Hurtt’s Spending Equals His Bold Conservative Agenda

Sen. Rob Hurtt, the Republicans’ boss in the California Senate, serves a lavish buffet to 200 lobbyists and political operatives, then strides to the podium.

He isn’t slick. Just the opposite. His humor elicits scattered chuckles. But the Capitol denizens aren’t at the banquet hall across from the Statehouse to be entertained.

They’ve heard the Democratic spin, that Hurtt is out to impose Christian theocracy. Now, they want their own look at this Orange County upstart who has fast attained power in their town, a tribute, more than anything else, to his willingness to spend his own millions to get his way. With votes from senators he helped elect, Hurtt stunned old-timers in August by seizing the influential post of Senate Republican leader. Now, the insiders are paying attention.

To this group, Hurtt doesn’t discuss biblical interpretations, or his view that abortion is murder. Here, he sticks to more salable pledges: lower taxes, smaller government, fewer shackles on business. Specifically, he lays out his plan for pushing the GOP into the majority in the state Senate.

He is brash, anti-government. He derides the old ways, where Republican and Democratic Senate leaders had a gentlemen’s agreement not to campaign against each others’ incumbents. Some in the audience cringe. But that’s the point. Hurtt’s rise signals that this once-exclusive club is the latest battleground of what he has called the war for “control of California, ideologically.”

To gain a Republican majority, Hurtt tells the crowd he will match whatever Democrats raise for elections next year, $3.5 million minimum. No one doubts he’s good for the money. Hurtt has pumped more than $3 million in donations and loans into California politics since 1992, an unprecedented sum for one person in state races.

In so doing, Hurtt and a few moneyed friends can claim credit for helping to elect one-fourth of the 120 lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly, and pushing the Republican Party sharply to the right. His message is clear: “Gear up early,” he says, asking the lobbyists for money. “You better be involved.”

‘Common Sense’

At 51, Robert Stanley Hurtt Jr., owner of Container Supply Co., a tin can and plastic bucket manufacturing firm in Garden Grove, has quickly become one of the most powerful Republicans in California, and among the most visible evangelical Christian officeholders in the nation.

If he topples the Democrats from control of the Senate--more plausible in 1998 than 1996--Hurtt stands to become president pro tem. If that happens, Hurtt would have control over every piece of legislation that goes through the Senate.

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For the moment, Hurtt is the focus of speculation and fascination. He’s a source of pride and hope for evangelicals and conservatives, and cause for fear and alarm among Democrats and groups that track the rise of the religious right.

“We’ve never seen anything like it in the history of California,” says Hurtt’s main rival, Senate Democratic leader Bill Lockyer of Hayward, who is fighting to maintain a one-seat Democratic majority in the upper house. He terms himself a “little scared” by the “enormous flood of money that just comes down on us.”

Even some moderate Republicans are dismayed at the ascent of Hurtt and the conservatives he has helped elect. “They came here to tear this place down and shake it up,” says Sen. Ken Maddy of Fresno, the veteran GOP leader ousted by Hurtt. “As a couple of them were quoted as saying, ‘Ken may be a great guy and may work hard and make consensus, but we do not want a consensus.’ ”

In the Senate, Hurtt acts as a sort of chairman of the GOP board. He rarely gives floor speeches, leaving that to more inspirational orators. He carries few bills. That chore falls to conservative allies.

Ask him to describe his philosophy and he replies, “common sense.” He’s an affable sort, disarmingly straightforward. His goals? Gain a majority in the Senate. Once the GOP is in control, he can go about changing California to his ideal of what it was when he came of age, when, he says, entrepreneurs could succeed and most families were intact.

“I really do have a concern about the direction we’re headed,” he says. “I know it will continue unless people try to make a difference. We live in a society where, right now, we still have the freedom to make a difference.”

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A compact 5-foot-8 with thin gray hair, Hurtt favors plain sports coats, slacks and pastel-toned floral ties, not up to the snappy standards of lifelong politicians. He moves fast, talks fast and prides himself on being punctual, another trait that sets him apart in Sacramento.

He relishes the role of outsider, yet tries to be part of the Capitol club, hosting nickel-and-dime poker games Wednesday nights in his hotel suite when lawmakers are in session.

His power is increasing, but Hurtt maintains he’s a businessman first, not a pol. He came late to politics, and avoided the turmoil of the 1960s as a young man. Although he says he was a hawk on the Vietnam War, Hurtt had a draft deferment while he attended Claremont McKenna College, graduating with an economics degree in 1966.

In his final year of college, at age 21, Hurtt married Nancy Braun, his sweetheart from Pasadena High School. By 1969, they had three children, and had a fourth later.

She remained at home to care for the children. He worked at his father’s tin can factory, starting at $600 a month, taking over in 1982 when his father retired. Now, Hurtt’s oldest son and a daughter work at Container Supply.

A sporadic churchgoer in his younger days, Hurtt attends a Presbyterian congregation in Santa Ana now. His convictions began deepening in the early 1980s when, looking for help rearing his children, he dial-surfed to a radio show hosted by James Dobson, the evangelical psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family, a huge conservative ministry in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Hurtt became a Focus on the Family devotee, but not one who would merely tune into Dobson’s daily radio broadcasts. He donated, in a big way. Between 1987 and 1989, Hurtt gave Focus on the Family $250,000.

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Dobson, one of the most influential leaders of the religious right, intersperses his advice on family life with attacks on gay rights, abortion and, recently, the United Nation’s women’s conference in China, calling it “atheistic.” It was Dobson who introduced Hurtt to politics.

Dobson led Hurtt and a few other donors to Washington in President Reagan’s second term, where they met Administration officials, including a White House aide named Lt. Col. Oliver North. Hurtt recalls North’s spiel, later to become infamous, about the Soviet support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and his pitch for money for the Contras. Hurtt did not give. But the trip had an impact. At the end, Dobson urged his followers to get politically involved.

Ever since, Hurtt has been backing his beliefs with his money--$10,000 for an anti-pornography crusade, $10,000 more to help fund former Assistant Los Angeles Police Chief Robert Vernon’s suit claiming his career was destroyed by a city investigation into whether his fundamentalist beliefs affected his work at Parker Center.

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, director of the Traditional Values Coalition in Anaheim and a Christian activist, calls Hurtt “our Daddy Warbucks,” a man who proves that his heart is with conservative causes by opening his wallet.

“Give it all away--that’s what good, honest people do,” Hurtt says. “Whether you agree with what I believe or not, I put my money where my mouth is.”

The largest beneficiary of Hurtt’s money is the Capitol Resource Institute, a Christian-based educational and lobbying group associated with Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Hurtt co-founded it in 1987 with multimillionaire Howard Ahmanson, and is its largest benefactor, giving it $1 million since it opened.

While Hurtt’s legislative focus is on pro-business bills, few of which are controversial, the advocacy group he created is devoted almost entirely to social issues and restoring its view of traditional family life.

It lobbies against aspects of public schools it believes undermine family values, and state interference in parental rights. It pushes for tax breaks for families and welfare limits, and against gay rights. Hurtt’s chief of staff and spokesman come from the group. Several lawmakers financed by Hurtt carry bills sponsored by Capitol Resource.

While Capitol Resource has had successes, Hurtt concluded that, so long as Democrats control the Legislature, he could not stop bills he opposed. So he dug deeper. While he gave to a few politicians in the 1980s--$2,000 for televangelist Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign--his real impact began in 1992. With Ahmanson and two other wealthy Christian businessmen, Hurtt established Allied Business PAC, now called California Independent Business PAC.

In 1992, the four Allied founders spent $2.2 million on state campaigns, mostly legislative races. Hurtt spent $750,000. The candidates all opposed abortion, gay rights and gun control. Some espoused fundamentalist views. Of the 26 original candidates, only nine won.

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In 1993, Hurtt took his involvement to the next level, financing his own campaign for a Senate seat in a district near where he lived, and winning. The district stretches from Disneyland to Little Saigon in Garden Grove. Container Supply is in the district, but Hurtt’s home in Orange is not.

When he ran, Hurtt promised to move to the district. Today, he complies with state law by being registered to vote in a rented condo in Garden Grove, but still lives in Orange, saying he cannot sell his four-bedroom, four-bath home without taking a loss.

Hurtt quit Allied after he was elected, but still swaps political advice with his friends, and puts money into campaigns. Since 1993, Hurtt has spent $2.2 million, making him the second-largest donor to legislative races, behind the California Teachers Assn. Allied spent another $1 million.

In recent campaigns, Hurtt has turned pragmatic. If, for example, polls show voters in a district favoring abortion rights, Hurtt will fund a pro-choice candidate, so long as he--most are men--is Republican and a fiscal conservative.

Today, Hurtt and the political action committee he helped create can claim some credit for giving Republicans a majority in the Assembly. They have given large amounts to 21 of the 41 Assembly Republicans, four of 17 Senate Republicans and smaller sums to several others.

“You’re not going to find many other examples like Rob, who started at ground zero politically and have risen to this level,” said Gary Bauer, director of the conservative Family Research Council in Washington and former domestic policy adviser to President Reagan.

The ‘Truth of Absolutes’

An American flag hangs outside Container Supply. Inside, over Hurtt’s desk in the office of his spotless factory, a sign says Jesus is Lord. Hurtt is not, however, one to turn the other cheek. He bristles when Lockyer, his Democratic nemesis, portrays him as a zealot.

On a recent day, Hurtt leafed through papers that came over the fax. The papers were Lockyer’s analysis of the 1996 Senate races--loot in the game of espionage that goes on between Hurtt and Lockyer. Lockyer, a tough and practiced campaigner, uses the papers in his pleas for campaign money.

Suddenly, Hurtt homes in on one line, often repeated in articles about the rise of conservative Christians: “My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives.” It’s a decade-old quote attributed to Ahmanson.

Hurtt curses Lockyer. He says the line is designed to scare people into believing Ahmanson--and, by extension, Hurtt--intends to force religion on others. Making it worse, Lockyer plays loose with the facts, implying Ahmanson made the comment recently.

“That’s the biggest con job,” Hurtt declares, slapping the papers, his voice rising. “He’s going to take it to Jewish groups and scare ‘em.”

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Hurtt calms down and explains what his friend meant, and says he agrees with him: “There are absolute values in the Bible that we should really pay attention to, and they should be the foundations of our society.”

When he was first elected, he told an interviewer that he believed creationism should be taught in public school. Now, he’s less specific about the practical impact of this idea, saying interpretations of constitutional separation of church and state are taken too far, and that ethics and values shared by all religions should be part of government.

A decade ago, before his political conversion, Hurtt favored abortion rights. Now, he says “abortion is murder.”

“We were not killing people. We were keeping them in bondage, and we fought over that,” he says. “Now we’re not even willing to fight a war over life, the beginning of life.”

Hurtt is not sure what to do about it, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion. At a minimum, he says, the state should not pay for abortions for poor women, at a cost of $40 million a year. He has cast votes against abortion funding. As for pro-choice Republicans he funds, once there is a GOP majority, “There’s always hope for people. Maybe I could convert [them].”

Then, there is homosexuality. Hurtt launches into a monologue about gay rights, and the spread of AIDS.

“We now have a plague on this earth that they’re responsible for. Now, I think they ought to be held accountable,” Hurtt says.

Hurtt has not carried AIDS-related bills. But the Capitol Resource Institute backed two measures, which failed, calling for wider testing and requirements that officials notify people who come into intimate contact with people with AIDS. AIDS activists and many physicians contend that such requirements would push people with the virus deeper underground.

Because of AIDS, Hurtt says, sodomy laws, abolished 20 years ago, should be reinstated.

“It’s like, ‘We dare not speak about this. It’s politically incorrect,’ ” he says. “We better speak about it. We’re all going to sit here until this keeps growing. How many innocent people are going to die?”

His social beliefs and the influence of Dobson aside, Hurtt’s experience in business pushed him to get more involved politically, he says. He disdains restrictions on business, from affirmative action to environmental law to taxes. Unions have outlived their usefulness, he says, and he opposes any increase in the minimum wage. He believes any good business owner needs good employees, and will pay to keep them.

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Container Supply has never lost money. But during the recession, it was “getting strangled” by high costs of workers’ compensation and the need to meet regulations imposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

“It took all my energy, all my time,” Hurtt says. “No more growing my business--just scrapping and fighting. That’s where I got to be a warrior.”

Now that he’s in the Senate, the air quality district is in his sights. This year, his bill was approved to abolish the district’s requirement that companies such as his promote ride-sharing among employees. It was “total bureaucratic red tape,” he says. Besides, he doesn’t much like the concept.

“I like to go where I want to, when I want to and with whomever.”

Hurtt swaggers through his factory. Machines roar, spitting out cans and plastic containers. He doesn’t wear a hard hat, a safety rule violation.

“This is what makes me a real person,” Hurtt says, spreading his arms as if to embrace his factory, happy to be in the bustling plant his father, then he, built into a $25-million-a-year business, with 200 workers.

He stops at a workstation where a crew places warning labels on plastic five-gallon buckets. The Legislature required the labels in 1993 because 200 toddlers drowned in buckets nationwide. Each bucket gets two labels. They warn in English and Spanish of the danger of drowning, and have a cartoon picture of a toddler with its head in a bucket of water, with a red slash across it.

Hurtt cites the law as evidence of how wrongheaded Sacramento can be. No toddler could read the warning. If anything, the label shows them how to drown themselves. What’s more, the labels add six cents to the $1 cost of one bucket. This year, Hurtt ally Sen. John Lewis (R-Orange) carried a bill easing the requirement. Now, bucket makers can get by with a single label.

“People die of accidents of all kinds all the time,” Hurtt says. “You can’t fix everything with laws from Sacramento.”

‘A Warrior’

Hurtt’s fast rise has caught the attention of groups that advocate a strict separation of church and state. The Anti-Defamation League included several paragraphs about Hurtt in a lengthy section about Dobson in its 1994 report, “The Religious Right: The assault on tolerance and pluralism in America.”

Says author Fred Clarkson, who studied the Christian political movement for Planned Parenthood’s national office in New York: “He epitomizes the rise of the political right and the failure of society to take it seriously.”

After Hurtt lined up nine of 17 Republican senators and became minority leader, Lockyer unleashed a string of invectives--”anti-choice, anti-labor, anti-consumer, anti-environment” and more--to describe Hurtt and the GOP.

Hurtt calls such characterizations hype, stereotyping and bigotry. He says he has always been a pragmatist. In fact, many lobbyists view Hurtt as simply one more politician--with money.

Indeed, Hurtt is showing signs of becoming more a part of the Capitol’s culture. When he was elected, he said he wouldn’t take the perk of driving a state-leased car. But last September, after his youngest son wrecked a state-owned 1995 Chevy Tahoe sports utility vehicle assigned to Hurtt, the senator said he had been austere in his first three years in office and “had been a good boy long enough.”

As minority leader, Hurtt’s main role will be to run elections for Senate Republicans. His supporters are counting on him to lead the GOP to a majority in the 40-seat Senate, something Republicans have not had since 1973.

“If we didn’t have a Rob Hurtt, we would have had to create it,” said political consultant Wayne Johnson, who has run campaigns financed by Hurtt. “We’re at war and we need a warrior to lead us.”

In his three years in office, Hurtt has carried only nine bills that have become law. Almost all were minor.

For the most part, he has delegated policy matters to his allies. Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside), for one, received $319,000 from Hurtt in his Senate race last year, and led a failed Senate fight to end abortion funding this year. More recently, Haynes has become involved in a move to cut welfare.

“I don’t have a specific goal on welfare, except keep it from busting the budget,” Hurtt said.

Sen. Maddy, the veteran leader ousted by Hurtt in August, viewed it as part of his job to carry Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s bills, and line up votes for his annual state budget.

Hurtt is no fan of Wilson. He endorsed Texas Sen. Phil Gramm for President when Wilson was seeking the GOP nomination, and voted against Wilson’s budget in each of his three years in office.

The main reason, he says, is that the $55-billion budget continues to grow. It can be cut, he says, by 5%, easy. Next year, Hurtt will help shape the budget. Whether he will end up voting for it remains to be seen.

“You wouldn’t want me to do something that I didn’t believe in, would you?” Hurtt says.

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Hurtt’s Support for Causes

State Sen. Rob Hurtt, using money primarily from his Container Supply Co., has given more than $4 million in donations and loans to campaigns and causes since 1987. Here’s where some of the money has gone:

1) Capitol Resource Institute, $1.09 million; lobbying and policy group co-founded by Hurtt that focuses on social issues.

2) Allied Business PAC, $707,442; co-founded by Hurtt to finance conservative Republican candidates.

3) His own political campaigns, $670,000.

4) California Republican Party, $440,000; for GOP candidates.

5) Assemblyman Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), $400,000; loan for Assembly races. Former Assembly GOP leader running for state Senate.

6) State Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside), $319,000 in campaign contributions.

7) Focus on the Family, $250,305; Christian ministry devoted to “traditional family values.”

8) State Sen. Maurice Johannessen (R-Redding), $147,000 in campaign contributions.

9) State Sen. Dick Montieth (R-Modesto), $122,250, in campaign contributions.

10) California Conservative Opportunity Society, $115,000; for anti-abortion, anti-gun control candidates.

Sources: California Common Cause, campaign finance reports, state attorney general’s office.