Democrats must dream in shades of red

JOSEPH N. BELL

Newport-Mesa Democrats are stirring in their bunkers at the prospect

of an open seat in the House of Representatives when and if Chris Cox

is approved as SEC chairman by the U.S. Senate.

Rejection seems unlikely. If the appointment of California judge

Janice Rogers Brown -- who believes that people of faith are

embroiled in a war against secular humanists who threaten to divorce

America from its religious roots -- to the federal appeals court and

John Bolton -- who believes that anyone who disagrees with him should

be squashed -- to the United Nations can get Senate approval, then

Cox should be a slam dunk.

So hope springs eternal, even among Democrats in Orange County. Is

such hope rational in a congressional district carefully crafted to

provide Republican security in perpetuity? Probably not.

The odds against the Democrats are comparable to George Bush

admitting a mistake. Or expressing himself in a complete sentence.

But if they can find a suitable candidate, the Democrats are

determined to give it their best shot.

Because I feel strongly that it’s time for the two-party system to

be introduced to the Newport-Mesa area, I’d like to suggest some

campaign issues that the Democrats might use to appeal to local

voters in the contest for Cox’s office. What the local Democrats have

to contend with for starters is the conviction -- held here despite

growing sophistication and a vastly changing population for the 55

years I’ve lived in this area -- that Genghis Khan could win the

congressional seat about to be abandoned by Chris Cox as long as

“Republican” was beside his name on the ballot.

That’s why the Democrats are going to have to put a creative spin

on issues with a conservative appeal to have any chance at all. So

here are a few suggestions they might run up the flagpole.

A cardinal thrust of conservatism is to get government out of our

lives at every level as fully and as quickly as possible. The

Democratic candidate can embrace this issue by promising to work for

a reform of the Patriot Act, which spends billions of dollars

annually grubbing around in our private lives, demanding such highly

personal information as our health records and the books we check out

at the public library. Like all good conservatives, the Democratic

candidate should promise to seek the fine line between legitimate

security concerns and erosion of the civil rights that underpin our

whole society.

The candidate can also pledge to support every effort aimed at

preventing the government from telling us who can or can’t get

married, what stem cells we can use for research aimed at saving

millions of lives, what constitutes biased teaching by college

professors, when and under what circumstances a woman can buy a

morning-after pill, and what creative people in the Corporation for

Public Broadcasting are allowed to think. And he or she would promise

never to be a part of government interference in such personal and

private matters as the decision to allow Terry Schiavo the freedom of

passing on -- especially in light of the recent autopsy, which proved

that the action supported by the president and the Congress was

clearly wrong.

Then there’s the airport issue, which could be a real winner for

the Democrats, at least in Newport-Mesa. Local citizens of every

political stripe are reminded dozens of times daily of the increasing

traffic out of John Wayne, which will only get worse, due in large

part to Cox’s blindsiding of the El Toro airport.

Democrats can build on the irritation of conservatives toward Cox

over this issue. Their candidate could rise, like a Phoenix from the

ashes, to announce that all is not lost and that if elected, he or

she will swallow civic pride and offer a hand to the city of Los

Angeles in its bid to build and manage a commercial airport in El

Toro.

Then there is outsourcing -- and its surrogate parent, privatizing

-- which have become very big in these parts. Here, the role of the

Democratic candidate must be to urge caution in the application of

both local and national outsourcing and privatizing.

Without such caution, some pretty scary possibilities seem to be

already underway at the federal level. The Pentagon, for example,

might logically be outsourced to the Halliburton Co., which already

pockets much of the defense budget. The National Parks Service could

be turned over the logging industry, which would quickly eliminate

the fire hazard caused by healthy trees by cutting them down, thus

saving millions of dollars paid out to forest rangers. By outsourcing

the National Institute of Health to the pharmaceutical industry,

drugs would get to the market much more quickly, and expensive

testing procedures could be cut back.

Although such decisions might appeal to many local voters, a

Democratic candidate must draw the line -- and privatizing seems a

good place to do it, especially in light of the unpopular effort by

the Bush administration to inject it into Social Security.

Finally, the Democratic candidate must regard the needs of his or

her constituents to be more important than personal upward mobility

and thus promise to pay primary attention, always, to the folks back

home. That would be a welcome change.

I came here 55 years ago in the era of Congressman James Utt, who

believed sincerely that an army of U.N. troops was being trained in

Georgia to take over the U.S. and kept us informed by highly creative

newsletters from the front in Washington. Although Utt was in a class

by himself, he was followed in his job by a national officer in the

John Birch Society and a string of congressmen mostly to the right of

King George III. Chris Cox didn’t change the pattern much

philosophically.

The Democrats might be able to change it modestly, but they can’t

bury it. With that as a starting point, maybe we can at least get a

real taste of two-party politics when it comes time to replace our

present congressman.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.