A Political Point That Doesn’t Travel Well

Leave it to Tom Fuentes to big-foot a situation. That was his calling card during the 20 years he ran the Orange County Republican Party, crushing enemies real and imagined.

If you want a handle on how Fuentes saw his job, picture Orange County as a house and Democrats as termites. Even peskier than Democrats, though, were Republicans who dared to challenge the party orthodoxy.

Fuentes’ 20-year reign ended last year, and you’d think he might then have dropped from sight. Unfortunately, he’s got the itch again, back as the apparent point man behind a decision to cancel a program that sends students to study in Spain.

In the grand scheme of things, it might seem an innocuous issue. Until you consider that foreign study is a staple of the American college experience and a big deal to the students who are so inclined. For the last 14 years, Saddleback College has sent college and high school students to Spain; this semester 18 are in Salamanca in the north-central part of that country.

Now, Fuentes has a burr under his saddle. As a trustee in the South Orange County Community College District, which governs Saddleback and Irvine Valley College, he’s part of a board majority that has scrapped future trips to Spain.

At a recent meeting, Fuentes said he was concerned most with the students’ safety and alluded to terrorists acts from Islamic and Basque factions. He also complained that the trip’s cost limits it to “an elite” group of students who can afford it.

But then Fuentes gave himself away.

Noting that many Saddleback and Irvine Valley students either have or will “fight on the battlefield of Iraq under the flag that is behind us,” Fuentes went on to say that “Spain has abandoned our fighting men and women, withdrawing their support. I see no reason to send students of our colleges to Spain at this moment in history.”

Four other board members joined in, citing the potential dangers or the program’s cost.

To state the obvious: Safety is an issue for the students and their parents to weigh. Fuentes’ lament about the cost would make sense only if the district paid the bill. As for terrorists, the Basque separatists have been fighting the government for years and Islamic terrorists have shown they can strike any country in the world.

No, the only new factor is Spain’s decision to pull its troops from Iraq and the year-old Socialist government’s opposition to U.S. policy.

One disgusted parent is Chris Hay, whose son and daughter have been planning the trip Spain for 18 months. “They’re being denied a lifetime experience,” Hay says. “This is all political. I know how dangerous Spain is. I’ve thought about it. It’s dangerous crossing the street. I’m a parent. Would I be putting my kids in danger?”

He asks that rhetorically, meaning he wouldn’t. Instead, he’s steamed at the board majority.

It’s perfectly legitimate for trustees to ask about safety in host countries. But I don’t see how the board justifies killing the trip to Spain when it has signed off on trips to Cambodia, Vietnam, Italy, Greece and New Zealand. It’s not as though the students are going to Spain by way of Baghdad.

Hay was so incensed that he wrote to Fuentes, who replied. Hay showed me Fuentes’ response, and he didn’t mention Spain’s politics. Instead, Fuentes reiterated his concerns about cost and safety issues, including the board’s possible liability.

I don’t buy it for a minute.

This is Fuentes playing politics again with the same high-handedness he always has, couched in the same high-mindedness he developed into an art form. It was a tiresome act that eventually led many of the county’s rank-and-file Republican leaders to want new party leadership.

Now he’s taken his act to college.

Same old Tom Fuentes. Looking for enemies and finding them.