California divided

In the end, Washington Democrats decided to fortify their districts in the California reapportionment rather than try for a few more seats that might help the party win back the U.S. House. That was fine with Republicans, who now believe that no news is good news from California. But for both parties, the result may produce unintended effects for years to come.

In Washington, a hint that the 2002 California reapportionment had the potential for causing bad blood inside the Democratic Party came two years ago in a private dining room on the House side of the U.S. Capitol. There, Representative Bob Filner (D-San Diego) sat at his customary table ordering his customary meal, which is tuna salad. But he did so in Spanish.

"Esta bien," replied Rosa, his customary waitress. She went on to ask if the congressman wants iced tea. "Si," Filner replied. "Gracias."

"De nada, senor," she answered; it's nothing. But it's not nothing. Filner wasn't merely being friendly to an immigrant waitress. Actually, he's practicing a language he has been studying seriously enough to do interviews for Spanish-language television. Although Filner represents a dependably Democratic district in Congress and boasts impeccable liberal credentials, the onetime Hubert Humphrey aide figures his very survival in politics depends on an ability to connect with a Latino audience. He is almost certainly right.

Like every California Democrat, Filner witnessed a conspicuous change in the demographic makeup of his district over the past 10 years. In his case, it was enough of a change that Democratic Party bosses tinkered with it in a way that makes it harder for a Latino to challenge him in a primary. This fine-tuning was part of the deal struck by Republicans and Democrats over reapportionment. The new district lines, drawn by Los Angeles consultant Michael Berman, brother of Los Angeles Democratic congressman Howard L. Berman, create one new Los Angeles district designed for a Latino Democrat while protecting 50 of the 52 House incumbents. This was no easy feat; the most salient feature of the map drawn by the Brothers Berman is that it may have left the nation's largest state without a single competitive congressional district.

The fallout was immediate. It included some horrid publicity from Representative Loretta Sanchez's (D-Garden Grove) admission that the 32 California House Democrats had promised to pay Michael Berman's firm $20,000 apiece, apparently with the understanding that he'd guarantee them winnable districts. "Twenty thousand is nothing to keep your seat," Sanchez told the Orange County Register in an odd but refreshing bout of candor. "I spend $2 million every election...."

The second shoe to drop came from national Democrats who groused privately that, in their zeal to ensure their own re-elections, California's Democrats passed up a chance to carve out another Democratic district or two - and thereby help the Democrats re-take Congress.

The nation's most prominent Mexican-American organization thinks so little of the Berman Brothers' plan that it filed suit under the Voting Rights Act to have two of the districts changed, including Berman's.

Finally, good-government types derided the map as the worst kind of smoke-filled-room politics. "It appears that the Legislature has decided to relieve us of the burden of elections," Claremont McKenna College government professor John J. Pitney Jr. observed dryly. "This is a classic incumbent gerrymander."

But the map, which is, indeed, the product of a smoke-filled room (Michael Berman is a chain smoker), was approved at the highest levels in both parties. House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt signed off on it. So did White House aide Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's political adviser. But if the two major political parties chose to play it safe, the 2000 census and the 2000 election returns demonstrated that the demographics and politics of California are ever fluid. This redistricting process promises to have lingering ripple effects on both parties - and perhaps not the intended effects - for years to come.

In the run-up to the state-by-state redistricting, national Democrats expressed hopes that California would produce a bonanza of new House seats for them. This optimism was fueled by three seemingly irresistible objects: First, California, historically a swing state, has been trending heavily Democratic for a decade. Second, Democrats' control of the Assembly, the state Senate and the governor's office gave them control of the process. Third, the surge in Latino political participation has been breaking disproportionately the Democrats' way.

For those reasons, officials at the Democratic National Campaign Committee were hoping for as many as three or four new Democratic districts out of the California reapportionment. "California was going to make Dick Gephardt the speaker of the House," said one former Clinton White House aide. "At least that's what we thought."

There also was a historical precedent. Twenty years ago, Representative Phillip Burton (D-San Francisco) drew a diabolically effective statewide map that changed the breakdown of the delegation from 22-21 Democratic to 28-17 in the Democrats' favor. Republicans learned from that 1982 nightmare. In 1991, with Republican Pete Wilson as governor, they fought for a plan that resulted in 20 seats considered safe for Republicans, 18 for Democrats and 14 competitive. This time, without a Republican governor to protect them, Republicans threatened to put reapportionment on the ballot as a referendum issue if the Democrats pushed too hard.

So were the national Democrats' expectations for redistricting unrealistic? Probably, for as it turns out, those three seemingly irresistible forces butted up against some competing political realities - three immovable objects, if you will.

The first of these barriers was as immutable as mathematics. In fact, it stemmed from an early misconception among some Democrats that the census would give California its usual raft of new seats. It didn't happen. Certainly, the state continued to grow. The 2000 Census count showed that California increased by 4.2 million people since 1990, a gain of over 13 percent. This was the largest raw gain of any state in the nation and a slightly higher percentage than the nation as a whole - but it resulted in only one additional congressional seat. The reason is that the more populous a state becomes, the harder it is to add congressional seats. When California's 4 million new people are spread over 52 congressional districts, the effect is not as profound as in smaller states. Thus four states with smaller total gains in population than California - Arizona, Georgia, Florida and Texas - actually gained two seats while California only gained one, going from 52 to 53.

"Everyone was sort of shocked in looking at the numbers, as to why we didn't gain more," said Representative Sam Farr (D-Carmel), dean of California's Democratic House delegation.

The second problem for the Democrats, if one can call it that, stemmed from their sweeping election successes in California in 2000. Essentially, they already had picked off all the marginal seats available. Representative Brian Bilbray (R-San Diego) was defeated by Assemblywoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego). In Glendale, Republican incumbent James Rogan lost to Democratic state Senator Adam Schiff, while Palos Verdes Democrat Jane Harman ousted Republican incumbent Steven Kuykendall. In the Silicon Valley, another Democratic assemblyman, Mike Honda, defeated GOP Assemblyman James Cunneen in an open seat than had been held by Republican Tom Campbell. The delegation went from a 28-24 Democratic advantage to 32-20.

"That was our redistricting," says Pam Barry, the delegation staff member most knowledgeable about the process. "We did it at the ballot box."

In Washington, stunned Republicans agreed. The only upside to this carnage, they reckoned, was that it couldn't get much worse. "In California, we've already had a blood bath," John Feehery, spokesman for Republican House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, explained. "It's going to be pretty hard for them to take anything more out of our hide."

But greed is human nature, and as they surveyed the 2000 election returns, national Democrats immediately began thinking of more damage they could do in 2002 through redistricting when Governor Gray Davis and his near veto-proof Democratic majority in the Legislature went to work. Certainly, Democrats would get the new, 53rd seat, a heavily Latino district in Los Angeles County, but then the national Democrats ran into the third, great immovable object: the self-preservation instincts of incumbents.

"Loretta Sanchez put it in the most raw form, but the fact is that as a delegation we hired Michael Berman as a consultant to protect our interests," explained one California Democratic congressman. "We decided, as a [Democratic] delegation, to do this. We had meetings, we had discussions, we had a vote to hire him. We said, 'Nobody can do this but Berman.' If you divided his $600,000 fee by 30 (Democrats), it comes to $20,000 each. A couple of people didn't pay, but he protected every incumbent, basically."

The final plan had to be sold not only to the delegation - on both sides of the aisle - but also to the Legislature, where Berman also worked his magic to help incumbents, and to the Republican National Committee, the White House and Democratic House leadership in Washington. Of the 52 California members of Congress, only one Republican, 70-year-old Republican Steve Horn of Long Beach, was gerrymandered out of a seat. Horn took one look at the Berman Brothers' map and announced his retirement. Controversial Democrat Gary Condit also saw his Central Valley district drawn with someone else in mind, although he has not complained publicly about it.

Two others registered concerns, one parochial and one philosophical. Brad Sherman squawked that Berman had seen to it that the Latino population in his San Fernando Valley district had gone from 20 percent to 52 percent while Berman's own percentage of Latinos had been reduced from 65 percent to 40 percent. "Howard Berman stabbed me in the back!" Sherman complained. To placate him, Berman split the difference in a hastily redrawn map.

The other delegation critic was Representative Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) - but not because he had any complaint about his own, still-safe, district. Thomas' objections were more philosophical. He believes that an entire slate of uncompetitive congressional races gives voters no real opportunity to be heard, and that by locking themselves into a minority status this way, Republicans were compromising their own chances of making a comeback in California. Moreover, Thomas also thinks that, at some point, Republicans simply must attract significant Latino votes and that by agreeing to place most of the state's Mexican-Americans voters in uncompetitive Democratic districts, Republicans risk distancing themselves from these voters in ways that make it hard to make inroads even if something good happens at the top of the ticket in the future.

But Thomas made no headway in his own party, where short-term pragmatism prevailed. "This map is a victory for the national Republican Party," says RNC communications director Steven Schmidt. "California is the only state in the country where the maps are being redrawn where one party has complete control of the process and we didn't lose any seats." This is the argument the California Republicans successfully made to national GOP leaders. Rove, still spooked over Bush's dismal performance in California in 2000, agreed that Republicans should cut their losses and accept the Bermans' deal - and met with Berman in secret to shake hands on it.

Meanwhile, Howard Berman and Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) were selling the Berman plan to Gephardt and the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman, Representative Martin Frost of Texas, on similar, tactical grounds. We are consolidating our position at our all-time high-water mark, the Californians said. This plan will solidify the still-tenuous gains made in 2000 on Election Day, while adding one more Democratic seat. That translates into 33 sure-thing seats for the next 10 years. To try to capture three or four more seats required spreading Democratic voters more thinly, and that eventually might put seven or eight districts at risk. According to one source, the disappointed national Democrats responded by insisting that not as much DCCC money would be available to California's Democratic candidates for next year's election. The Californians' view was that, with the Berman-made districts, they won't need money from Washington. Okay, then Gephardt and Frost replied: The money will go to other states.

"Am I satisfied?" Frost mused in an interview with California Journal. "Actually, we had always hoped for one additional seat in California, but we're quite satisfied. We picked up four seats last year and one more in redistricting, and this plan has the effect of strengthening those gains. The DCCC devoted some money trying to take those seats and now we have them, and we'll use those resources in competitive races elsewhere."

For their part, Californians still bristle at any suggestion that they let the party down. "It's ridiculous for them to say they wanted more," said one California Democrat. "They said in 2000 that if California got four or five seats they'd take over the House. Well, we got four seats and they didn't pick up the House. This time around, quite frankly, we took care of ourselves - and we got the fifth seat they asked for in 2000. They ought to be thanking us."

In the end, the leadership didn't exactly thank the Californians as much as accept their plan. "I had a number of conversations with Gephardt," recalls Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg (D-Los Angeles), who figured he could squeeze out another Democratic seat if he had to - but whose main concerns were harmony in the Democratic fold and avoiding litigation with Republicans. "There was discussion about making up ground in California, trying to pick up more Democratic seats. But that changed in talking to a number of members of the delegation. ...I called Gephardt and Gephardt says, 'No, I'm on board with everybody at the 20-33 plan.' I said okay."

Not quite. California likely will have seven or eight Latino members in Congress. This is progress, but with 32 percent of the state's population, some Latino activists think it's not enough. Moreover, in its lawsuit, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund asserts that the Bermans manipulated their map to deliberately dilute Latino voting strength for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for Latino candidates.

"And that," says Denise Hulett, lead counsel for MALDEF on redistricting, "is simply illegal."

The specific districts she has in mind are Berman's and Filner's, which raises unwelcome questions inside the Democratic Party: When the pressures of immigration and birthrates change a district's ethnic makeup to majority Latino, should the representative of that district then be Latino? And, can't a progressive Anglo represent Hispanics in Washington just as well?

MALDEF, understandably, wants to sidestep such divisive questions. Hulett freely concedes that Howard Berman has built an admirable legacy of advocacy on behalf of Mexican farm workers, immigrants and Latinos in general. She claims to not even know which Latino Democrats are eyeing Berman's seat. About Filner, whose seat is 80 percent non-Anglo and coveted by an ambitious Assemblyman Juan Vargas (D-San Diego) - he's challenged Filner in primaries twice already - all Hulett says is: "I understand he's a real good guy."

But if MALDEF claims its lawsuit isn't personal, that's not how it is perceived by either Berman or Filner. "For 30 years in public office, I have not merely voted for but have led the legislative battles to enact issues of importance to the Latino community," Berman said bitterly. "I guess for MALDEF, it's more about skin color and ethnicity than the philosophy and the quality of representation." Filner complains that the MALDEF lawsuit "is not really Hispanic empowerment. It's Vargas empowerment."

Such sniping can get out of hand, especially when it's cross-cultural. In 1998, a state Senate primary in San Fernando Valley between Richard Katz and Richard Alarcon degenerated into a mud-fest that pitted Jews against Latinos. Alarcon, the victor, later apologized to Katz and has gone out of his way to build bridges between the two communities, even to the point of organizing last year's first-ever Latino-Jewish festival called "Fiesta Shalom." That's a start, but it will take more than kosher tacos to make this tension disappear. All seven of the white Democrats in the Southern California House delegation - including Filner - are Jewish. All seven of their districts have large and increasing Latino populations who, not surprisingly, have spawned a generation of ambitious politicians. Will they wait patiently for Berman's generation to retire and then take over in districts that will be majority Latino? Some will; some won't. Vargas, a man in a hurry, already has publicly called Filner "that ugly guy."

These are just the tip of the passions unleashed by an incumbent-protecting reapportionment process and brought into the open by the MALDEF lawsuit. At stake is whether the California Democratic Party becomes the ineffectual, intellectually stale, racially polarized Democratic Party of New York City that was on full display in the 2001 mayoral race - and which made voters turn their backs in disgust on the Democratic Party. But California Republicans might do well to look to New York, too. If they decide, the way they did in reapportionment, to accept the logic that Latino voters equal Democratic voters (they are already not competitive among blacks) California Republicans will come to resemble their rapidly shrinking and almost irrelevant cousins in the New York City GOP. If that happens, 10 years from now, they will be hard-pressed even to defend their small beachhead of 20 congressional districts.

These, then, are the twin pitfalls of gerrymandering: Self-defeating internal racial politics by Democrats; self-defeating lily-white politicking by the Republicans. Tom Hofeller, the Republican National Committee redistricting honcho recently told the National Conference of State Legislatures: "In the politics of redistricting, politicians get to choose the voters." He's right, but as Bob Filner and every other incumbent House member in California is in the process of learning, when they exercise this power the political parties must be mindful of what they wish for.

Carl M. Cannon is a White House, correspondent for National Journal. Comments on this story may be sent to edit@statenet.com.

I happen to think that gerrymandering is one of the last great vestiges of old fashioned politics still left (it has allowed the Florida Concgressional Delegation to be diproportionately Republican, for example), since the idiots in the Supreme Court made its "one man, one vote" decision, a true infringement on states rights.

It sickens me how the otherwise sensible writers on the Wall Street Journal editorial page denounce gerrymandering whenever it comes up. If you don't like how yor districts are drawn, simply play closer attention to your local legislature. The old coot from Cambridge, Mass. was correct when he said "all politics is local."

This is an excellent article on the type of inside baseball that is played in redistricting in any state -- though perhaps more so in California. It illustrates a truth about politics which the simplicity of the civics text books ignore.
The central purpose of incumbents is to protect their own hides, not to advance the interests of their party. When push comes to shove, both Democrats and Republicans will abandon their parties interest in victory for the sake of their own safety in the next election.
Mind you, this happens not just in states which have gained seats, like California. It is even more vicious in states which have lost seats, where there aren't enough seats to go around for the incumbents. In four states, congressional musical chairs are being played, with incumbent congressman having to run against each other for the prize.
This is one more proof of Otto von Bismark's statement, "Those who love laws and sausages must never see how either is made."

Congressman Billybob

Latest column" "Approaching the Heliopause fron 1776."

Billybob, even you must miss the days when Connecticut only allowed three state Reps per town or city. Before "one man, one vote," Connecticut had a 70% Republican legislature in a state with 68% Dem Registration (with Pubbie registration just about 28% at the time).

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