In the Sacramento News and Review, Ralph Brave has a must-read on Congressman John Doolittle where he asks:
The interesting question, though, is whether, after more than a quarter-century as a rising, and then prominent, political figure on the Sacramento and national scenes, the downfall of Doolittle means something more than the latest corruption of a politician.
Just like the all nationalized races before this, the internet attention this race will receive will make some new national stars from the local press corps. Ralph Brave has a great audition. So check out the story — maybe even email it around. After the jump are some of my favorite parts.
First, the personal qualities and character of Doolittle must openly and frankly be dealt with, for there is no figure currently on the California political stage who has consistently engendered as much overt loathing and disgust as Doolittle–as much from members of his own party as from his ideological counterparts. When he was fined by the Fair Political Practices Commission for laundering money to swing his 1984 election, his defeated opponent, former Senate Republican colleague Ray Johnson, foresaw that it would not be an adequate penalty to stop future misbehavior. “Oh God,” Johnson lamented in 1987 in the California Journal, “can’t we just drown him and get it over with?” A year after that comment, on the verge of Doolittle winning re-election based on another vicious campaign, Sacramento Bee columnist Pete Dexter couldn’t constrain his contempt. In print he pronounced Doolittle “a lying, unprincipled, crooked piece of human garbage.” Even for Dexter, this was strong stuff.
What evoked these and other expressions of outrage was the combination of characteristics that arises with regularity in American political life: the religious hypocrite, the sanctimonious scumbag. In Doolittle’s case, it is the devout Mormon with a highly selective ethical compass, which since the very beginning of his career consistently has drawn out such a continuous avalanche of animus toward him.
From Doolittle’s perspective, there must have been some considerable measure of spite and vengeful malice that motivated him and bridged the contradiction in his character. While many of the 1960s youth were struggling for political and cultural and personal liberation, the teen-aged Johnny Doolittle was dreaming of Richard Nixon. When he graduated as a history major from UC Santa Cruz in 1972, the town of Santa Cruz voted 96 percent for George McGovern. In the 1970s, while South America was in the throes of overcoming a century of colonialism and imperialism, Doolittle landed in Argentina as a Mormon missionary.
Some in the district used to ignore this because he was a rising star, but more and more voters are realizing that he stopped being able to deliver much of anything but interesting newspaper articles since he stepped down from appropriations. But judging by his electoral past, we can expect him to go down guns a blazing:
Revenge was sought. The establishment reapportioned Doolittle into a district that made him run against an incumbent Democrat, Leroy Greene, whom he could not and did not defeat. But because Doolittle had been elected to a four-year term in 1980, he continued to serve as a senator without a district. By 1984, he had landed in a newly redrawn district that was more favorable–but he faced a three-way race, with former Republican Johnson running against him as an Independent. Doolittle stooped to the gutter, funneling money to the Democratic candidate, who had no other support, in order to draw votes away from the popular Johnson. Doolittle survived by the margin of votes received by the Democrat. “Never has so little money done so much good,” pronounced Doolittle’s master, H.L. Richardson.
The FPPC fine that Doolittle would receive for these campaign violations would be the first, but not the last. Doolittle established a record and a hard-earned reputation as the zealously principled right-wing politician who zealously would do whatever it took to hold onto and expand his power. Perhaps the ultimate example of his principled unprincipled-ness occurred in the November 1994 general election for U.S. Congress. Facing a Democratic woman with a background as a software-company executive who had garnered the support of Hewlett-Packard, one of his district’s largest employers, Doolittle was taking no chances. The week of the election, voters received a letter with an endorsement of Doolittle by James Roosevelt, a founder of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and a son of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had signed the original Social Security Act into law in 1933. The mailer was significant because Doolittle had received extremely low ratings for his congressional record from all the major senior-citizen groups. Even more significant was the fact that, by then, Roosevelt had been dead for two years.
Doolittle again last year ran a gratuitously slimy campaign and I think we can expect the same. But his game is over.
Yet his legacy will remain. Almost every single one of Doolittle’s buddies seeking to replace him was party of his machine and only got where they are by doing what Doolittle demanded.