by the seastrand
REES, MATTHEW
By the Seastrand by Matthew Rees Santa Barbara, Calif. The differences between Andrea Seastrand, the freshman Republican representative, and Democratic challenger Walter Capps couldn't be...
...Capps probably won't pay a price for his hypocrisy on Election Day, though his time in the ivory tower won't help him much...
...Beyond their mutual opposition to offshore oil drilling, their only shared trait is that both are musicians—he plays the tuba, she the clarinet...
...The explanation is simple: The political mood has shifted in Clinton's favor, and a Congressional Quarterly analysis of 1995 voting found she voted with President Clinton less frequently than any other member of the House...
...He liked Clinton's veto of the ban on partial-birth abortion, and in a recent debate he called abortion a "civil right" (Seastrand is staunchly pro-life...
...One of the ads has an image of what looks like sewer sludge spewing into the ocean while a narrator intones, "It's time to dump Andrea Seastrand before she dumps anything more on us...
...He's done nothing to distance himself from the distorted attacks on Seastrand...
...She had Dan Quayle in for a fund-raiser...
...Perhaps the world ought to watch...
...He begs off with the lame explanation that the ads are only exposing his opponent's record...
...While Dole has little chance of winning California, he could bolster Republican turnout in swing districts like Seastrand's if he maintains his quest for the state and warns voters about a Democratic Congress...
...Yet Seastrand and Capps act as if the whole world is watching their bitter rematch (two years ago Seastrand won by just 1,563 votes...
...Democrats and their interest-group allies have had some success portraying these rookies as extremist Newt Gingrich clones responsible for the government shutdown last year...
...I really do admire the man," she told me...
...So the real surprise is that Seastrand isn't ahead...
...She identifies her influences as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich...
...Seastrand is unrepentant: "I have nothing to be ashamed of...
...She's had Gingrich to the district on three occasions, most recently in August...
...He also boasted of his support for the United Nations ("a worthy enterprise...
...And with freshmen making up roughly one-third of the House Republican caucus, how they fare November 5 will determine whether the GOP controls the House and Gingrich remains speaker...
...The attacks aren't exactly subtle...
...I'm running as a citizen and a teacher who believes in democracy," he solemnly intoned in an October 21 debate...
...Capps adopts a pious tone when asked about the negativity of the campaign...
...She estimates their total spending against her to be in the range of $1 million, which is more than Capps expects to spend on his entire campaign...
...He says he would not have voted for the congressional welfare reform bill and disagreed with the president's signing of an anti-gay marriage bill...
...But such rhetoric only underscores the Faustian bargain Capps has struck this year...
...The GOP's biggest mistake, she argues, was not responding to attack ads when those ads began having a real effect in the late summer of 1995...
...One of his daughters, by the way, works for George Stephanopoulos...
...The election, he told me, "is a referendum on Gingrich," and his summer polling showed the speaker is viewed negatively by 51 percent of district voters...
...This may be the most laid-back district in the country—almost always sunny, not too hot, and politics a low priority...
...In speeches, she extols the accomplishments of the Gingrich-led Congress, emphasizing procedural reforms (like eliminating ice delivery to congressional offices) over policy reforms...
...Capps methodically points out that Seastrand voted with Gingrich 96 percent of the time, and then recites the familiar and false litany about Republican attempts to slash Medicare benefits and gut environmental protections...
...This suggests that as Seastrand goes, so goes Congress...
...Those positions go over well in Santa Barbara, the biggest city in the district, but leave Capps vulnerable to the charge that he's out of step with the rest of his constituency...
...It also hurts that while Capps insists on calling himself "mainstream," he is an utterly conventional California liberal...
...My goal in going [to Washington] is to increase civility," he says, and he sells himself as the embodiment of the Jeffer-sonian citizen legislator...
...Bob Dole may have more to do with whether Seastrand is reelected than Gingrich...
...The district's voter registration is split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats, which usually helps Republican candidates (Republicans, more affluent and better informed, are better at showing up on Election Day...
...Closer to home, he opposes the California Civil Rights Initiative...
...He points out that he's spent 30 years as a professor of religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara, during which time he's written 14 books and taught popular seminars on the Vietnam War and Tocqueville...
...And Seastrand has been targeted by liberal pressure groups ranging from the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO to the National Abortion Rights Action League...
...Much of the district is rural, and the university is viewed with some disdain in smaller towns like Solvang (where one elderly gentleman told me Santa Barbara is "full of guacamole-heads...
...The differences between Andrea Seastrand, the freshman Republican representative, and Democratic challenger Walter Capps couldn't be greater...
...Capps will benefit from a massive voter registration drive undertaken at his university (Toad the Wet Sprocket, a local band gone big-time, helped out...
...he opts for Vaclav Havel and Thomas Jefferson...
...he calls the contract "a total and complete failure...
...Which explains why, like so many other Democrats, he's running as much against Speaker Gingrich as he is against Seastrand...
...The groups have been littering the district with hostile television and radio advertising...
...But students often don't vote, and Seastrand has history on her side: The district hasn't elected a Democrat to Congress since 1942...
...Seastrand's struggle for reelection mirrors that of many of the 73 House Republican freshmen...
...he had Michael Douglas...
...She's sorry only two-thirds of the Contract with America has been enacted...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 8
