The Freshman

Monday, April 14, 6:09 a.m. -- The first stirrings of this Washington week begin under the famously swagged canopy of Dulles International Airport. The sun still isn’t up. Ticket counters are silent and the cavernous terminal is empty except for a snaking procession of sleep-deprived Californians disembarking from a “red-eye” just in from LAX. * One is in jeans and running shoes and swaddled in an ankle-length red coat--one arm cradling some spiral-bound notebooks, the other carrying a frayed black-leather suitcase by the straps. Her hair is matted on one side, her face creased from sleeping on an airline pillow. Her eyelids are at half-mast. * For Loretta Sanchez, freshman congresswoman from Garden Grove and upset winner of last fall’s contest with 12-term veteran Republican Bob Dornan, this April morning begins her 15th week on the job. * She doesn’t know it, but in the next three days she will deliver her most dramatic floor speech yet from the House of Representatives, albeit 60 seconds long and to a nearly empty chamber. She will savor her first legislative success, only to see news coverage of it disappear amid the blizzard of charges and countercharges in Dornan’s relentless campaign to prove that the 37-year-old Democrat stole the election. * The week will find her hounding the head of NASA for a ride into space, buttonholing members on the House floor while a Mickey Mouse water bottle sticks out of her purse, exercising in the House gym alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich and delighting a visiting group of deaf children in the hall outside her office. For the umpteenth time, Sanchez will mispronounce the name of the Rayburn House Office Building (she keeps calling it “Raymond”) and chat with fellow legislators without letting on that she doesn’t have a clue who they are. Her ethnicity will be the reason she will be showered with adulation by visiting Latinos. Yet political operatives will treat her like a token. On one day she will be flattered by the White House and that evening tell a white lie; on another she will vote for something she doesn’t believe in--and not for the first time.

But just now, as Sanchez leaves Dulles, her mind is filled with the clutter of what lies ahead: a week crammed with receptions, caucuses, floor votes, negotiations, back-to-back meetings, luncheons, committee hearings, dinners and more floor votes. And through it all, there is the drumbeat that plays over and over each day as Sanchez tries to find her way as a freshman. The drummer is Dornan. His cries of election fraud, along with the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee’s pledge to investigate, pervades everything. Lawyers must be consulted, legal fees raised, a media war waged. Supporters express sympathy. Lobbyists politely inquire. And reporters demand answers. “Why don’t you ask about other things besides Dornan?” she’ll ask impatiently. Sanchez’s mood can swing from pensive to giddy to livid, depending upon the Dornan news of the day. (By the end of the week, exasperation overtakes Sanchez’s legislative director, Mauro Morales. With the media spotlight fixed on the postelection dogfight, staffers struggle to articulate other agendas, such as education. “I came here to do something for her,” Morales gripes, “and it gets frustrating for us to have to get pulled away with this [Dornan] stuff.”)

But just now, on the ride through northern Virginia into Washington, Sanchez has momentarily cleared her head of Dornan. The sun is up. She is wide awake, playful, even sassy.

“One of the things about being in Congress is, first of all”--her voice drops to an intimate just-between-us level--”nobody really knows what you do. Really.

“I mean, I could literally go and sit on a desert island and the people wouldn’t see me. Probably wouldn’t vote me in again. But the taxpayers would pay me. The reality is, you can take as much control or as little control of the situation as you want.”

This is vintage Sanchez. The dark horse that power brokers once ignored, the ex-financial advisor whose only other shot at politics was when she finished eighth in a field of 16 running for the Anaheim City Council. She beat the odds last fall, so maybe that has given her license to be irreverent now and again. At one of Washington’s black-tie affairs in January, she kidded California Sen. Barbara Boxer about looking “pretty good when you get cleaned up.” In front of C-SPAN in February, she chided House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri about not bothering to return her phone calls. Conversing with two congressmen on a stroll across the Capitol grounds, she described Gingrich trying to burn off weight in the House gym, noting that “he still looks like a little doughboy to me.” And when the Hispanic Caucus met with President Clinton in the Cabinet Room of the White House to discuss its agenda, she carried on her own discussion about Latino issues with the guy sitting beside her, Vice President Al Gore. She called him “Al,” oblivious to her colleagues’ darted glances.

The very first words she spoke on the House floor March 11 were an act of audacity. Tired of the Republican majority scheduling last-minute votes on wedge issues and symbolic resolutions and forcing members--particularly far-flung Californians--to cut short their district time, Sanchez one day suddenly stood up on the floor and demanded a vote on a largely ceremonial piece of legislation concerning the presence of American troops in Okinawa. Republicans and Democrats alike were forced to stop whatever they were doing and trudge across the street to cast votes.

There is a frankness about Sanchez that can be a refreshing alternative to the stale correctness of Washington. But to some, at times, it seems common, even inappropriate. Ask her if she’s awed by people in power, and she replies: “I just figure Clinton’s got to go to the bathroom the same way as everybody else.”

This graduate of tiny Chapman University in Orange County, an avid seamstress who made the gold metallic gown, size 6, that she wore to the inaugural ball, fancies herself someone who tells it like it is. And she suffers no delusions about the mission her colleagues have assigned her for the 105th Congress: to be invited back to the 106th. No small feat. The only Democratic member of Congress from conservative Orange County, her victory margin was 984 hotly contested votes. She will likely be the Republicans’ No. 1 target in the House in 1998.

“My job, according to all the Democrats here on the Hill, is to keep my job in two years,” Sanchez says. “That’s all they expect from me: ‘Tell us what you need. Tell us how we can help you. Tell us how you can keep your job. And don’t worry about anything else.’ ”

*

Tuesday, April 15, noon -- “How you doing, babe?” The burly union boss puts a bearhug on Sanchez as she circulates among tables at a Washington luncheon for the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California.

Others grab her hand or sidle up beside her for a Kodak moment. Dozens more around the room gaze up from their salads to watch. These are labor leaders for the construction trades, a crowd of men mostly, with beefy shoulders and outsized suits. Many were instrumental in raising the money that got Sanchez elected. Other seasoned Democrats from California’s congressional team are here or soon will be: Reps. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, Howard L. Berman of Mission Hills and caucus chairman Vic Fazio of West Sacramento. But Sanchez is the keynote speaker and star. “A tough, tough fighter,” Bob Balgenorth, the council’s president, introduces her.

Sanchez wears a cream-colored suit with a dark pinstripe running through the jacket and a sleeveless black blouse with a pearl necklace. She laughs and reaches out to grasp an arm or a hand; in the art of social greeting, she is a clutcher and gives every indication this tendency comes naturally. People are drawn to her, patiently waiting their turn to approach. Sanchez pokes fun at her appeal, saying it is merely that “everybody wants to meet the woman who beat Bob Dornan.” But there is a magnetism beyond her political conquest that’s evident even when she moves about the House floor. Political figures as diverse as Fazio and Gingrich, when asked what they think of this youngest woman in Congress, usually include the words “very attractive.”

In truth, social glad-handing is work for Sanchez. “If you just drop me into a room of 500 people, I’m typically not one of those people who goes up and says, ‘Hi, I’m Loretta Sanchez. Who are you? What are you all talking about?’ But I do it anyway. I mean, that’s what I do.”

Sanchez was shy growing up (she insists she still is) and learned to assert herself as a businesswoman running her own consulting firm. Before that, she took to heart advice from a favorite great aunt. “She said to me, ‘You just watch everybody else around you and you just follow their example. And don’t ever let them know you can’t do it. Don’t think that they’re any better than you.’ ”

Both Sanchez’s parents are Mexican immigrants. Ignacio Sanchez worked as a machinist in a Los Angeles plastics and rubber plant. He pushed his seven children hard to excel in school. Anything less than a straight-A report card was trouble. The family was poor when the children were young. Nine people were crammed into a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house, three miles northeast of Disneyland. But her father taught his children never to take a back seat to anyone. To Loretta, his eldest daughter and second child, he said: “Never let them tell you you are a dumb Mexican.”

On this Tuesday, the labor crowd is loving the story about how her mother met her father while trying to organize workers on his assembly line. But they cheer loudest for any scrap about the ultraconservative political icon who dominated their congressional district for so long and built a reputation for rancorously bashing gays, liberals and Clinton.

“They would have just loved to hear me tell Bob Dornan stories all day long,” Sanchez says, catching her breath in a limousine the labor bosses arranged for her trip back to Capitol Hill. “How we beat him together.”

3:30 p.m. -- Hers is Suite 1529 on the fifth floor of the Longworth House Office Building. The walls and shelves in the reception area are nearly empty. Much the same is true of her office, where glass-encased bookshelves hold little more than a copy of the Constitution and a few orientation notebooks. There are personal photographs scattered about: Sanchez at a wedding with her four brothers and two sisters; cheek-to-cheek and smiling sweetly with husband Stephen Brixey III, 36, a securities trader, and a shot of Gretzky the cat, a Himalayan, curled up on a couch.

Daniel Goldin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, arrives. Known for his media savvy, talents of persuasion and familiar Bronx accent, Goldin begins spinning NASA effortlessly. There will be an effort the next week to dump the proposed space station (the measure will fail, with the help of Sanchez’s vote), and down the road, Congress must consider the agency’s $13.5-billion budget request for 1998. Goldin is sitting on a leather couch talking about “the future of America,” computer literacy, tracking El Nino, and osteoporosis in space travelers. Sanchez sits next to him on the couch, her chin resting on her fist. Every once in a while, she prods him about giving her a ride on the space shuttle. Each time he smiles and politely deflects the requests. But she persists.

“Of course you can do it,” Sanchez says impishly.

“We can get you into the shuttle-training aircraft,” Goldin offers.

“You guys,” she says, coyly drawing out the last word.

“Help me here, Jeff,” Goldin says, grinning and rolling his eyes in mock panic toward his aide, Jeff Lawrence.

Before the half-hour meeting is over, Sanchez will bring up her ride on the shuttle eight times. “Very determined,” Goldin says. When a radio reporter steps in later for a quick interview, she puts it on the record: “I would love to be up in a spacecraft and really be able to see our planet from another point of view.”

Minutes later, a buzzer on the wall sounds. The noise resembles something between a klaxon and an alarm clock, and it’s followed by a muffled intercom voice summoning members to a vote--this time on a Republican-sponsored proposal for a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds majority for Congress to raise taxes.

Sanchez joins the foot traffic across Independence Avenue to the Capitol. She gets nods and greetings and snatches of conversation from people who might, for all she knows, be members of the House of Lords. Because of the intense publicity Sanchez has received, dozens of congressmen and women know her by sight, although she can’t possibly know all of them. After the vote, she rides the elevator five floors with a congressman who explains that he had seen her on CNN, thought she was getting a raw deal from Dornan, had talked to “Jesse” about it and agreed that they should contribute to her defense fund. She listened and courteously thanked him, then stepped off the elevator, turned to someone and said, “Who was that?” She didn’t realize it was Baltimore Democrat Elijah Cummings and that “Jesse” was the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Many Hill Democrats are watching Sanchez’s voting pattern closely, trying to figure out her politics. (Today she won’t decide how she’ll vote on the tax issue until she’s in the revolving door that leads into the Capitol.) Sanchez’s campaign platform last fall--apart from attacking Dornan--was that of a business-oriented fiscal conservative and social progressive passionate about education. But particulars were few. So now they wonder what really matters to her.

Sanchez used to be a Republican. She voted for Ronald Reagan (maybe twice, she’s not sure) and for George Bush over Michael S. Dukakis. She abandoned the GOP in 1992, deciding that it had drifted too far right, alienating women and minorities. Still, she’s evasive about her choice for president that year, saying only that it was neither Clinton nor Bush and that she had soured on Ross Perot. But she did vote. Last year, Sanchez went with Clinton. (And he went with her, appearing at one of her campaign rallies, in Santa Ana.) She finds his vigor and ability to inspire reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s.

Republicans are watching her, too. Rep. David Dreier of San Dimas is pushing her to support his capital gains tax cut. “She might have some roots that are of a Republican leaning,” he says. “She told me that virtually every member of her family . . . said she should be supporting my legislation.” (She says she’s thinking about it.) So far this term, apart from bills on partial-birth and other abortion issues on which Sanchez has staunchly voted in favor of abortion rights, there has been little on which to judge her. But there are clues.

An obscure vote in February to extend an existing airline-ticket tax to pay for improving airports and air traffic-control systems was hardly an example of tax-and-spend fanaticism. It passed overwhelmingly. But Sanchez voted with just eight Democrats and 64 Republicans against it. Even within the conservative Orange County delegation, only Republican Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach joined her.

More telling was her vote on a resolution in March endorsing the display of the Ten Commandments in government offices and courthouses. Utterly symbolic, it passed easily against mostly Democratic opposition. Sanchez says she didn’t believe in the bill. “There should be a separation of church and state,” she says. “We shouldn’t show a preference for Christian ideas or Buddhist ideas or Hindu ideas.” She voted for it anyway. Her reason: Constituents might not understand how, to her, the bill violated a fundamental principle. “It would be difficult to explain to a normal person,” she says. And worse, they might consider this practicing Cath- olic anti-Christian. She also didn’t want to give her enemies something to use against her. “I’d rather be attacked on something that’s substantive.”

The super-majority tax issue on the House floor this afternoon is also a potential campaign weapon. The bill itself is more symbolism: There is no chance that Republicans will garner the two-thirds vote necessary to approve the constitutional amendment. They tried last year with an even larger majority in Congress and failed.

The night before, Sanchez had jeered the proposal. “I’m not going to change the Constitution,” she said with disgust.

Today, her vote is in favor.

“If it had changed the law, I’d have voted against it,” she says quietly afterward. But, she notes, the the bill was “not worth using against me.”

Just now, all debate over whether to vote one’s conscience or take political cover evaporates as San- chez steps into a meeting with her chief of staff, Steve Jost. She emerges silent, jaw set, fuming. Word has arrived that Dornan has subpoenaed her telephone, utility, rental and campaign-committee records. Jost immediately proposes that they simply throw open the records and snatch Dornan’s fire. But the idea dies quickly.

The hour is late, and Sanchez is co-hosting a small dinner for other House Democrats at a Greek restaurant down the street. She slings a purse strap over her shoulder and storms out the door, too furious to explain her thoughts. They come pouring out only the next day.

“None of this is his business. It’s none of his business what my personal finances are. I know what he wants. He wants to try to find dirt on me. He wants to try to figure out how I ran my campaign and what all my inside secrets are [as] to how I got rid of him and who my volunteers are. He wants to find out who my contributors are, and he wants to put together an effort to beat me in 1998.”

*

Wednesday, April 16, 10:20 a.m. They are three peas in a pod, waiting to see the congresswoman. Squeezed into a soft-leather couch just inside Sanchez’s cramped reception area, they are quiet and politely oblivious to the whirlwind of young staffers squeezing past them. Mathias A. “Pete” Valadez, president of Cement Masons Local No. 500 in Santa Ana, his business manager, Art Martinez, and Martinez’s wife, Magdalena, have waited a long time for this day. Back during the campaign, when so many thought Sanchez didn’t have a prayer, Valadez knew it would happen. He promised her that when he came to Washington in April for a labor convention, they would have breakfast.

The day had come, just as Valadez had foreseen.

“We’re awfully proud that a Spanish-speaking person has made it,” Magdalena Martinez says.

They don’t mind waiting a little longer.

*

11:11 a.m. -- Sanchez sits by herself near the front row of the House chamber, waiting her turn to speak. In her lap is a speech, and she whispers its words to herself. The chamber is nearly empty, the visitors’ gallery half full. But a television camera, feed- ing images nationally through C-SPAN, watches as she moves to the lectern.

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call attention to an injustice suffered by over 300 men of the Vietnam War,” Sanchez begins, her delivery clear and concise, thanks to years of speech training required by her father and the efforts of a staffer who timed the speech at precisely 57 seconds.

These one-minute floor speeches are a morning ritual in which members of the House can talk to the world about anything they please as long as it doesn’t take more than 60 seconds. Sanchez is promoting what will become her first piece of legislation: some special wording that committee chair- men have agreed to add to an appropriations bill. The wording provides $20 million as compensation for former South Vietnamese commandos or their survivors. The commandos fought with the United States during the Vietnam War, only to die or languish for years in Communist prisons afterward. They emigrated years later, and dozens are among Sanchez’s constituents.

“Let’s not turn our backs on the commandos,” she implores.

*

2:20 p.m. --* Sanchez’s schedule has been dissolving and reforming by the hour. She’s in her office now, teasing some visitors: veteran lobbyist Robert C. McCandless and his clients, four executives of Transamerica Corp. At times, her voice rises to a playful shriek.

“I LOVE IT! AND SEE! SEE! WE CAN WIN!” she gushes, talking about her election victory, to which Transamerica had contributed a monumentally tentative $500.

“You’ve given me hope again,” says McCandless, a heavyset man with a gravelly voice who last year formed Democrats for Dole and doubted that Sanchez could beat Dornan.

This is a get-acquainted session for the Trans-americans--small talk and introductions all around. Sanchez complains about the House Oversight Committee’s handling of the election dispute with Dornan--a “kangaroo court,” she calls it. Her visitors nod sympathetically, occasionally finishing her sentences as she struggles to articulate her frustration.

“They’re fishing,” offers James B. Lockhart, Trans- america’s vice president for public affairs.

“And I’ll fight it all the way to the Supreme Court,” Sanchez vows.

“There you go,” Mc- Candless chimes in.

Right now, she’s not on any committees beneficial to Transamerica, but Sanchez suggests that she may be in line for the Commerce panel someday. And besides, she says, her roommate in Washington is Connecticut Democrat Barbara Kennelly. “She’s inside leadership,” Sanchez tells them. “I get what I want. If I don’t get what I want, I complain to her.”

Her visitors are dutifully impressed. At one point, McCandless invites her to speak to the Transamerica work force in California. In the process, he makes an oblique reference to her ethnicity.

“We can have a little speech to these employees of all colors, races, creeds, whatever and then maybe a little lunch,” McCandless says. “I think you’ll enjoy seeing all these people whom we’ve hired. You talk about equal opportunity--we’re really equal-opportunity employers. Some- times I think I should be Spanish to go into the building.”

McCandless explodes with laughter. No one joins with him. But Sanchez politely suggests that she’d be happy to visit sometime.

Several times a day, Sanchez is defined by her heritage, something with which she is not entirely comfortable. She would rather people acknowledged her as a businesswoman first, or as someone who struggled from humble beginnings, from a Head Start program in childhood to success.

The irony is that so many Latinos, particularly in Orange County, take genuine emotional pride in her victory. Valadez and the Martinezes remained on that couch until it was clear that Sanchez was too busy to see them. But that was OK; they understood and left their warm regards. The looks on their faces when they talked about her mirrored the pride and wistfulness of Latinos who met Sanchez earlier in the week, asking her to pose for pictures, or the thousands who have come to her rallies. That her success gives them validation is fine with Sanchez, but she doesn’t need to be an ethnic role model to feel validated herself.

“That’s an important piece of me,” she says, “but I don’t walk into a room thinking I’m a Latina. Everybody else does. I don’t.”

*

4:15 p..m. -- Sanchez and 13 other members of the Hispanic Caucus step into the Cabinet Room of the White House for a meeting with President Clinton and Vice President Gore. She is in for a surprise. There are seat-assignment cards around the table, and she finds her seat beside Gore and almost directly across from Clinton. The White House later explains that the seating was assigned according to rank, and that she is a caucus vice-chairperson. But the arrangement is noticed nevertheless.

“It told me a lot--that they bypassed more senior members to let her sit next to the vice president,” caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra, a Los Angeles Democrat, says later. “It’s an acknowledgment of some status.”

Sanchez leaves the session with the place card as a souvenir.

On the White House lawn, the 14 gather before television cameras for a post-mortem on the meeting. Sanchez stands near the front of the group, smiling. But when member Luis Gutierrez criticizes President Clinton’s apparent lack of resolve in restoring welfare benefits to legal immigrants, Sanchez and a few others break away suddenly and leave.

“The last thing I want in my district,” she says back at her office, “is for this to play on the 6 p.m. news tonight where we’re saying how bad the president is and [the welfare issue is] so important for Mexicans and immigrants and everything. It is. But this is not . . . constructive.”

It’s late, and most of Sanchez’s staff has left for the day. The phone rings and she answers it. The caller wants to discuss some proposed legislation, but the congresswoman isn’t familiar with it just yet. So she lies a little.

“Yes, this is Congresswoman Sanchez’s office. . . . Well, we certainly will. May I ask your name? . . . Great! I will let the congresswoman know . . . . So glad you called, Dorothy. Bye bye.”

Tomorrow is Thursday and Sanchez will fly back to California, where her husband will be waiting at the airport. Her schedule allows them only fragments of a weekend before she catches the red-eye back to Dulles and the cycle begins again. News of her legislation about the Vietnam commandos will be dwarfed by stories about the House Oversight Committee’s decision to approve several Dornan subpoenas. In Santa Ana, a congressional task force will take public testimony on Dornan’s claims that hundreds of noncitizens or illegal aliens voted for her. Sanchez will present strong evidence in rebuttal, but Republicans dominating the task force will make it clear that their probe is far from over. (At presstime, the investigation was continuing.)

Meanwhile, polls will show Sanchez’s popularity rising, suggesting that the more Dornan produces new allegations and subpoenas, the more people respond sympathetically to her. The paradox is not lost on Sanchez. She acknowledges the fact that she is both blessed and damned for having beaten him.

“Certainly, it’s good that she has exposure,” Rep. Becerra says. “It’s bad in that it’s got to take up a lot of her time, and it makes it difficult for her to concentrate on her work.” Be- cerra, a crucial early supporter, saw in Sanchez someone who was tough and unyielding. “She’s young. She’s got energy. If she can slay Goliath, she can do a lot more.”

Earlier in the week, minutes before she would walk across Independence Avenue to vote in the House chamber, Sanchez sat in her fifth-floor office, reflecting on how precarious it all sometimes seems.

“I’m just as vulnerable as anybody else to lose an election,” she says, “to making a bad vote or to saying something stupid on TV or on one of these interviews where, all of a sudden, instead of being the Golden Girl, nobody wants me. Things change from one day to the next around here. I wait for the day when I’m going to wake up in the morning and I’m going to read the newspaper and it’s going to be all over.”