Santa Clara, Calif.
A two-foot statue of Napoleon glowers from the shelf. Jacques Louis David’s rendering of Napoleon’s self-coronation dominates the wall. Republican congressional candidate Tom Campbell sits in his office facing the emperor, triangulating like crazy. He’s distancing himself from the Democrats, who he says don’t really want to balance the budget.
But he’s also distancing himself from the congressional Republicans. He thinks they should drop the family tax cut and should spend more on Medicare. If the short Frenchman had been this careful in positioning himself, he wouldn’t have recklessly invaded Russia in the wintertime.
Tom Campbell is running in the Dec. 12 special election for the Silicon Valle y seat being vacated by Democrat Norman Mineta. A former congressman himself, C ampbell entered the campaign as the overwhelming favorite. But the Democratic p arty and the little- known Democratic nominee Jerry Estruth nationalized the race. Their first barrage of TV spots didn’t even mention Campbell. They blasted Newt Gingrich and urged voters to send a message. Estruth smashes all records for the number of times it is possible to mention the word “Gingrich” in a single paragraph, and his efforts to link the moderate Campbell to Gingrich are imaginative. If the two used the same toothpaste, the Democrats would use it.
And the strategy was working. Campaign polls showed Campbell’s lead filling from 26 points to about 8. Republicans in Washington took notice.
House members can already imagine the commercials that would be run against them in 1996, morphing their lovely features into those of the speaker. Gingrich himself has more immediate concerns. The special election takes place three days before the next budget showdown. If Campbell loses his race on the budget issue, then there will be an epidemic of wobbliness in Republican ranks.
The good news for Republicans is that the Democratic strategy probably isn’t going to work. Tom Campbell will likely beat the attempts to “Newter” him. His lead has stabilized and, among people who will actually turn out, he should do well. The bad news for Republicans is that he’s doing it by running as Bill Clinton. There’s only a slight difference between his ideas and the White House budget strategy. Both want balance in seven years that protects Clintonite social programs and leaves out the tax cut.
It’s only one district, and an idiosyncratic one, but a Campbell victory would suggest two tilings. First, while independents and moderates may tell pollsters they disapprove of Newt Gingrich, their feelings about GOP budget strategy are not so visceral that they will spite well4iked local Republicans. And second, the Clinton strategists who suggest the president should cut a deal on the budget are right. If he agrees to a seven-year balanced budget that is cosmetically softer than the GOP version, he captures the ground that is now being sought by Perotistas and moderate Republicans.
It’s easy to see why the Democrats would want to try out their anti-Gingrich strategy here in California’s 15th District: They have a weak candidate who could not possibly win on his own. Former San Jose city councilman Jerry Estruth has been out of politics for over a decade, working as a stockbroker, and he clearly hasn’t been paying much attention to national affairs.
His answers in an interview are nervous and halting, his knowledge of issues extremely superficial. The Democrats had to take the emphasis off the one-on- one match-up between Estruth and the polished and smart Campbell, so they brought in outside Newt-bashers, including a press secretary who came in from the recent Louisiana gubernatorial race — a failed attempt to use Gingrich to local effect.
The 15th is a generally Democratic district, where anti-Newt sympathies would be expected to run high.
Democrats hold a 46 percent to 38 percent advantage among registered voters; Mineta had been winning landslide pluralities for most of the last 10 elections. In 1992, Clinton trounced Bush here by 16 points (Perot earned 23 percent of the vote). The local governments in San Jose (which juts into the district) and Santa Clara are unapologetically liberal, with politicians who are still raising taxes to pay for public works.
But more interesting than the district’s middle-class Democrats are its rich Republican areas in the western towns of Los Gatos and Saratoga. This is Silicon Valley territory, the home of information-age Republicanism. Because these are the folks who are more likely to turn out in a special election, they will play an important role on December 12.
The Republicans here combine Old Brains and New Money. Many had well- educated parents, and now, thanks to their software skills, they have been able to pull down big salaries. It’s the kind of place where upscale parents shop at toy stores that pretend to be educational institutions — with names like Zany-Brainy, Imaginarium, and The Learning Center.
This brand of Republican bills himself as riscally conservative and socially liberal. Tom Campbell says that the issues he is asked about most frequently are balancing the budget, education, Bosnia, abortion (the menace of the Christian right), and the environment.
You’d think that Newt would get some credit in these quarters for his Toffier esque enthusiasm for high technology, but his unfavorables are as high here as they are nationwide — which is to say, around 60 percent. Part of that is caus ed by environmental and Medicare concerns, but the Democratic candidate Jerry E struth is not attacking Republicanism or even conservatism. Indeed, the Democra t also talks about balancing the budget and slashing marginal tax rates and cap ital gains rates. Rather, his is a personalized attack on Campbell and Gingrich . And a lot of the negative feeling about Newt in the district seems to be aesthetic. “Not too much zeal,” British diplomats used to tell their proteges; the young affluent moderates here, likewise, have little taste for stridency and overstatement.
This is a Lexus district, and Tom Campbell is the Lexus of candidates. In a debate last month he even dressed like a Lexus, all black, silver, and gray. He’s emblematic of the district, and as National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Bill Paxon says, “Without Tom Campbell we wouldn’t have a chance.” Campbell grew up in an Irish Democratic household in Chicago, the son of a federal judge. He cast his first vote for George McGovern, but at the University of Chicago, he was influenced by Milton Friedman. He earned a simultaneous B.A. and M.A.
there at age 20. He went on to get a law degree from Harvard, and came back to Chicago for an economics doctorate. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Whizzer White (working on the Bakke decision, which would influence his subsequent opposition to aff’lrmative action). He was a prosecutor in Chicago and a lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission before becoming a law professor at Stanford, the youngest tenured professor in the university’s history. In case his mother doesn’t have enough cause to be proud of him, he doesn’t drink or party (that’s the University of Chicago influence). He’s charming, and the only personal vices people talk about are his love of double-chocolate milkshakes from Denny’s and his comb-over hairstyle.
In some districts this record of achievement would be enough to make people sick, but Silicon Valley is the land of meritocracy, so they go for it. He first was elected to Congress in a neighboring district. He served during the Bush administration, often angering the Bushies with his ever more subtle explanations of why he couldn’t support certain conservative measures. He co- founded the Republican Majority Coalition, a moderate Republican pressure group that he said at the time was designed to “exclude; issues of morality and conscience as litmus tests of being Republican.” But on spending, the story was. different:
He was rated the most frugal member of Congress by the National Taxpayers” Union in 1992 .and often opposed pork for his own district.
In 1992, he ran against Bruce Herschensohn and Sonny Bono for what is now Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat. Herschensohn beat him in the GOP primary by spending a lot of money portraying Campbell as a liberal, a reputation he now uses to the hilt to unhitch himself from Gingrich: “I’m not only a moclerate, I’m the most clearly identified moderate Republican in California.” He made his pro-choice views central to that campaign. He’s an Arlen Specter Republican (so there are at least two of them) and refuses to talk about endorsing a presidential hopeful because Specter has not ofricially dropped out.
He’s been serving the last year in the state Senate, where he was one of only two Republicans — remember, this is California — to support a bill that would have guaranteed a woman’s right to wear pantsuits to work.
Campbell believes that Republicans can beat the Democratic anti-strategy simply by emphasizing the need to balance the budget over and over again. “You find overwhelming support for the balanced budget, and no one thinks it would happen if the Republicans had not taken a majority.” When he talks about a balanced budget, his eyes almost get misty. He calls it the most important issue of the era and argues that when a deficit-cutting deal is struck it will overshadow any popular concerns about GOP strategies to get there.
On a more practical level, Campbell seems to have halted his opponent’s gains by going negative against Estruth, portraying him as slightly shady city councilman. He points to campaign contributions the Democrat took from a major developer with interests before the council. One ad links Estruth to an Orange County-style fiscal scandal that struck San Jose while Estruth was in office. The Democrat also wrote a letter seeking leniency for a convicted gambler; the gambler had contributed $ 5,000 to his campaign. Not all the charges are totally persuasive, but they have served to shift attention away from Washington and back to local personalities.
But the bulk of Campbell’s time is spent triangulating, distancing himself from both Democrats and conservative Republicans. And since Bill Clinton seems to be heralding a golden age of triangulation, we might as well sit back and appreciate it as an art form.
As practiced by Campbell and others, it is a supple dance. It involves a seri es of small steps to the left, and then just when that flow is perceptible, a s eries of small steps to the right. An interview with Campbell is a fascinating experience, since one is confronted by so many nuanced and carefully chosen wor ds. In a televised debate last week, he was overly policy-wonky, because he has to get into the details of legislation to show how he subtly differs from both Gingrich and the Democrats
Campbell claims there is principle behind all this, and that is libertarianism — getting the government out of people’s lives in economic and social matters. But his is a strange form of libertarianism, since he opposes tax cuts, opposed the California school voucher initiative, and won’t list even a single major program that the government is now running that should cease. He refuses even to call for an end to the Department of Education, but falls back into diplomatic-speak: “The origin of the Department of Education is conducive to questioning. I’m not convinced it has fulfilled its promise.”
In his new book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt points out that in 1950s Chicago, politicians, especially when young, were content to hitch themselves to a team, so that a group could pull together. But upscale districts like the 15th value independertce of mind more than loyalty to a larger institution, and Campbell’s suppleness is representative of this larger social trend.
It’s Gingrich who has to make compromises with different sections of his coalition; these independence-lovers have the luxury of remaining pristine. It’s Gingrich who plays partisan, to win the victory that makes a balanced budget conceivable — at which point the triangulators come in and try to conciliate, to muddy the waters, to prove they are not beholden to anyone or anything.
The problem is not ultimately with Campbell, but with the political tastes of these highly educated communities. Everyone knows they’ve lost faith in government. But they’ve also lost faith in the elementary principle of politics, which is that politicians sometimes need to be loyal members of coalitions and institutions. If all 435 representatives showed the independence of mind and trianglulating skills that are valued around here, then nothing would ever get passed.
In truth, the people of the 15th care little about the race. The campaign has received scant attention in the local media, even in the area’s dominant paper, the San Jose Mercury News. Both candidates say Tom Campbell they have given more interviews to the national press than to the locals. And there are few lawn signs. If you pull people aside and ask what they think of Gingrich, most say they don’t like him, but there is little sense of burning anger. The general distaste for politics and government might be bad for Republicans in the short term, but it is good for conservatives.
Campbell should pull through in what was always going to be a tight race, given the district’s make-up. But if he does lose, then the tremors will be substantial. We will be forced to deal with the fact that the new American elites in areas like Silicon Valley may be injecting a strange narcotic into the body politic; a new political class without resolve or will, a bloc that has been sent to Washington for the purpose of getting nothing done.
