When Elephants Collide

The mood is buoyant and light among members of the Placer County Republican Central Committee, who are gathered for their regular monthly meeting in the gleaming new county Elections Office in Auburn. Red, white and blue bunting behind the front counter frames a grinning Chairman Ken Campbell as he calls the meeting to order.

It’s Ash Wednesday, but that’s not as important as the occasion that just passed, or the one to come. Over the previous weekend, at the California Republican Party Convention in San Jose, Campbell accepted an award from the state chairman naming Placer the “Best Performing County Republican Central Committee.”

The award is a nod to the Placer Republicans’ milestone last year, when they unseated storied GOP stronghold Orange County as having the highest percentage of registered Republicans, a feat accomplished through both aggressive outreach efforts and sheer demographics in this bastion of the wealthy and white.

Long nicknamed “Orange County North” for its status as a second-tier party powerhouse, Placer County has now emerged from the shadows to stake its claim as the center of Republican power in California, a status with deep ideological and historical roots.

“It’s amazing how Placer County’s stature has risen in the state party,” Campbell tells the 40 party faithful in attendance this evening. “I think these are exciting times. I think the best times for the Republican Party are in the future. We just need to fasten our seat belts.”

Perhaps his last comment is more telling and prophetic than he intends. Placer County Republicans just aren’t used to dealing with contested congressional primary elections, not with the entrenched and seemingly untouchable Congressman John Doolittle in charge.

“The future” waits on the other side of the March 5 primary date, but the party’s present path is a bumpy one. While Republicans are strong as ever in Placer County, they have largely fallen from favor with the California electorate, which has sided overwhelmingly with Democrats for the last several years, a trend the GOP hopes to reverse this year.

The meeting moves along as they plot their party’s return to prominence with fund-raisers, get-out-the-vote efforts, registration booths and precinct walking. The youngsters of the group—23-year-old county party spokesman Aaron Klein and 35-year-old Paul Hrabal, president of the Republican Congress of Placer County—rift off the discussion at one point, joking back and forth in muffled tones and cracking each other up like a couple of class clowns.

The Republicans appear to be unified and hopeful, with the only moment of minor acrimony coming when former county supervisor Phil Ozenick unsuccessfully tries to get the committee to approve his resolution urging stricter limits on immigration, his second such attempt in the last year. Tonight, with the press present, the committee musters the two-thirds vote needed to avoid even discussing the controversial proposal.

Yet deep divisions lurk beneath the veneer of party unity, manifested in increasingly nasty battles for control of the party both in Placer County and on the state level. Doolittle’s race against moderate Republican challenger Bill Kirby is about more than just who will serve in Congress. It’s about what it means to be a Republican, or for that matter, a member of any political party. It’s about whether advocating unpopular ideals is an asset or a liability, a vice or a virtue.

For while Klein and Hrabal seem like buddies tonight, they’ve spent months slinging the region’s two most stinging political epithets at one another: Hrabal calls Klein and his ilk “extremists” while Hrabal and other congress members are derided as “liberals.”

A look at Paul Hrabal’s palatial home—located in the gated Granite Bay community of Los Lagos—and one can understand the appeal of fiscal conservatism to this young, retired, dot-com millionaire. After all, the political right thinks people like Hrabal are entitled to keep all their hard-earned dough. But Hrabal claims his conservatism predated his wealth.

“I have a ‘keep government out of our lives’ mentality,” said Hrabal, recalling with pride how his first vote at age 18 was cast for President Ronald Reagan’s re-election, as the Great Communicator was voicing Hrabal’s core value.

Yet Hrabal has a problem with Republican social conservatives like Doolittle. He says they have hurt the party with their divisive and intolerant positions on hot-button issues like abortion, gun control and homosexuality.

Being gay, Hrabal has personally felt the impacts of that intolerance. Last year, shortly after Hrabal was named capital region coordinator for Bill Simon’s gubernatorial campaign, he was the target of a mailer to Republicans around the county warning “Gay activist appointed to Simon campaign.” It was purportedly mailed by a Richard Hughes, who it turns out doesn’t exist, and the true source of the mailer has yet to be discovered.

The mailer begins: “You may want to check this out, if you already haven’t. This makes me sick. To think that when our beloved country is now at war, they can still push their twisted agenda, probably with the notion that we will be too busy to notice.” It goes on to note “Hrabal is also leading a group of liberal activists in an attempt to unseat the Reagan Republicans on the El Dorado and Placer central committees.”

The mailer then copies and comments on portions of Hrabal’s personal Web site (which he has since taken off the Web), noting his support for gay marriages, legalized abortions, gun control, environmental protection and restrictions on prayer in school, and even including a picture of Hrabal and his lover.

Hrabal said such tactics are typical of the Doolittle political machine, which is now into its third decade of ruling the Placer County Republican Party, using functionaries like Campbell and Klein to enforce adherence to an uncompromising agenda of social and economic conservatism, as well as construction of an Auburn Dam.

“It’s a great example of how intolerant the far right is and why we need a change,” Hrabal said. “The people who control the party apparatus want to impose their values on the rest of us through government.”

That’s why Hrabal and the three-year-old congress have launched an aggressive political offensive, offering up a slate of candidates for the Central Committee that would wrest control away from the “extremists,” and support Auburn physician Bill Kirby in his bid to unseat Doolittle.

With a dues-paying membership of around 250 that includes most Republican officeholders in Placer County, the congress is the area’s largest Republican club, and this is the largest chapter of Republican congresses in California.

In this solidly Republican district, where Democrats are little more than sacrificial lambs, the November general election should be a mere formality for the Republican nominee. But the question this year is: who will that nominee be, and perhaps more importantly, what values will that candidate represent?

Kirby bristles at being labeled a moderate. “I’m not moderate about anything,” he declares. He prefers the carefully chosen labels-du-jour of GOP moderates: “tolerant Republican,” or “responsible conservative.” They’re the latest incarnations of President George Bush’s focus-group-tested “compassionate conservative.”

Kirby doesn’t want to wear a label or represent a faction, projecting himself as a gruff, experienced, common-sense, anti-politician outsider who’s tired of his party being controlled by ideologues like Doolittle: “He and I have serious differences on issues. I consider him a right-wing extremist and most people do,” said Kirby, citing abortion, the Auburn Dam and environmental protection as a few areas in which they differ.

Yet one who definitely cares about labels and intra-party political strategy is Brandon Gesicki, Kirby’s political consultant. Gesicki is a political operative who is on a personal crusade to seize control of the Republican Party from the social conservatives, one California county at a time.

Sipping a Coke in the Sacramento Hyatt bar during a two-hour break between his afternoon and nighttime meetings, wearing jeans, a sport coat and scruffy red beard, Gesicki flitted among groups of politicos. He was initially guarded and suspicious—“I don’t know if I want the far right to know what we’re doing”—but soon warmed up to discussing his quest.

Gesicki, 29, began his career in politics when he ran his best friend’s campaign for student body president of Carmel High School, ousting the leadership of the “popular crowd.” After high school and some college, Gesicki crisscrossed the country working on Republican campaigns, including Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential bid and a friend’s race for the Cleveland (Ohio) City Council, both losing efforts.

But it was in 2000 that Gesicki embarked on a determined effort to change the direction of his party in California. That was the year that he worked on the campaign of Brooks Firestone, a wealthy Santa Barbara moderate who ran against conservative Tom Bordonaro for the Republican nomination to run against Democratic Congresswoman Lois Capps.

For a simple congressional primary, the race turned into a high-profile battleground in the fight for control of the Republican Party, with such notable GOP moderates as former President Gerald Ford campaigning for Firestone, and religious right firebrand Gary Bauer spending money on Bordonaro’s behalf.

Firestone lost the race (and Bordonaro went on to lose to Capps), but this heir to the Firestone Tire fortune used the lessons of that loss to begin recruiting and funding moderate Republicans, helping Gesicki’s Mainstream GOP Consulting to place his party’s state leadership in moderate hands.

To accomplish that ideological switch, Gesicki says he’s worked in 25 California counties to help moderates take control of their central committees. He claims to have helped flip 10 of those counties from conservative to moderate majorities. His ultimate goal is to create a moderate majority of state party delegates in order to get the abortion plank and other divisive social issues removed from the party platform, thereby making his party more competitive in elections.

“I believe that social issues do not belong in politics. Government should have nothing to do with these things,” Gesicki said. “We have a silent majority of the Republican Party who believes like we do, that morality issues don’t belong in the party.”

In conservative Placer County, where Doolittle was thought by many political observers to be unbeatable, Gesicki hopes to send a strong message that the far right’s days are numbered, a message he believes will be heard even if the race is close but Kirby loses.

“The divide is between the mainstream and the extremists who are in charge of the party,” Gesicki said. “It’s the extremists in Placer County who run the party, including Ken Campbell and John Doolittle.”

Since his arrival here, Gesicki said he has come to see Placer County Republicans as far less stridently conservative than they are reputed to be. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking.

Placer County has always been a conservative stronghold, with historic connections to the “Reagan Revolution,” a place that has only become more conservative with the influx of former urban dwellers who escaped to the suburbs and hold a special disdain for big city liberals.

Placer is one of only two counties in California where a majority of registered voters (50.33 percent) are Republicans, the other being tiny Madera County. And it’s one of only a couple of counties where Democrats account for less than a third of voters. The next highest category is “declined to state” at 13.5 percent, and most of those are likely to be conservatives, too.

While Republicans credit their impressive registration numbers to aggressively recruiting new members in the high schools and elsewhere, the fact remains that older, affluent Caucasians tend to be conservative, and this is a county dominated by old, rich, white people.

The average age of 38 years old is nearly five years older than the state average and 3.6 years older than the average Sacramento area resident. More than 83 percent of Placer residents are white, compared with 66 percent in the region and 46.7 percent statewide.

Placer County’s average household income of $73,151 allows its residents to live in many of the gated communities or upscale subdivisions throughout the Valley (around the towns of Lincoln, Loomis, Rocklin, Roseville and Granite Bay), on large oak-studded properties in the Gold Country (around the towns of Auburn and Colfax), or on scenic Sierra spreads in the High Country (around Tahoe City or secluded spots along Interstate 80).

With its beautiful and diverse geography, business-friendly political climate and the fact that it’s close (but not too close) to the state capital, it’s understandable why those with means choose Placer County. And that reality has shaped its politics since the Uhler family moved to what would later be named Granite Bay in 1970.

Ronald Reagan—the living deity of modern conservatives—personally brought Lewis K. Uhler to the capital area. The two first met in 1961 when Uhler—a Southern California lawyer active in Republican politics—organized an anti-communist rally at which Reagan, an actor beginning to show interest in politics, was the keynote speaker.

Uhler became Governor Reagan’s undersecretary of health and welfare, but used the role to push the ultra-conservative vision of minimalist government he had been cultivating for years, heading up a task force that developed a report titled “A Reasonable Program for Revenue Control and Tax Reduction.”

It was Reagan’s introduction to the conservative economic theory that would eventually be dubbed “Reaganomics.” To give the plan credibility, Uhler turned to academia, seeking the help of economist Milton Friedman, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his supply side economic theories, and a young McGeorge Law School professor named Anthony Kennedy, whom Reagan would later appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Our side was coming of age politically and our ideas were becoming more popular,” Uhler recalls, noting, “We saw it as a stepping stone to the presidency.”

Yet the Democrat-controlled California Legislature rejected this plan for capping government growth. So Reagan and his administration turned directly to the voters, placing Proposition 1 on the November 1973 ballot, where it was defeated. But Uhler said the ideas and philosophy started similar movements across the country, which Uhler aided by forming the National Tax Limitation Committee, an organization he still runs today out of an office in Roseville.

“It fired a shot heard round the world,” Uhler said, beaming with pride. “It really started the anti-tax revolution.”

Growing up with the likes of Milton Friedman, Edwin Meese and H.L. Richardson as regular dinner guests in their Granite Bay home, it’s no wonder that all four Uhler boys grew to hold conservative political views. But Kirk Uhler, now 34, was the only one to go into politics.

In 1992, with support from conservatives and the development community, Uhler was narrowly elected to the Placer County Board of Supervisors. At just 24 years old, Uhler was one of the youngest county supervisors in California history, and he distinguished himself as a strong and lucid voice of conservatism in the county.

Active on the Placer County Republican Central Committee, Uhler worked aggressively to register young Republican voters. During the contentious General Plan update process, he won over powerful friends with his property rights beliefs that offered landowners the ability to develop their properties.

He was his party’s young rising star and at the end of his term, Uhler announced plans to run for the Assembly in a competitive field that included former baseball star Steve Sax and Rico Oller, who is now a state senator from Placer County. Sax eventually dropped out and swung his support to Uhler, but it wasn’t enough.

Oller ran a no-holds-barred campaign, highlighting Uhler’s youth and, ironically, a conservative stand came back to haunt him. Years earlier, in the wake of a controversy over then-Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders advocating a study of legalizing drugs, Uhler told the Auburn Journal that the war on drugs had been a failure and that he too supported studying legalization. The comment didn’t cause much of a stir at the time, but later allowed Oller to portray the young conservative as soft on crime.

After losing the election, Uhler moved to Southern California, but has since returned to Placer County to find his party divided into warring factions. “The Central Committee has always been political,” Uhler said, “but it’s never spawned into groups that exclude one another.”

He learned of the exclusionary nature of the factions when he tried to join the Republican Congress of Placer County last year. Uhler is again running for a seat on the Central Committee, and said he sought membership in the congress as a way of expanding his base of support.

Shortly after applying and sending in his membership dues, Uhler got a call from Paul Hrabal denying his application. “He said, ‘We are a moderate organization, not a conservative organization, and you have a reputation as a conservative,’ ” Uhler recalls.

Other Republicans have also been denied membership in the congress. While the exclusions would seem to cut against the organization’s stated mission of trying to create a more inclusive Republican Party—as well as its criticism of Doolittle’s camp as being exclusionary—Hrabal defends the practice.

“They are far-right-wing extremists that want to co-opt our movement,” Hrabal said. “We want the Republican Party to be inclusive, but not every club in the party needs to have everyone in it. All we care about is that you aren’t trying to actively overthrow us. They’ve used so many dirty tricks that we have to be paranoid.”

Word of the exclusions was a setback for the congress and the moderate movement. Then it was hurt again in January when, after endorsing a slate of 21 moderate candidates for the Central Committee, five of those candidates—including Roseville Mayor Claudia Gamar and longtime Rocklin City Councilwoman Kathy Lund—signed a letter making it clear they didn’t support the slate or the moderate movement.

Lund said of the congress: “My goal was to bring the different factions together, but theirs seems to be to create divisions. I think we have people from outside this area who are stirring things up.”

And then in recent weeks, the congress has again been stung by a series of high-profile defections, including that of Placer County Clerk Jim McCauley. Each time the moderate movement has a setback, it is trumpeted in press releases and intra-party announcements by party spokesman Aaron Klein, a Doolittle appointee who serves as Campbell’s right-hand man.

“On Valentine’s Day, the honeymoon’s over for the Congress Club,” was the subject line of a February 14 e-mail from Klein, going on to gloat, “We could probably have told the Republican Congress that candidates who have a history of supporting Democrats and raising taxes won’t fly in Placer County.”

While trying to start his own Web site consulting business, Klein shares a tiny office in little Meadow Vista with his dad—their desks almost touching. Klein denies that moderates get shut out of party leadership roles, or that support for Doolittle’s brand of social conservatism is a litmus test for local Republicans. He also dismisses the threat from moderates, predicting Doolittle will soundly defeat Kirby and conservatives will maintain control of the Central Committee.

“Placer County is a conservative county, and there are some very liberal Republicans here who are frustrated and want to take over,” Klein said. “Their belief system is on the far end of liberal.”

This brash young Reagan conservative seems a bit like the Kirk Uhler of 10 years ago, only more aggressively partisan in tone, and without Uhler’s early electoral success. Klein lost a race for his local school district, as well as a run for the Central Committee, but was subsequently appointed to the body as Doolittle’s alternate, and then named spokesman by Campbell. Doolittle is rarely in the district, so Klein is essentially a de facto member of the committee.

In fact, Klein’s rapid ascension to becoming the voice of the party has rankled some, like Auburn City Councilwoman Cheryl Maki. “He is an alternate who has never been elected who speaks for the Republican Party, and that bothers me,” said Maki, calling Klein an ambitious political climber who is fiercely loyal to Doolittle.

“He supports those who support him. John Doolittle has done more to build the Republican Party in Placer County than the congress ever could,” Klein said, later adding, “John has always been a great friend and great ally of mine.”

While Klein claims to value party unity and criticizes the congress as divisive, he is quick to hurl the “liberal” epithet at fellow Republicans—such as those who supported Measure W on the 2000 Placer County ballot, which would have raised the sales tax to purchase open space. Its Republican supporters claimed the measure was consistent with conservative beliefs that if government was going to restrict a property’s use for environmental reasons, it should pay for that property. But conservatives like Klein say any tax increase is a betrayal of Republican values.

“The Republican Party has always been the party of lower taxes,” Klein said.

While dismissing the threat from moderates, Klein’s side has also worked to counter it. They’ve come up with their own Central Committee slate and activist group, the Placer County Republican Leadership Committee, which Klein said “is an organization to elect good, solid Republican values to the Central Committee.”

“I’ve been aware of Brandon Gesicki for a while,” Klein said, “and he’s one of those people who thinks the Republican Party should be a carbon copy of the Democratic Party.”

Joe Carroll has been a Democrat almost his entire life. But he’s more political junkie than partisan, someone who loves the intrigues and machinations of Placer County politics, which he captures each week in his column for the Auburn Sentinel. Each column bears an alliterative headline playing off “Placer” and “political,” such as Placer’s Political Perversions.

Over lunch in Maribelle’s Café, a gathering place for local power brokers in historic Old Town Auburn, Carroll talked about the control Doolittle exercises over the Placer County Republican Party, and how many of his former staffers now constitute the staffs for both Assemblyman Tim Leslie and Senator Rico Oller.

He echoes the concerns about Doolittle voiced even by many Republican officeholders in Placer County, that Doolittle has always been more concerned with pushing a narrow partisan agenda than with his constituents, and with pie-in-the-sky projects like Auburn Dam that are more political than politically possible.

So Carroll this year re-registered as a Republican in order to support the candidacy of Kirby, his doctor and friend. The only other time he did that was to support Kirk Uhler, who he saw as intelligent and reasonable, against Rico Oller. The local chapter of the Sierra Club has also urged such party switching in this primary, hoping to unseat one of the U.S. Congress’ staunchest anti-environmentalists.

“No Republican has ever had the guts and the grit to challenge him,” Carroll said of Doolittle. “He’s very bright, very cold, very calculating, and it’s going to be very difficult for Bill to beat him.”

Doolittle’s camp has already made political hay out of Democrats urging his downfall, making support for him a matter of party loyalty. Here in Placer County, Doolittle looms large over his party, but it’s an almost spectral presence. He rarely visits the district, even now, during an active campaign.

Doolittle’s relations with the media are testy as best. Neither he nor his staffers returned any of a half-dozen calls seeking comment for this article, and he has similarly shut out other newspapers in his district, including the Chico News & Review, Auburn Journal, Roseville Press-Tribune and even the Sacramento Bee, which he only in recent months ended an official policy of ignoring.

“He doesn’t expose himself to his constituents,” Kirby said, pledging to hold bi-monthly town hall meetings if elected. “I think Doolittle is afraid to answer the public about his record and what he’s done for the district. He is unfit to be in office.”

Yet Doolittle shares a strong simpatico with like-minded area officeholders like Oller, Leslie, and many local leaders. Doolittle engenders loyalty and admiration in his conservative supporters.

“When you are running against Congressman Doolittle, you are running against Assemblyman Leslie and Senator Oller. They are all the same. You cannot peel one off without taking them all on. They are the Republican Party here,” said Campbell. “And you can’t fight Congressman Doolittle, Assemblyman Leslie and Senator Oller and get away with it.”

By most accounts, Leslie is the most accessible of Placer County’s conservative triad of power, a standing supported by a frank and open interview he recently gave SN&R in his Capitol office about the nature of Placer County politics.

Throughout his 16 years in the Legislature, Leslie has presided over his party’s roller coaster standing in the state. And even though Republicans are at their weakest point during his tenure—in terms of legislative seats and state offices held—he disagrees that social conservatives like him should moderate their views.

“I’d hate to think of belonging to a party that has no moral focus,” said Leslie. “That we should just be a party of economics would make us fall short of being the great party we can be.”

Leslie sees the erosion of the traditional family unit and values as the root of many social problems. It is from that belief that Leslie actively opposes abortion and the legitimizing of homosexuality, calling for a return to Judeo-Christian social codes—the very core of what moderate Republicans are fighting against.

“If you want to ignore all those issues, it doesn’t leave anything other than being a party of economics, and that’s just not enough for me,” Leslie said. “But everyone doesn’t feel as passionately about the pro-family agenda as I do.”

If Placer County’s Republican conservatives and moderates are a telling study in contrasts, so were the two sides’ main events of the election season: a January 28 Republican Congress fund-raiser in Roseville featuring gubernatorial candidate Richard Riordan; and last week’s stop in Sacramento by Vice President Dick Cheney at a fund-raiser for Doolittle.

As if to reinforce the criticism that he has not been accountable to his constituency, Doolittle at the last minute barred the press from covering the Cheney event. Just two days earlier, Vice President Cheney’s press office had said the event would be open to the press, and then later said that the Doolittle campaign had decided less than 24 hours before the event to keep reporters at bay.

Outside Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, dozens of Sacramento Police and California Highway Patrol officers closed off streets and provided security. Television and print journalism crews showed up anyway to cover everything but the words inside the hall. Kirby, Democratic challenger Mark Norberg and a handful of protesters showed up to cry foul.

Inside, about 550 attendees ate breakfast and listened to Cheney, one of the most powerful men in the country, who likely praised Doolittle as a good and decent American with solid Republican values. Maybe he even criticized the moderates, who knows? And Doolittle’s already healthy campaign fund grew by what was reported to be more than $100,000.

By contrast, Riordan’s speech to the Republican Congress of Placer County had the folksy feel of a town hall meeting. The informal crowd of a couple of hundred (which included a few Democrats, but no people of color) chatted amiably and snacked on finger sandwiches held together by little American flags before taking to their folding chairs in Roseville’s Maidu Community Center. Conservatives like Campbell and Leslie were notably absent, with a few confiding to SN&R that the currently divisive party politics is what kept them home.

Hrabal served as the master of ceremonies, voicing the congress’s moderate mantras, introducing important guests—such as Kirby and other moderate Republican holders and seekers of various offices—and fussing about like a picky stage director when he wasn’t at the podium. Journalists, such as the Bee’s Dan Walters, lingered skeptically in the back by the finger sandwiches.

“The Republican Party has lost more than a million and a half women voters and we have become an endangered species,” said Riordan, urging Republicans to get past their differences on divisive social issues. “We can work together on the issues that count.”

And for the moderates in attendance, the only issue that counts is empowering people over government. Riordan got big applause for conservative comments on reining in bureaucracy and keeping taxes low, but also for more progressive stands like promoting affordable housing and reaching out to minorities.

“I’m important, and everyone else is just as important as me. I really believe that,” Riordan said. “That’s part of the inclusiveness of our party to think that way.”

Yet it’s power and purse strings that decide elections, and in both categories, the Doolittle event handily edged out the congress shindig, leaving the moderates—as with the media—on the outside looking in.