Ex-Democrat Aims at Middle

ROSEVILLE, Calif. -- Toni Casey is at it again. The former mayor of Los Altos Hills wades through the crowd at the Placer County Republican Party’s fundraiser with a wide smile and a piercing gaze, repeating her mantra in a slight Southern lilt.

“Hi. I’m Toni Casey. And I’m going to retire Barbara Boxer,” she says, getting “I’m all for that” from a few women in the crowd.

But getting through the gatekeepers of the state’s most Republican county wasn’t easy. Casey is a Republican. But she’s also a former Democrat who supported President Clinton.

Organizers of the annual fete had invited all three of Casey’s major opponents in the race for Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat, but had frozen Casey out. Gracious but firm, she called state party higher-ups for help and elbowed her way in. True, she’s relegated to a last-minute, posted insert on the evening’s program, but as with so many other battles in this uphill race, Casey casts this one as a victory.

“I am the candidate to beat Barbara Boxer,” insists Casey, a young-looking 59-year-old with an auburn bob and a hummingbird’s insistent energy. “It’s going to take the independent vote and the votes of moderate Democrats who don’t like Barbara Boxer to retire Barbara Boxer.... I can tell you right now, the momentum is growing.”

Momentum or not, she has plenty of hurdles to jump. Apart from her 12 years on the City Council of the affluent 8,000-resident Bay Area town of Los Altos Hills -- which included three stints as mayor -- Casey has never held elected office. But her work in healthcare and biotechnology and as a Bush appointee to the U.S. Small Business Administration has given her plenty of economic and political experience, she says. Casey also has strong ties to Silicon Valley money. As of two weeks ago, she had raised nearly $900,000, only $2,000 of that her own money.

But much of that money is now spent. And Casey is still fighting on several fronts. Former Secretary of State Bill Jones is sailing ahead of the pack with endorsements from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and most of the GOP establishment. Former Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian is closing from the conservative side, heating up talk radio with assaults on immigration and gay marriage.

And, perhaps most critically, former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin is also running as a socially moderate Republican, potentially splitting that part of the vote. Although Casey deviates from Marin in condemning Bush’s immigration proposals, her pitch is otherwise similar: As a woman who supports abortion rights, she can deny Boxer the incumbent’s base.

“Toni Casey has the tenacity,” she tells crowd after crowd, referring to herself in the third person as if to sear her name into the audience’s consciousness. “Toni Casey can go toe to toe with Boxer on the issues.”

These days, such persistence has its price. Casey finds herself fending off increasingly spirited blows from a party that, for a time, simply ignored her. Seizing earlier this month on a 1977 federal tax debt -- long since paid -- and a 1992 arrest for drunk driving, the California Congress of Republicans, a party subgroup, labeled her “damaged goods.” Last week, Marin advisor Ken Khachigian hammered out a memo to “Grass Roots Republicans” blasting Casey as a “Bill Clinton Republican” who would drain votes from Marin.

But Casey is undaunted. The tax debt was carried over without her knowledge from a joint filing made by her husband before their divorce, she says. As for the DUI, she accepts responsibility: “There are no excuses,” she says simply. “Don’t drink and drive.” Proudly in favor of abortion rights -- although against late-term abortion -- Casey makes no apologies for her political conversion shortly before the 2000 Bush election, saying she has always supported local Republicans. “The best president who has ever served this country, Ronald Reagan, was a Democrat,” she notes.

Casey starts one morning at KTKZ-AM radio in Sacramento. She and her 24-year-old daughter and campaign coordinator, Allison, were sent scurrying from their hotel room by a fire alarm in the middle of the night. But Casey is raring to go when conservative talk radio host Eric Hogue greets listeners at 7 a.m. “from the right side of this glorious left coast.”

Casey runs through her credentials: “I am so fiscally conservative I voted against a cable tax,” she tells him. She vows to help California recoup the $58 billion in tax receipts that flow to the federal government and don’t return in the form of services. She supports Bush, she says, but calls his proposal for a guest-worker program amnesty in disguise. Her alternative would offer work permits but require workers to return home to their families. It would also withhold transportation grants to states that allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

The show blinks to a commercial, and when they return, Hogue is chuckling: “During the break you and I had a little frenzy on unions,” he says of Casey’s opposition to labor groups that oppose biotechnology deregulation. “Talk about shooting fish in a barrel!”

That’s right, Casey assures the conservative listening audience: “Get government out of our face is precisely what I’ll do if I’m elected.”

Her next stop is the Sacramento Republican Women Federated Whistle Stop Candidate Forum -- yet another luncheon at yet another golf club, filled with red power jackets and elephant lapel pins. Casey and Allison work the crowd, handing out biographies.

“Aren’t there three people in this race?” one perplexed woman asks. “Actually,” counters Casey, “there are four.”

“I can beat Barbara Boxer,” she tells another. “I’ve been a married mom, a single mom, a soccer mom, a carpool mom. I’m good on education. I have a master’s in healthcare. Boxer will have nowhere to hide.”

When it comes time to speak, Casey gets four minutes, then four more for questions. She whips through her platform rapid-fire: Supports Bush war on terrorism and war in Iraq. Not afraid to differ with the president on immigration. All for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent. Supports small-business development. Favors abortion rights.

But the audience is limp, so Allison jumps in with the first question. Two more trickle in. Then Casey embraces congressional candidate and former California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, who is awaiting his own four-minute turn at the podium, and dashes to her next event.

Casey grew up in Bristol, Va., a town of 12,000 on the Tennessee border. Her mother operated a small antiques business from home. Her father, an accountant, was an alcoholic whose disease, Casey says, made her stubbornly resourceful.

Casey married in 1967 and worked to put her husband through school. By 1972, it was her turn. They moved West, and Casey earned two master’s degrees -- in business administration and healthcare -- at Stanford University. She owned two restaurants in the late 1970s and early 1980s; the first was shuttered when the mall where it was located closed, and the second went out of business.

Casey divorced in 1984. Her ex-husband died 10 years ago, so for years she reared Allison and an older son alone. She has worked as a healthcare and high-tech consultant, and as an advocate for Silicon Valley’s biotechnology sector, lobbying on behalf of companies that sought to market mobile blood-testing technology. The job took her to 17 states. In California, she helped state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) pass legislation that loosened biotech regulations.

Her years in Silicon Valley won her friends with deep pockets. Her list of supporters includes Charles R. Schwab, chief executives of several dozen firms and top venture capitalists, including Tim Draper, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “If she got up in front of Barbara Boxer, I think she’d win it,” Draper said, conceding that Casey had struggled to be heard. “I hope she gets a chance.”

During Casey’s three terms as mayor of Los Altos Hills, she streamlined the planning process and reduced permit fees. A vocal supporter of private property rights, she vigorously opposed a plan to create more public footpaths that bordered the backyards of the town’s well-to-do. Critics there bristled at her outspoken nature. But Casey is unapologetic.

Politically, though, her affiliations have shifted. While she supported Clinton’s runs in 1992 and 1996, and long ago gave money to a group that supports only Democratic women candidates who favor abortion rights, Casey says she has always been a fiscal conservative. She campaigned in 1986 for the U.S. Senate run of Republican Ed Zschau, raising about $50,000 in the unsuccessful contest. Later, she raised money for other Republicans.

At the presidential level, her conversion came at a small breakfast for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in Silicon Valley. As co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney 2000 effort for Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, she helped raise more than a quarter-million dollars. She also stayed true to her beliefs: As one of two California representatives on the platform committee of the 2000 Republican National Convention, Casey pushed hard, though unsuccessfully, for a plank advocating abortion rights. After Bush’s election, she got a job with the Small Business Administration, working with mayors and chambers of commerce around the U.S. But she resigned last spring to run for the Senate, appalled, she says, by what she calls Boxer’s “dismal record, constant Bush bashing and obstructionist politics.”

Still, at the Placer County GOP fundraiser, some harbor suspicions: “It’s kind of hard to figure out a person who supported Clinton and then Bush,” says Tish Pickett. “What happened? Was it a religious experience?”

But Casey’s spirited attacks on Boxer at the podium, and her conviction that she could win, impress even some who have already chosen their favorites.

“She was pretty dynamic, forceful,” said Paul Richardson, a Yolo County deputy district attorney who has never heard of Casey before. “But Bill Jones has more depth of experience.”

Others wonder whether her credentials as a small-town mayor justify a run for Boxer’s Senate seat. “Toni Casey is a very nice lady,” Hogue, the talk show host, confides at the Placer County dinner, more than 12 hours after Casey appears on his show. “But jumping from mayor to U.S. Senate is a tough jump.”