Married, wife Maurine, two grown daughters.

“‘Politics is like farming. You can do everything right and have everything wiped out by a hailstorm. It’s a matter of looking at the conditions, picking a time you can contribute and win. That’s the time we are looking at now.”

*

“‘The one thing I have learned both in business and politics is that to succeed one must lead and to lead one must know where one wants to go.”

*

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