The Rock, the Hard Place and the Man in the Middle

Darrell Isa is stuck in his silver Lxus on the rain-slicked streets of Washington, D.C., an hour late. A crowd has gathered around vegetarian grape leaves and pumpkin-filled kebabs at the Egyptian embassy, waiting to hear a few words from the distinguished gentleman from California. He is one of the lone Arab American voices in a decidedly pro-Israel Congress, a 48-year-old car alarm millionaire who never held public office before he was sworn in 20 months ago as the Republican from Vista. He has no seniority and therefore no clout--49th most junior congressman in California’s delegation of 52. But his Lebanese lineage makes him one of a half-dozen Arab Americans in Congress, one of the most politically powerful members of a politically powerless minority.

It is an odd mantle for a kid who grew up in the Jewish section of Cleveland Heights, down the street from the Taylor Road Synagogue. He knows more words of Yiddish than Arabic. His Boy Scout troop observed Saturday services on camping trips. So Arab-in-Residence is not the job Issa envisioned two years ago when he made a run at the House of Representatives, campaigning as a loyal law-and-order conservative, not a Lebanese Christian.

But the evils of Sept. 11 had a way of remapping everyone’s destiny. In Issa’s case, it gave him an identity he never asked for. The handsome lawmaker, dark-haired and swarthy-complexioned, found himself barred from an Air France flight to the Middle East after 19 hijackers with similar dark hair and swarthy complexions made racial profiling a national pastime. Weeks later, his district office on the fringes of peaceful San Diego turned up as a target in an alleged bomb plot by the radical Jewish Defense League. The Arab American community, desperate for sympathetic ears in high places, is courting him mightily to champion its cause. They crave a lawmaker who knows what it feels like to be viewed suspiciously by passengers on an airline flight.

So Issa assumes he is headed for welcoming arms as he drives in a warm rain this June night to a reception hosted by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He thinks he is going to get some sort of award. Instead, he gets a grilling.

“Arabs are being attacked, isn’t now the time for legislation more than ever?” demands Ban Al-Wardi, a young Los Angeles attorney disappointed in the congressman’s refusal to press for laws against Arab hate crimes.

“The fact is, if not for the leadership of the president, the American people might be willing to lock up Arabs the way they did the Japanese,” Issa responds with tepid restraint, sounding more like a dispassionate pundit than a man who has felt the sting of ethnic prejudice.

The young woman is exasperated. Where is his outrage? Her friends and family endorsed Issa’s candidacy, brought him into their homes for fund-raisers and meet-and-greets, figuring they had found a comrade in the fight for Arab justice. In Arabic, after all, “Issa” means “Jesus”--but from his perch in Washington, he has hardly acted the role of savior. “A lot of people in California supported him because he made himself out to be a leader for the Arab American community. But he is not willing to be a leader,” she later fumes. “It’s sad. The only difference he has made is a negative difference.”

Issa pops open a Diet Pepsi and moves on to the next gaggle of guests. Every fourth person in the room seems somehow disappointed that his thinking is not “more Arab.” If you didn’t know it from his roots, they complain, you wouldn’t know it from his record.

But to call Issa Arab American seems a stretch of the ethnic imagination. It’s a label that even he questions. He likes to think of himself as an honest broker, not a standard-bearer. Whatever Jesse Jackson is to black Americans, whatever Cesar Chavez was to Latinos, Darrell Issa will never be to his Arab American brethren. He is working inside Washington, and that is not how inside Washington works. The watchwords there are capitulation and compromise. The freshman creed: lay low, don’t do anything stupid, get yourself reelected.

But after the terror attacks, Issa found himself with a surname that opened doors in the Middle East. Perhaps it was freshman naivete or an ego swollen by corporate success that led him to believe he could make a difference, but he decided his calling was to help broker peace in the Middle East. His only credentials were the accident of his ethnicity and the neighborhood in which he happened to grow up. Sympathetic to two intractable sides, he took the middle ground. The result: The Arab camp is consistently disappointed that he’s not more bullish; the Israeli camp is consistently surprised.

“Some people think he sold out,” says Ziad J. Asali, president of the anti-discrimination committee. “But Darrell is a freshman congressman with a tiny margin of power ... He has to take a position more in the mainstream and less to the liking of this one Arab American constituency that wants 100% support on every position that comes along. I can’t blame him for that.”

Issa has traveled to the Middle East three times since Sept. 11, the first time in a display of ecumenical brotherhood with Rep. Robert Wexler, a Jewish Democrat from Florida. He has watched television with Yasser Arafat at the Ramallah compound. He was the first U.S. lawmaker to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad, establishing a diplomatic dialogue with Congress where none had existed. And in June, he made small talk with Ariel Sharon at the Capitol, posing for a picture that he promptly framed and displayed on his desk.

By any measure, that is remarkable access for a first-term lawmaker. But his impartial stand in a divisive conflict isn’t winning him many friends. When the House Republican leadership pressed in May for a resolution of solidarity with Israel, Issa voted yes--then spent a half-hour on the floor lamenting the measure’s failure to acknowledge the other side. Afterward, he caught it from every direction. Phone calls and letters poured in from Arabs who said he’d caved. A pro-Israel group descended on his office in protest, presuming he had voted against it rather than for it.

“People assume if you’re an Arab American you must think a certain way,” Issa says later in his cramped office, preparing for a morning meeting with Sharon that ultimately will be dashed by another suicide bombing. “Well, I’m an Arab American who grew up delivering poultry for a rabbi. So who am I?”

The screensaver on one of the computers in Issa’s office is a picture of the brick English Tudor on Antisdale Road where he grew up with five siblings, his mother’s 1967 Ford Fairlane parked in the driveway. Cleveland Heights was a union town of steel and rubber. The schools were good and the laws strict--no pickups parked on the street, no restaurants that served take-out. His mother took the children to a Mormon church while his father waited in the car, drinking coffee and smoking.

Issa’s grandparents had emigrated from Lebanon and he learned a few words of Arabic--mostly phrases such as, “God bless you.” But the greater ethnic presence was outside his front door, where half the neighborhood was Jewish.

It was a nice place to grow up, though it required his father to work two full-time jobs--as a truck salesman and X-ray technician. He died of a stroke at age 50. “Money was always a problem in our family,” Issa recalls. “Being one of the eldest, you knew there was no way the family could support a college career. My paper route wasn’t just for giggles and pocket change. I had to figure out how to pay for college.”

If Issa is embracing his Lebanese heritage now, it comes after years of distancing himself from his working-class past. As a teenager, he was indicted with his older brother on charges of stealing a red Maserati from a car dealership; he denied the charge and the case ultimately was dismissed. On his 17th birthday, he dropped out of high school to join the Army. He left 10 years later with an engineering degree and headed for the private sector, scrambling for a leg up in the competitive auto-security business. An apparent arson fire tore through his manufacturing plant in 1982, weeks after the insurance coverage was increased. That aroused suspicion, but no charges were ever filed.

Issa went on to make millions, inventing anti-theft gadgets for cars with menacing names such as Viper, Python and Wasp. His firm, Directed Electronics Inc., was thriving. So with the blessing of the company’s co-founder--Kathy, his wife of 22 years--Issa turned his attention to politics and a 1998 bid for the U.S. Senate. A rough primary and late revelations about his somewhat checkered past helped sink him.

Two years later, though, Issa was on his way to Congress. Indeed, if he has a gift for anything it is for sizing up a problem and finding a solution, whether it be rising above meager beginnings or taking apart a sluggish laptop. Once he fixed a photocopier after the repairman gave up. When a cell phone company told him no charger yet made could work in the house and car, he invented one. He has 36 patents, most of which hang on the walls of his office.

His tenacity is matched only by his energy. Operating on little sleep, he recently visited four Arab states in three days. During a campaign stop at an Armenian anniversary celebration in Fresno years ago, he got carried away and did a cartwheel on the dance floor. Maybe it’s all the Diet Pepsi--his secretary says he drinks so many a transfusion might be more efficient.

That this resourceful businessman is now enmeshed in the unfamiliar world of international politics is less the work of design than fate. He came ready to lend his expertise to his country, was denied a seat on the prestigious Commerce Committee, and sat on International Relations in relative obscurity. Until that terrible Tuesday.

Like most politicians, Issa is driven by a desire to be noticed on the world stage, a pipedream for a freshman congressman from San Diego County. But 9/11 gave him the opportunity and his surname gave him the access. Now, one year later, he is engaged in international diplomacy at the highest levels--not the knee-jerk conservative some expected, nor the down-the-line party loyalist Republican House leaders were counting on. Challenging the GOP’s long-standing fidelity to Israel, Issa suggests his party is “playing to a single-minded attempt to move Jewish voters over to the Republican column.” An ultra-conservative Internet columnist has dubbed him “Jihad Darrell.”

While some activists think he’s too quick to compromise, many experts see in Issa a maturing politician who foregoes grandstanding for incremental progress. “He’s not so much bold as responsible,” says George Cody, executive director of the American Task Force For Lebanon. “He raises the right questions at committee hearings. He doesn’t speak to the Arab side or the Israeli side ... But I don’t think he holds his finger to the wind or follows his leadership lock, stock and barrel. For that he deserves credit.”

But Issa also is a novice, with a reputation for brashness and poorly chosen words. He once called then-President Clinton “a slut.” He comes out with phrases such as, “A lot of my best friends are Jewish,” although the proclamation seems more a point of pride than veiled intolerance. He admits his religious history is less likely to come from the Torah than the “Old Testament for Dummies.” But many leaders in the Arab American community appreciate Issa’s knowledge of the region and its culture, which enables him to move easily in a sometimes misunderstood world.

“The stars are aligned for peace,” Issa insists, noting that all of the Arab League states agreed at the Beirut summit in March to Israel’s existence along pre-1967 war borders, a massive shift in mind-set for states that spent more than 50 years challenging Israel’s right to exist. He knows people say he’s naive, particularly in light of the recent violence, but he believes peace is inevitable. After all, the Hundred Years’ War ended, even if it took 100 years.

So he presses his colleagues to reject proposed sanctions against states such as Syria and the PLO, and build on progress with more dialogue. He recently spent two hours drinking tea with Syria’s Assad, and handed him a personal letter urging a more progressive course than his late father’s. The new president read the letter, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.

In the vast diplomatic machinery struggling to settle the conflict, Issa’s role is relatively small, yet not without some political risk. Congress’ heart belongs to Israel, and those who defend the Arab view risk the wrath of a powerful Jewish lobby. Rep. Earl F. Hilliard, a five-term Democrat, lost his Alabama primary in a June runoff after Jewish supporters threw their votes to an opponent they perceived to be more sympathetic to Israel. Fellow incumbent Democrat Cynthia McKinney, who faced a similarly tough challenge in Georgia in August, was virtually the only lawmaker spotted at a recent pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, while a demonstration for Israel drew a parade of congressional stars.

Issa’s solidly Republican San Diego-area district--with no significant Arab American constituency--gives him job security as long as he pays attention to local issues. (Indeed, it was a meeting with some of the Southern California developers who nurtured him politically that made him late for the Egyptian embassy bash.) But if he aspires to another run for Senate--which many deem likely--his credentials as Congress’ “go-to Arab” can only harm him in a match against incumbent Barbara Boxer--a Jewish Democrat.

“Everything I’ve done on this issue is counter to being a good thing to do if you simply want to be politically popular,” Issa concedes. “There are rules here: Take a trip to Israel and put your hand on the Wailing Wall, don’t take any new positions and don’t try to move the debate. Anyone will tell you that.”

So why do it? Some people say it’s ego--he needs to be a player and thinks he has ideas. Who else would spend a record $9 million of his own money on a pie-in-the-sky run for the U.S. Senate? Maybe it’s a sense of duty--access and opportunity fell into his lap and shame on anyone who fails to seize it.

Or maybe it’s like the photocopier. It’s sitting there broken and no one else seems to be able to fix it.

his 3 o’clock appointment is on the other side of the Capitol. Most members take the sleek electric subway across campus. Not Issa. True to his car-worshipping California roots, he heads for the garage. There in a front-row space sits his beloved Lexus. With its master still 20 paces away, the car starts up, Harry Potter-style. The air conditioner is humming by the time he gets in. He punches in his destination--Hart Senate Office Building--and a soothing female voice on the navigational system instructs: “Turn left at the first light.... “

“This,” Issa proudly explains, “is what got me here.”

His fortune was born of his passions--cars and gadgets, like the little button on his key chain that starts the engine from a block away. So far in his life, there haven’t been too many obstacles he couldn’t outwit. But this latest one is a whopper. Very un-Issa-like, he begins with modest goals. “It’s a very small role I play,” he says of his Middle East efforts. “When I go into the region, I am educating members of Congress one by one, two by two, helping them understand there is opportunity there. And every time you have a visit where leaders there understand a little bit more about our Congress, it makes it easier for them to accept some of the things we might do without taking offense.

“I try to be an out-of-the-box thinker and there have to be some solutions. I may not be the one who comes up with them, but seeing what is possible, talking to as many people on all sides of the issue, maybe I can help move the process that will lead to peace.”

The Lexus glides into the Hart driveway.

“Very nice car, sir,” the guard coos.

Issa pulls into the parking space, another gadget guiding him along so he doesn’t bump the curb.

Beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeeeep. A perfect landing.

Now if only he could invent a button for peace.