Looking-Glass Politics

Plumes of gray hair spill out from beneath the straw hat of a rope-thin woman working in the garden at a small bungalow in the flatlands of Berkeley. Early Neil Young blares from a boombox so loud that she spies our small entourage only when we are already at her gate. Her weathered face betrays displeasure at the intrusion, until she notices her local congresswoman among our group. With a gardening implement still in hand, she moves toward Barbara Lee. Apparently she has something to say to the woman who, since Sept. 11, might just rank as the single most vilified elected official in America.

Three days after the terrorist attacks last September, Lee joined her colleagues at the National Cathedral for a memorial service attended by five U.S. presidents, past and present. The next order of business that day was a congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to use military force against the perpetrators of the attacks. The measure passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House. Lee cast the sole vote in opposition.

Before that day, Lee had served California’s 9th Congressional District--an area that encompasses Berkeley, Oakland and its surrounding suburbs--in relative anonymity, a diligent but introverted two-term congresswoman toiling in the shadow of a beloved predecessor. That all changed with a single vote. Across the country, radio talk-show hosts rained invectives on Lee’s head, rendering her a symbol of inappropriate dissent at a time of unity and flag-waving national pride.

David Horowitz, a former leftie-turned- conservative social critic, accused her of being a “Communist” who “actively collaborated” with America’s enemies. She was dubbed a “traitor” and “un-American,” and described as “American hating” on the DumpBarbaraLee.com Web site launched shortly after her vote. A former state legislator announced that she would challenge Lee in the Democratic primary. As one top aide to Lee tells it, even congressional colleagues who might have respected her action were wishing her well in whatever life brought her after her constituents booted her from office.

But anyone assuming the worst doesn’t know California’s 9th District. Two years ago, George W. Bush barely edged out Ralph Nader in the presidential election, and Al Gore bested both men by more than a 6-to-1 margin. Lee, 55, is one of the more left-leaning members of the House of Representatives, a dependable vote on a long list of issues--from the environment to civil rights to civil liberties--dear to the average East Bay resident.

On the Saturday before the March primary, I joined Lee, who was dressed casually in tennis shoes and stretch pants, as she walked a precinct. To be sure, her campaign had sent her to walk friendly precincts, but I was figuring that she’d be forced to defend her vote at least occasionally in face-to-face encounters with constituents. She never had a chance. Although she was met by indifference at a few doors, Lee was frequently greeted as if she were a returning hero.

The Neil Young-listening gardener, who had walked over to vigorously shake Lee’s hand and express admiration, was typical. The congresswoman, who wore a jewel-encrusted American flag pinned to her jacket, heard plenty of “thank yous” and lots of “good lucks” and even received a few spontaneous hugs from appreciative constituents.

If she had been running for reelection virtually anywhere else in America, Barbara Lee would have been a certain loser. But the central question in the Lee campaign in the days leading up to the primary was whether she’d win with a small but comfortable majority or garner the same 85% share of the vote she had received two years earlier.

Any exploration of Lee’s popularity among the people of San Francisco’s East Bay must begin on that fateful day in September, a moment Lee recalls with an undercurrent of resentment. “There were many members [of Congress] voicing many of the same concerns that I was voicing that day,” Lee says. “Calling for restraint. Calling for more debate before rushing into anything. Not wanting to see any more innocent lives lost. And not wanting to give such broad authority to the president.” Listening to the debate, it never dawned on her that she might be the only member of the House to vote no.

Colleagues tried persuading her to change her mind before the voting closed, but she refused. The devoutly religious Lee, a practicing Baptist whose father had been a career Army man, believed she was right. She received so many death threats in the days following her vote that the Capitol police assigned around-the-clock plainclothes officers to guard her.

Her schedule was kept secret even from some members of her staff. Lee’s political brain trust tried to remain confident. The majority of the 70,000 e-mails, faxes and phone calls her office received were from outside the district, and not all of them were negative. But there was creeping cause for concern. Man-on-the-street articles running in the local newspapers suggested that there was a decidedly mixed reaction to Lee’s stance, and an October poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies showed that only 53% of those polled said they agreed with Lee’s vote.

Even staunch trade unionists expressed doubts about Lee, despite her unwavering pro-labor record. Lee Halterman, Lee’s campaign chairman, is a political consultant who doesn’t believe in canvassing voters, but he made an exception that time. “For the first time ever in my thirtysomething years of political life,” Halterman says, “I actually did a poll for my candidate.”

His fears were short-lived. About 2,000 people showed up for a pro-Lee rally in downtown Oakland in mid-October, including actor Danny Glover and author Alice Walker, and all around town bumper stickers and buttons claiming “Congresswoman Barbara Lee speaks for me!” appeared. The same poll that revealed mixed reactions to Lee’s vote left no doubt that she was still popular among voters. “We found that even people who disagreed with her vote admired her for her courage,” says Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley political science professor and the director of Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

Lee also received help from the unlikeliest of allies, Audie Bock, a former member of the Green Party who had served a term in the California Assembly. Initially, Bock had called Lee to congratulate her for taking so courageous and principled a stance, but then a few weeks later announced she would be seeking Lee’s seat.

It was Bock who had funded the now-defunct DumpBarbaraLee.com Web site, a virulent piece of cyber-agitprop featuring an unflattering photo of Lee set against an image of the damaged Twin Towers billowing smoke. “Dump the American-hating Barbara Lee from Congress,” read a banner headline. For many of Bock’s once-loyal supporters, the site represented a dumbfounding reversal. Even Kevin Greene, an early key supporter of the short-lived Bock campaign, admits that Bock “hammered on that one vote in such a personal way that it created a backlash of sympathy.”

Bock abandoned her campaign just before the deadline for filing for the primary, leaving Greene, a little-known party functionary, to run in her stead. Any number of better-known local political figures, under different circumstances, might have eagerly made a run for Congress. But even if Lee were vulnerable, challenging her seemed a sure-fire way to dash a promising East Bay political career. Says former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, “If you had future political ambitions and you challenged Barbara, the progressive constituency would’ve been lost to you forever. I mean forever.”

In the looking-glass reality of East Bay politics, Lee’s vote against granting Bush carte blanche in the country’s war on worldwide terrorism has probably rendered her more popular rather than less, just as it has helped her emerge from the long shadow of her former boss, Ron Dellums, a pillar of leftist activism and hero to the Mother Jones set, who represented the 9th Congressional District for nearly three decades. Lee worked with Dellums for more than a decade, ultimately becoming his chief-of-staff, before successfully running for the state Assembly in 1990.

“She’s no longer ‘the congresswoman who succeeded Ron Dellums,’ ” says Halterman, who also worked as a top Dellums aide. “She’s now the congresswoman, period.” That sentiment is echoed by Harris. “People who might’ve said Barbara is wishy-washy or whatever they felt, now all of a sudden had a reason to vote for her.”

Lee won the March primary with 85% of the vote. She faces Republican challenger Jerald Udinsky in November, but the consensus among local political consultants is that Udinsky is such a long shot in the overwhelmingly Democratic district that the national Republican Party probably won’t waste its time or money on the race.

Incumbency no doubt played a role in Lee’s primary victory. In short order she had locked up the endorsement of every local Democratic club, including the club Greene had chaired before running for Congress. Money was another factor. “Protest is something respected here,” says Larry Tramutola, an East Bay-based political consultant who has worked for Lee. “Her protest vote enhanced her ability to raise money nationally, but it wouldn’t hurt her electorally.” Entertainers Bonnie Raitt, Ossie Davis and Bill Cosby contributed to Lee’s campaign, and Sean Penn was the special guest at a small fund-raiser held the night before the primary. Lee had raised $438,000 as of mid-February, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and that figure doesn’t include the money she raised at a swank fund-raiser the weekend before the primary. In contrast, Greene claims to have raised less than $10,000.

Ultimately, factors such as money and the anonymity of her opponent didn’t matter as much as what UC Berkeley’s Cain calls the “extremely liberal nature” of the district. To make his point, Cain tells of a study of voting patterns he conducted in 1996. Not a single precinct in Berkeley or Oakland gave a Republican a majority vote that year. Cain, who has been studying local electoral politics for 26 years, can’t help but confess his surprise at the results of both his Berkeley-Oakland study and the final tally in Lee’s primary run. “You could say,” he says, with a disbelieving laugh, “that Berkeley and Oakland are a universe unto itself.”

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Gary Rivlin, a writer based in the Bay Area, is the author of “The Godfather of Silicon Valley” (Random House).