The leader of this Mission Impossible is a seemingly mild-mannered economist named Victor Elizalde. But in a time of upheaval, surfaces can be deceiving. Elizalde may look like an economist, but for this great game he’s taken on another persona.
There’s a Republican sleeper revolution afoot in Los Angeles, and tonight Victor Elizalde is starring as Che Guevara.
For Elizalde has been chosen to venture far, far off the red areas of the map and go deep into the forbidden, to a place worse than New Jersey, into West Coast liberalism’s blue and nuanced heart: Victor Elizalde is a Republican running for Congress. He’s running against Henry Waxman. He’s running in Santa Monica and in Hollywood.
And he’s running, he insists, to win.
“California is in play!” Elizalde chants, to the whooping of the 30-odd volunteers who have gathered here on a Friday night to receive their marching orders. And by this he means more than the chicken farms around Sacramento.
Where once the state was a political Mojave of the conservative imagination, the irresistible rise of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has brought water to that desert, and Republicans are rushing out to drink. After a decade in which the most prominent state office held by a Republican was tugboat commissioner for Fresno (not really, but close), Schwarzenegger has amped-up the GOP base like a gaggle of teenagers in the front row at “Terminator 3.”
And they don’t come any more amped than Elizalde. While he takes a libertarian view on some social issues, Elizalde isn’t running away from his pro-war, pro-Bush outlook, in spite of the fact that the 30th District is as granola as they come.
Does he really think he can unseat Waxman, who took 70 percent of the vote in 2002 with only a nominal effort? Elizalde’s eyes steel up: “We’re gonna whack ’em so hard!” he says.
Hopeless is not a word in Victor’s dictionary. (Maybe he needs a new dictionary?)
Both Democrats and Republicans seized on the 2000 census as an opportunity to recut California’s congressional districts, like many other places in the country. The new map surprised no one when it appeared with all the epileptic zigs and zags that incumbents hail as reapportioning and challengers deride as gerrymandering.
The result being, inevitably, that few races in California’s 53 districts are truly competitive. Nonetheless, the system demands that for each incumbent there should be an opponent, an individual prepared to commit time, money and sanity for a one-way trip to the big wipeout.
Come Nov. 2, there will be 53 people — the challengers — with tears before bedtime.
And one of those folks is going to be Democrat John Graham, the self-described “Don Quixote” of California politics. For the past three election cycles, Graham has been tilting at a Chris Cox-shaped windmill in the solidly Republican 48th District of Orange County.
Graham first ran against Cox in 2000, garnering 31 percent of the vote. His tally in 2002 dipped a little from there (28.8 percent). While that drubbing might have scared off lesser souls, it didn’t deter Graham from mounting what he swears is a final effort against Cox.
As Graham succinctly put it, “It’s d骠 vu all over again.”
A university professor and a former Navy Seal, Graham does not immediately appear to be a stand-in for Cervantes’s romantic madman. But when he explains that he won’t be doing any fundraising this time out, intending to run what he calls a “pristine campaign” free of the toxic effects of cash, one hears those windmill blades shwooshing with mirth in the distance.
Graham intends to focus his efforts on promoting ideas and issues through the media and small-group events. Or by word of mouth. Or, as his website suggests, by meeting people while he’s out jogging.
Not that Graham fails to see the challenges in going up against the powerful, popular and well-funded Cox, especially when running on, well, big ideas and Adidas. “I don’t have any delusions about my chances,” he admits. Nonetheless, he feels the need to push the system and get from it what he can.
“It’s about the honor of the race,” Graham elaborates. “Why let these guys sit on their incumbency? The structure isn’t promoting choice. The least we can do is to ask them hard questions.”
If Graham has a Republican counterpart in California, it is Luis Vega, opposing Rep. Xavier Becerra (D) in the 31st District of northeastern Los Angeles. Vega, the Hispanic spokesman for the California GOP, first ran against Becerra in 2002, when he polled a grand total of 19 percent of the ballots (just under 12,000 votes).
That’s a sharp kicking, the kind that would drive most people out of politics for more than one lifetime. But like Graham, Luis Vega ultimately isn’t running for his party; he’s running for the dream. In spite of redistricting, which Vega declares has turned California into a “China or Russia, where the central committee of the party imposes the candidates,” Vega can’t shake his belief in the inherent rightness of the process.
“There are freedoms that we have, but if we don’t exercise them, they don’t seem to be real,” he muses. “Win or lose, I’ve won already.”
Which isn’t to say that the long shots don’t suffer from moments when the vision thing crumbles and the world comes in through the bedroom ceiling with a thud.
Brian Keliher, running a spirited grassroots race against Rep. Duncan Hunter (R) in the 52nd District, groans while describing those mornings when “you wake up asking: How did this happen?” Keliher admits he has an outside — way, way outside — shot at best, with Hunter’s Democratic opponent polling just 25 percent of the vote in 2002.
Perhaps the mother of all uphill races is in San Francisco, where attorney Jennifer DePalma is running for the GOP against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D).
DePalma’s challenge is unusual in that it is entirely possible that she could be defeated twice, by Pelosi and Terry Baum, the Green Party write-in candidate.
DePalma admits she’s essentially just a placeholder for the party and reckons her chances are a little “unrealistic,” but she prizes the opportunity to introduce people in the Bay Area to such words as “Republican” and “tax cuts.”
Not that people haven’t been fair-minded toward DePalma when she explains she’s trying to unseat Pelosi. (Pelosi scooped 80 percent of the votes in 2002). San Francisco is a city with a long history of tolerating the far-out politics of fringe groups, such as the GOP. “They may think ‘crazy,’ but they say ‘courageous,’” says Depalma with a chuckle.
Back at insurgency HQ, Victor Elizalde’s volunteers have retired for pizza and John Kerry jokes (“He’s so stiff!”) under the watchful cardboard eyes of Arnie and Dubya cutouts. But Elizalde’s not joking when he says he’s going to take it across the line in November.
In fact, there’s a hallucinatory quality in talking to Elizalde, who has an almost messianic assuredness about his victory over Waxman that confounds political good sense. A Bush-loving congressman in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica?
It’s an out-of-reality experience one also encounters, though to a lesser degree, in talking with the other challengers. These Quixotes see a mirage democracy of choice and competition, issues and debate that momentarily transfixes and makes them forget the gerrymandered incumbents, truly opposed only by death and scandal.
(The last incumbent to lose his spot in California was former Rep. Gary Condit, ousted in the primary by fellow Democrat Dennis Cardoza after he was bespattered by the scandal surrounding a dead intern, Chandra Levy.)
“We’re making the system work as best we can,” says Brian Keliher. “Not just complaining. We’re there trying to make a difference.”
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