Can Bush Capture California?

Promising to wage a concerted effort to win California is among the most reliable campaign-season cliches, and Republicans like Bush’s father and Bob Dole uttered it repeatedly in the past two presidential elections, even though they didn’t mean it. But everything looks different with Bush. He’s already begun mounting a massive effort to build support throughout the state, with a campaign team in place and Californians occupying senior slots in his national strategy sessions. Indeed, the surest sign he’s serious about the state is that he’s visiting not only glitzy areas like Santa Barbara and Silicon Valley, but also Riverside and Bakersfield, cities most California residents avoid like the plague.

The case for contesting California is simple. First, if Bush prevails in the March 7 primary — it’s winner-take-all — he will have gone far toward winning the nomination. Similarly, there are 54 electoral votes at stake in the general election, and if Bush won them it’s almost inconceivable he wouldn’t win the presidency (Texas and Florida, Bush strongholds, have 57 electoral votes between them). Second, his enormously successful fund-raising, coupled with his decision not to accept federal funding for his campaign, means he’ll have the resources needed to advertise in expensive, but vote-rich, media markets like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose (Steve Forbes is the only Republican who can hope to compete with him in the primary). Third, contesting the state forces his rivals, whether in the primary or the general election, to do the same if they hope to defeat him, and thus draws their resources away from other battleground states.

There’s one more argument for Bush’s making a run at California, particularly in the general election: He’s got a decent shot at winning the state. While Republicans have fared poorly in California recently — Dan Lungren and Matt Fong, last year’s GOP nominees for governor and senator, both got slaughtered — Bush is different. A recent poll of state voters by the Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan San Francisco think tank, found him leading Al Gore by 49-44. This is striking considering Gore has made nearly 60 trips to California as vice president, while Bush has come to the state just three times since launching his presidential bid.

That small number of visits, though, masks a flurry of campaign activity. Last year, for example, Bush raised $ 500,000 from California residents during his reelection campaign for governor. And the day after he was reelected, he called David Dreier, a senior California congressman with whom he’s been friends for over 20 years, to sound him out on the political scene. Bush told Dreier he was giving serious thought to running for president and added, “I’d like you to be part of my leadership team in California.”

The two stayed in regular contact over the next few months, and in June Dreier was named one of five co-chairs of the California campaign (the others are Condoleezza Rice, a Hoover Institution fellow who was a senior foreign-policy aide in the Bush White House; Jim Brulte, a state senator; Ann Veneman, food and agriculture secretary for Governor Pete Wilson; and Eloise Anderson, Wilson’s director of social services). Even more impressive is the breadth of support for Bush among California’s Republican elected officials: Thirty-six of the state legislature’s 47 Republicans are backing him, as are 19 of the state’s 24 GOP House members.

Overseeing Bush’s entire California effort is Gerald Parsky, a Los Angeles investment banker. Tapped in March, he will help Bush penetrate the state’s vast network of campaign donors (the California finance director is the highly regarded Brad Freeman), while also assisting in policy development. Parsky coordinated the opening of a campaign office on Wilshire Boulevard in Brentwood (it’s just down the street from the McDonald’s made famous by O. J. Simpson), but he’s also been involved with outreach to Hollywood. Early this year, he arranged for two top Warner Brothers executives, Terry Semel and Gerald Weintraub, to meet Bush in Austin. The meeting was designed to be a simple get-acquainted session, but Semel was so impressed with Bush that immediately after the hour-long meeting he told Parsky he wanted to host the governor at his Bel Air mansion.

Bush liked the idea, so before his $ 2.3 million Los Angeles fund-raiser on June 29 he stopped off at Semel’s to rub shoulders with 100 entertainment industry bigshots, such as Oliver Stone, Quincy Jones, and Warren Beatty (when Bush introduced himself, Beatty replied, “Hi, I’m Bulworth”). Semel enthusiastically endorsed Bush at the event — “He’s the guy,” he said — and reports afterwards were that the mostly liberal group liked Bush, particularly because he didn’t directly castigate them in his 15-minute speech. “My job is not to pit one group against another,” he told them. “My job is . . . to call on all of us to do our part to help usher in the responsibility era.” Word of Bush’s appeal has been spreading. “I’ve never seen a Republican make this kind of inroads into Hollywood,” says Lionel Chetwynd, a conservative activist who’s spent 30 years in the area as a director and screenwriter.

The outreach to Hollywood is part of the Bush team’s larger strategy of courting California constituencies other Republicans have lost. Another example is Hispanics, who are 15 percent of the state population. Bush has been touting his support for immigration and his opposition to Proposition 187, the 1994 California initiative that proposed denying state services to illegal immigrants, and he sprinkles his speeches with Spanish phrases. The campaign strategy calls for Bush to reach out to Hispanic business and political leaders through a variety of private meetings, such as the session after his September education speech, in hopes the word will spread that he’s an acceptable Republican. Bush has already won the endorsement of Hector Barreto, chairman of the Latino Business Association, and expects more leaders to follow.

An even more aggressive strategy has been laid out for Silicon Valley, which in the past has been apolitical but leaning Republican. An array of top Democrats, including Bill Clinton, have aggressively sought the support of its fiscally conservative, socially liberal residents. Most Republicans have either ignored the area or made awkward attempts to campaign there, losing lots of money and a great many votes.

Bush officials saw it made no sense to write off Silicon Valley and for six months have waged an extraordinary effort to line up support there. That’s smart, considering Bush has a few natural advantages over his Republican and Democratic opponents. First, his “compassionate conservatism” sells well among people feeling a twinge of guilt over all the money they’re making, but looking for non-governmental solutions to social problems. Second, Texas is home to a number of high-tech companies, and Bush understands the industry better than most Republicans. And third, in a culture addicted to success, Bush looks like a winner.

The lead organizer for Bush in Silicon Valley is E. Floyd Kvamme (pronounced Kwa-may), a partner at Menlo Park’s vaunted venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Kvamme first met Bush last year, when he hosted a fund-raising breakfast for him. “He made a tremendous impression,” recalls Kvamme, “talking about the importance of technology and how it benefited the California economy.” Earlier this year Kvamme met with Bush in Austin at the urging of James Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape and a Bush supporter. Impressed with how much Bush was willing to listen during the meeting — “He’s a bit of a sponge,” says Kvamme — he returned and began mobilizing a crew of Silicon Valley titans to raise money for the governor.

Kvamme breaks down the other leading Bush operatives by age: Those in their twenties and thirties are being organized by Gregory Slayton, the 39-year-old president and CEO of ClickAction, a Palo Alto-based e-marketing company (its stock was up 469 percent last year). Timothy Draper, a local venture capitalist, is handling the fortysomethings, Barksdale of Netscape the fiftysomethings, while Kvamme says he’s handling “the old guys” himself. The energetic Slayton is also the founder of Silicon Valley Bush 2000 (www.svb2000.com), a group organizing young professionals to support the candidate. At a July 1 fund-raising breakfast in Palo Alto attended by 500 people, Bush singled out Slayton. “He represents the young entrepreneur who’s realizing the American dream,” remarked Bush at the beginning of his speech. “Thank you, buddy.”

So intense is the Bush effort in northern California that his supporters are reaching out to specific industries. Bob Grady of Robertson Stephens in San Francisco and Scott Ryles of Merrill Lynch in Palo Alto are two who have been targeting their fellow investment bankers, while Kathy Behrens of Robertson Stephens and Thomas Stephenson of Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park are working the venture capital community (Bush slept over at Stephenson’s home the night before the July 1 fund-raising breakfast). On the CEO front, John Chambers of Cisco in San Jose and Brian Halla of National Semiconductor in Santa Clara have been talking Bush up among other industry dynamos. Bush also has an influential supporter in Tony Perkins, editor-in-chief of the Red Herring, a San Francisco magazine that covers the high-tech world.

A final feature of Bush’s Silicon Valley schmooze has been the Technology Network, a bipartisan group in Palo Alto founded two years ago to help introduce elected officials to the region’s players. In March, two of Technet’s Republicans, Lezlee Westine and Margita Thompson, met with top Bush strategist Karl Rove to brief him on Silicon Valley (Rove has taken a special interest in the area). Shortly thereafter, 55 self-proclaimed “New Economy leaders” placed an ad in the San Fose Mercury News urging Bush to run for president. The ad, timed to appear on a day Gore was visiting the area, received heavy press coverage. Thompson, an adroit political operative, is now one of four salaried employees in Bush’s Los Angeles campaign office.

Beyond Silicon Valley, Bush’s chief politicos in the state are Brulte, the state senator, and Scott Saddler, one of his advisers. Brulte is recognized in Sacramento as the best political strategist in the legislature, and many believe his tactical decisions leading up to the 1994 elections were responsible for Republicans’ winning an assembly majority for the first time in 24 years. The legislature’s conservatives aren’t so sanguine about Saddler, given his association with McNally Temple Associates, a decidedly moderate political consulting firm in Sacramento.

A potentially sensitive issue for Bush’s California campaign is Pete Wilson, the state’s former Republican governor. Wilson hasn’t announced whether he’ll support Bush, but a source close to him says he’s been approached about it by Bush operatives. He’s also been quoted indicating he expects Bush to be the nominee (Parsky, Bush’s California chairman, is a close friend and supporter of Wilson).

While popular when he left office in January, Wilson still provokes strong feelings among many of the Hispanics Bush is trying to win over, and Democratic strategists have threatened to make an issue of a Wilson endorsement. Recent speculation has been that while Wilson will endorse Bush, his more public role will be to mobilize support for a pro-Bush “independent expenditure” tentatively titled “Shape the Debate,” which will be directed by veteran California consultant George Gorton.

Regardless of Wilson’s activities, the Bushies know California will be anything but an easy victory. “We all acknowledge it’s uphill,” says Dreier, pointing to a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and Democratic control of both houses of the legislature.

Indeed, one ominous signal for Bush if he wins the nomination are the words of Garry South, the senior political adviser to Governor Gray Davis. South says Bush can’t win California in the general election because he’s too conservative on hot-button concerns like abortion, guns, and the environment. “We wrote the book on how to slice and dice a candidate on those issues,” boasts South, referring to Davis’s dissection of Dan Lungren, his conservative opponent, in last year’s gubernatorial election. “If we have to get out the Vegematic again, we will.”

Bush returned to California for a four-city tour on September 28-30 — he stopped in Silicon Valley for a fund-raising lunch — and more visits are in the works. No one knows just how many, but senior campaign advisers predict Bush will spend more time in California than any other state save Texas between now and the March 7 primary. That could deliver the boost Bush will need to seal the nomination. If he becomes the GOP nominee, the real test of his mettle will be whether he keeps coming back to California during the general election. If he does, and if he wins the state, he’ll be the next president.

Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.