A ‘Self-Funded’ Candidate: Avoiding Special Interests, or Buying the Office?

Cathryn DeYoung is my new poster child for why people are conflicted about politics and politicians. I have absolutely nothing against her. For all I know she may be the most righteous politician Orange County has ever produced.

But when someone spends at least $2.7 million -- the most ever -- to win a seat on the Board of Supervisors, the impulse is to scratch your head and ask why someone wants to be elected that badly. Especially when DeYoung tapped into her family’s resources and loaned her campaign $2.1 million.

Most of us just don’t operate like that. Or can’t.

But talk to DeYoung, as I did a couple days after last week’s primary, and she has a perfectly logical explanation: Because her opponent has greater name recognition and access to a large campaign fund, DeYoung has to spend big to play the game.

“I would hope people would say that someone who is willing to self-fund, who is not beholden to special interests, is the kind of person they’d like to see on the board,” DeYoung said. “That’s up to them. We’re just giving them the option. If they want to go with business as usual, then go with it.”

I’m not getting into the “special interests” argument. One person’s special interest is another person’s constituent group. But as we saw with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also touted his personal wealth as assurance that he was his own man, just having money doesn’t mean that, once in office, you’re impervious to lobbyists’ charms.

Patricia Bates won the primary for the 5th District seat with 44.3% of the vote and spent about $700,000. She and DeYoung, who got 37.6%, will square off in November.

DeYoung is right about Bates’ presumed head start. Although both women have served on the Laguna Niguel City Council as members and mayors, Bates also served three terms in the Assembly. And when Gov. Pete Wilson was looking to fill the supervisorial seat in 1996 that went to Tom Wilson, Bates was on the short list.

I’ll assume DeYoung isn’t oblivious to concerns about people spending lavishly for public office, but I got the sense she’s already tired of talking about it.

“Oh gosh,” she said, “it shows a level of commitment there that someone wants to step up and do the job. Maybe people say I’m nutty to be devoted to public service. Maybe we are, but at the end of the day it’s a decision [she and her husband] made. We knew to be competitive, we’d have to self-fund. It’s not easy. It was a difficult decision to make.”

That’s the front end of the equation. Of equal concern is the back end. If a candidate lends that much personal money to win election, is it money to be recouped? And if so, how else to do it but with fund-raisers, which, at the level of DeYoung’s spending, means heavy hitters?

When I asked DeYoung if she planned to repay herself through fund-raisers, she said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to repay that amount of money. You just can’t do that in Orange County.”

Even the best fund-raising politician in Orange County couldn’t do it, she said. In specific response to my question, she replied, “We consider it money gone.”

Fair enough. As I said, I have no ax to grind with DeYoung. She says she wants on the board to fight the proposed tunnel between Orange and Riverside counties, to work on traffic improvement in South County, to push for a new county courthouse in the district and to add her voice to law enforcement.

A former private practice attorney and deputy district attorney, DeYoung says she has no political ambitions beyond the supervisor’s job. She concedes that “running for office is not pretty” but is something for which she feels a calling.

She and Bates have five months to slug it out. We haven’t seen the last dollar spent -- perhaps not even the last million.

In a neat irony, DeYoung will have enough time and money to convince voters that her heart’s in the right place and that she’s not trying to buy the seat.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.