June 5, 2004: Headlines: Presidents - Bush: Peace Corps Directors - Vasquez: National Journal : Bush, who in 2001 held the first-ever Cinco de. Mayo festival at the White House, has appointed prominent Orange County Hispanics to high-profile positions within his administration like Former County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez who was named Peace Corps director in 2001. Although the GOP points to such nominations as evidence of its good faith, California Democrats call them merely window dressing.

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Headlines: June 2004 Peace Corps Headlines: June 5, 2004: Headlines: Presidents - Bush: Peace Corps Directors - Vasquez: National Journal : Bush, who in 2001 held the first-ever Cinco de. Mayo festival at the White House, has appointed prominent Orange County Hispanics to high-profile positions within his administration like Former County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez who was named Peace Corps director in 2001. Although the GOP points to such nominations as evidence of its good faith, California Democrats call them merely window dressing.

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Bush, who in 2001 held the first-ever Cinco de. Mayo festival at the White House, has appointed prominent Orange County Hispanics to high-profile positions within his administration like Former County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez who was named Peace Corps director in 2001. Although the GOP points to such nominations as evidence of its good faith, California Democrats call them merely window dressing.

Bush, who in 2001 held the first-ever Cinco de. Mayo festival at the White House, has appointed prominent Orange County Hispanics to high-profile positions within his administration like Former County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez who was named Peace Corps director in 2001. Although the GOP points to such nominations as evidence of its good faith, California Democrats call them merely window dressing.

Bush, who in 2001 held the first-ever Cinco de. Mayo festival at the White House, has appointed prominent Orange County Hispanics to high-profile positions within his administration like Former County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez who was named Peace Corps director in 2001. Although the GOP points to such nominations as evidence of its good faith, California Democrats call them merely window dressing.

RED, BLUE, AND ORANGE

Jun 5, 2004

National Journal

by Charles Mahtesian

Caption: President Bush (right) with Peace Corps Director Gaddi Vasquez at the Cinco do Mayo celebration at the White House on May 5, 2004.

Ronald Reagan used to joke, with good reason, that Orange County "is where the good Republicans go before they die." For decades, that slice of Southern California was a citadel of conservatism and, as the local GOP loved to brag, "America's most Republican county." Orange County regularly sent Congress some of its most conservative members and, at the same time, functioned as California's COP bulwark, turning out Republican voting margins so enormous in statewide races that they neutralized huge Democratic voting majorities in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Since 1936, not a single Democratic presidential nominee has managed to cany the county.

In 1984, the last time Reagan appeared on the ballot, he won 75 percent of its vote.

Republicans still control Orange County, but GOP presidential nominees no longer rack up Reaganesque totals. In 2000, George W. Bush won just 56 percent. Four years earlier, Bob Dole got 51 percent, an anemic showing by Orange County standards. Today, just 49 percent of the county's voters are registered Republicans, down from a modern-day high of 56 percent in 1990.

MUTUAL ADMIRATION:

Beloved in Orange County, Reagan joked that it's "where the good Republicans go before they die."

Not so long ago-midway through Reagan's second term, in fact- every legislative and congressional district within the county was in GOP hands. Democrats were so downtrodden that they printed bumper stickers that read, "It's OK to be a Democrat in Orange County." Today, things are different. Democrats hold two state legislative seats from the county, a congressional seal, and scores of local offices. And after a November runoff between two Democrats, the party will have its first member on the Orange County Board of Supervisors in more than a decade.

Orange County isn't the only suburban locale where the Republican electoral stranglehold has loosened, but none of the others is quite as large as this Southern California behemoth of 2.8 million people. So when the Orange County Republican machine misfires, a shudder reverberates through the rest of the party. And the problem confronting the famed Orange County GOP organization is familiar to Republicans across the country: How to make inroads among the burgeoning Latino population.

Since much of the Republican Party's base is anchored in states and suburbs where the Hispanic population is exploding, increasing the GOP's share of the Latino vote is a political imperative. In the 1990s, three states now worth 116 electoral votes-California, Florida, and Texas-accounted for half of all Hispanic population growth. According to the Census Bureau, more than three-quarters of all Hispanics live in the South or West, in places like Orange County, where Latinos are 31 percent of the population.

Almost every political yardstick indicates that Republicans lag far behind the Democrats in attracting Latino votes. According to the William C. Velazquez Institute, a California-based think tank that specializes in Latino policy, Democrats won 85 percent of California's Latino presidential vote in 1996, and 74 percent in 2000. In terms of political affiliation, 65 percent of Latino voters in California were registered as Democrats in 2000, compared with just 12 percent who were registered as Republicans.

The current California political landscape is best understood by using 1994 as a dividing line. Before then, the GOP could at least claim to be competitive in its quest for Latino support, even if the Democratic Party held a decided edge. Republicans' fortunes changed dramatically, however, after their state party threw its support behind Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that sought to deny virtually all social services, including access to public schools, to illegal immigrants and their children.

The measure-endorsed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican- passed with 59 percent of the vote in 1994. But the victory proved Pyrrhic, because Proposition 187 generated a strong Latino backlash. Latino voters had favored the Democratic candidate for governor by 6 percentage points in both 1986 and 1990, according to California's Field Poll. In 1994, though, the DemocraticRepublican gap in the Latino vote expanded to an enormous 46 points. In the 1998 gubernatorial election, the divide grew even wider, to a staggering 61 points.

Proposition 187, almost all of which a federal court eventually struck down as unconstitutional, also sparked a surge in Latino political involvement, in no small part because of an incendiary television commercial that included the ominous-and now infamous- line: "They keep coming." Since then, approximately 1 million more Latinos have registered to vote in California. By 2001, about 17 percent of the votes being cast in the state were Latino, according to Los Angeles Times exit polls-almost double the percentage in 1994.

Manny Padilla, the ethnic-communities chairman for the Orange County Republican Party, says the bitter taste left by Proposition 187 "has been a deterrent, because the other party consistently uses it as a wedge issue and to get people excited. While the Republican Party was demonized, it also didn't do a very good job on that issue."

In Orange County, the Proposition 187 furor could not have come at a worse time for Republicans. The local party was still struggling to overcome the distrust generated among Latino voters on Election Day 1988, when GOP officials hired uniformed private security guards to patrol predominantly Hispanic precincts in Santa Ana, carrying signs that warned, "Noncitizens can't vote!"

The episode, a political blunder for a local party organization not accustomed to making many, enabled Democrats to portray Orange County Republicans as downright hostile to Latinos. In 1996, that depiction gained new credence after political newcomer Loretta Sanchez upset GOP Rep. Robert Dornan in a race marred by charges of ballot fraud. Dornan claimed that Sanchez had stolen the election and pointed to evidence that noncitizens had voted. After a 13- month investigation, what is now the House Administration Committee upheld Sanchez's victory, despite finding evidence of substantial illegal voting.

AL FRINK:

Bush's manufacturing czar is his latest high-profile Hispanic Orange County appointee.

Dornan unsuccessfully challenged Sanchez in 1998, referring to himself as "the only true Latino in this race," because of his Catholicism and social conservatism. He lost but again managed to roil the Latino community with a campaign mailer that featured an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and graphic portrayals of abortion procedures.

The stereotype was that latinos were totally pro-life and Catholic. And that miscalculation on the Republican side led Io disenchantment," says former state Sen. Art Torres, who now chairs the California Democratic Party.

Sanchez's 1996 election did not prompt Orange County Republicans to immediately alter their strategy and tactics, but it helped set in motion forces that have led the party, both locally and nationally, to lake a more sophisticated approach to wooing the Latino vote. During the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, Texas Gov. George W. Bush publicly opposed the "spirit of 187" and made a concerted effort to embrace Latino voters by campaigning in places like heavily Hispanic Santa Ana.

 Gaddi Vasquez

Bush, who in 2001 held the first-ever Cinco de. Mayo festival at the White House, has appointed prominent Orange County Hispanics to high-profile positions within his administration. Former County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez was named Peace Corps director in 2001. And in April of this year, Orange County businessman Al Frink became the administration's first "manufacturing czar."

Although the GOP points to such nominations as evidence of its good faith, California Democrats call them merely window dressing. "They traditionally trot out these folks, dating back to the days of Richard Nixon, but that strategy has never worked, because they don't address the real issues that matter to Latinos," Torres says. "They've been doing that since 1968, and it hasn't produced anything."

Until recently, Orange County Republicans persisted in believing that the OOP's cultural conservatism would eventually attract Hispanics, in much the way that the party's strong anti-Communism won the overwhelming support of the local Vietnamese community during the late 1970s and '80s. Led by long-lime Chairman Tom Fuentes, himself Hispanic, the Orange County GOP concentrated on doing what it did bestmaintaining one of the nation's besl county- wide grassroots operations.

Fuentes "wanted to focus on inclusion, rather than outreach," says Bill Christiansen, former executive director of the county GOP. "In Orange County, the message has been more lifestyle-based, that it's about quality of life, not ethnicity."


National exit polls in 2000 suggest that affluent and middle- class Latino voters are often receptive to that approach, but in places like the central region of Orange County, where working- class voters are the predominant Latino constituency, that message has failed to win converts to the GOP. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Santa Ana, the county's most populous city. Democrats hold a 51 percent to 31 percent voter-registration advantage there.

"Republicans can open all k\inds of storefront operations and find all kinds of upwardly mobile Hispanic business-people, but until they begin walking the walk and talking the talk on immigration, health care, and education, they won't get anywhere," says Orange County Democratic Chairman Frank Barbaro. "All you have to do is look around and see what political party is supporting and electing Latino candidates, whether it's in Santa Ana or in other cities.... The center portion of this county is essentially controlled by the Democratic Party."

The GOP's weakness in attracting latinos was part of what led Fuentes to step down in March. Under newly installed county Chairman Scott Kaugh, the party is moving in a different direction, making plans for more-aggressive recruitment of Latino candidates and for voter-registration initiatives aimed at working-class Latinos. Baugh has hired a bilingual Latina political director to oversee the operation.

In Baugh's view, "There is a growing consensus among Orange County Republicans that we have not done a great job in central Orange County. Sure, latinos share the same cultural values as Republicans, but that's not enough. Wc need to penetrate the community with a sustained effort. We have to recruit candidates and build a farm team," he said.

"If the face of our party is all white males," added the Orange County Republicans' new chieftain, "then it's tough for us to market ourselves as representing the great diversity of California. We have to cultivate candidates in communities where we have historically not done well."

The, author is editor of The Almanac of American Politics and can be readied at cmahtesian@nationaljournal.com .

Copyright National Journal Group, Inc. Jun 5, 2004




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