BOB DORNAN'S LAST BATTLE
LABASH, MATT
BOB DORNAN’S LAST BATTLE By Matt Labash Garden Grove, Calif. Oliver Stone once wrote that former congressman Bob Dornan, Orange County’s oratorical blowtorch, is a “man stricken with paranoia.”...
...He can try to appease, but there’s still something jarring about his person...
...Dornan complained of “a little bump-a-roo...
...Pretty simple, isn’t it...
...The violence is unbelievable...
...Instead, it morphed into an outfit called “The Deranged One Has Been Dumped Committee...
...Bill Clinton suggested that “he needs a rabies shot...
...While he’s enjoying some party support now, Dornan still winces at how long it was in coming...
...She failed to recognize Daniel Patrick Moynihan after several minutes of small talk...
...Most of the time I get fingers and ‘Blank you, Dietrich,’” he says...
...DIETRICH...
...who’d repeatedly criticized the Nicaraguan contras...
...Nicholson explains, “Since I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, I took a little power nap...
...But the group didn’t dissolve when Loretta Sanchez took Dornan’s seat in the same year...
...It’s dangerous...
...I love going where angels fear to tread—my dad taught me that...
...Entire organizations have been consecrated to his destruction...
...But not for long...
...He’d ramble like a Hibernian Jeremiah, denouncing everything from Clinton’s military record to another congressman’s buggery...
...If you’re a Dornan in campaign season, it is indeed wise to stay in fighting shape, which is why the 65-year-old Dornan is now doing 300 stomach crunches a day...
...He was never big on coalition-building...
...People really do hate him...
...lying lunatic...
...The woman is Kathy Dornan, Bob’s 37-year-old daughter, who along with her sister, mother, and brother form the nucleus of Team Dornan...
...Dietrich purports to be a carpenter, though for the last eight months he seems to have done little more than mutter to himself while picketing in Dornan’s parking lot...
...Team Dornan, however, produced a videotape of the incident...
...Thick-torsoed Teamsters and sheet-metal workers congregate around us chanting, “Eight-hour day...
...Whenever reporters get unfettered access to Sanchez—a mistake her handlers don’t make often—the magnitude of his loss becomes a little more painful for the widely read, widely traveled Dornan...
...But Dornan is now trying to plane his rough edges...
...You come back and tell me all about it, and I’ll do a special order on it.’ I said, ‘Hey, Newt, I like my special orders better than yours...
...A small physical altercation did in fact take place in a Ralph’s parking lot...
...Joel whimpers a bit...
...Surrounded by unfriendlies, Mark says, “Take that off my back, or I’ll kick your ass right here...
...His intermittent explosions on the House floor are his most enduring legacy...
...loud enough to rupture her uvula...
...With his video camera and shock of red hair mushrooming out under his Armageddon hat, he is immediately identifiable...
...Even when making nice, Bob Dornan has a hard DORNAN MAILED FLIERS THAT HAD OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE, THE PATRONESS OF MEXICO, ON THE COVER...
...Team Sanchez alleges that as the congresswoman was holding “neighborhood office hours,” Dornan pushed his way into a constituent line and nearly toppled Loretta while body-blocking a senior citizen, who burst into tears...
...Dietrich hasn’t been back since...
...These are Dornan supporters...
...When Downey caught up with Dornan, asking him to explain the charge, Dornan replied, “Number one, you’re a wimp...
...Yeah, baby, I love it,” he says...
...He lectures on the movie Braveheart (and on voter fraud) while tousling the hair of four young brothers, ages 3 to 9—all named after Old Testament prophets...
...Such is life in the Dornan camp, which, like the 18-year congressional career of the former fighter pilot, pretty much engages at one speed: full...
...Dornan had called Downey a “draft-dodging wimp” (Downey received a deferment for a perforated eardrum...
...Sanchez is polling anywhere from 7 to 12 points ahead, but Republican leaders regard her seat as winnable since Dornan is believed to only need 5 percent of the Hispanic vote in a year where depressed minority turnout is expected...
...It’s enough to make Dornan keep fighting, to pass up a $3-million talk-radio deal, to stand in a Garden Grove community center to stoke his liver-spotted, bear-claw-inhaling precinct captains, many of them brother “Latinos” who, like Dornan, are here for “Dutyhonorcountry” (Dornan pronounces this as one word...
...Dornan, for his part, called Stephanopoulos a “misguided young jerk” and continues to call Clinton a “lip-biting degenerate”— among several hundred other epithets...
...He holds a Loretta Sanchez sign...
...And she lied to a constituent about her identity when she picked up the phone, because the constituent wanted to discuss legislation she knew little about...
...The House oversight committee refused to overturn the election, despite documented evidence of illegal ballots...
...Dornan is now attempting to reclaim his seat following a 14-month voter-fraud investigation (which established, to no avail, that 748 out of the 984 votes constituting Sanchez’s margin of victory were cast by illegal aliens or were otherwise improper...
...Dornan does possess a special knack for driving opponents insane, as he seems to have done to Dietrich Nicholson, who stands watch outside Dornan’s Garden Grove campaign headquarters...
...What hurts him most, it seems, is losing his seat to a “giggling airhead” like Loretta Sanchez, who, despite her star quality as a campaigner, is nobody’s candidate for sharpest Ginsu in the knife block...
...In 1996, the Dornan/ Sanchez contest was noteworthy for being the only race in the country where one candidate’s campaign manager performed a citizen’s arrest on another candidate’s spouse (Dornan’s son Mark apprehended Loretta’s husband Stephen for swiping Dornan campaign signs...
...In two local newspaper profiles, Sanchez repeatedly referred to the Rayburn House Office Building as “the Raymond Building...
...Bob Dornan does not merely imagine that people hate him...
...Sorry to hear you think it’s dangerous.’ And from that moment on, I moved him into a totally different box...
...In 1984, for instance, Dornan, prankster that he is, visited his opponent’s headquarters with five of his staffers suited up in velour cat costumes (intended to represent the fat cats his opponent was beholden to...
...His manhood compromised, Downey tattled to the speaker of the House...
...As 3-year-old Joel plops down in front of a precinct map, Kathy Dornan bounds through the door, crunching his fingers under her shoe...
...The late speaker Tip O’Neill recommended that Dornan “see a psychiatrist...
...He recalls the time he implored Newt to travel with him to Central America to see the freedom fighters up close...
...The sticker-slapper then skitters away like a nervous duck...
...It seemed a keen idea, until one of Dornan’s felines was kicked down a flight of stairs by a startled Democrat—resulting in the inevitable squad cars, ambulances, and lawsuits...
...I don’t get that often,” Dietrich shrugs, as he hands me a comb with the inscription “Keep Dornan Out Of Our Hair...
...It’s a decision that Dornan rightly regards as being influenced by a squeamish GOP leadership, afraid to tangle with a Latina star (Jackson Browne plays her fund-raisers, Clinton and Gore visit her district) in a state where Hispanic outreach is Priority One...
...This is evident when Mark Dornan, Bob’s 39- year-old son and campaign manager, drags me to a pro-Sanchez labor rally across the street...
...I call them rednecks...
...While no one would quibble with Stone’s firsthand knowledge of that disorder, it’s not a fair diagnosis...
...And when a reporter asks him if he’s ever thought of moderating his style, the full-blooded Irishman says, “I can’t, I’m a Latino...
...But as this year’s Sanchez/Dornan contest is shaping up to be the most expensive House race of the year, Dornan is making nice with the GOP powers that he feels betrayed him—the extra cash from the national party might prove useful...
...Dietrich has dark tales to tell...
...Dornan had followed Sanchez to the Santa Ana grocery store to force a debate (she has turned down his 10 formal invitations...
...Dietrich is a slight man with patchy facial hair and a straw fedora...
...We’re just like the Kennedys,” says Bob, “except without the broads and the booze...
...Dornan labeled Farber his “evil nemesis...
...He mailed graphic partial-birth-abortion fliers that had as their cover art Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of Mexico...
...That’s the woman that said she’s going to kick the sh— out of me...
...And number two, you dodged the draft...
...No squirting seniors were apparent...
...Mark gives chase, and when he catches up with the laborite, they come nose to nose...
...I admire him because it’s not easy to doze off when Bob Dornan is engaging you...
...She already has,” he deadpans...
...And after Dornan rankled Barry Goldwater, the peace-loving senator promised, “I’m going to wreck your life...
...There are no weak sisters in a Dornan campaign...
...It’s small surprise then that Dornan subscribes to the sort of siege mentality that he brought to the well of the House, where he worked tirelessly on pet causes such as POWs and abortion...
...The sticker is removed...
...I’ll do my own friggin’ special order...
...Mark, having no beef with an eight-hour-day—maybe because he’s been working 36 hours straight—decides to join the chant, until somebody slaps a union-local sticker on his back...
...Take his courtship of Hispanic voters, who may have been alienated by his persistent cries of voter fraud: Dornan elected to crash a Cinco de Mayo reception, where he flopped around the buffet tossing off broken Spanish and using words like maric?n (homosexual...
...What happened next is a source of debate, but it seems that Dornan, as he says, “straightened” Downey’s tie, as he “liked the members to look elegant on the floor...
...He recalls a meeting in July with RNC chairman Jim Nicholson in which Nicholson asked how “that voter-fraud thing turned out” (five months after the decision...
...You go on down there,’ he said...
...One of the rednecks passes, calling out, “I love you, fella...
...While the political lexicon is larded with the warrior’s patois, there is perhaps no stronger simulation of actual combat than parachuting into a Dornan campaign—where a vague threat of violence always seems to lurk...
...I ask him whether, if Sanchez ever consents to a debate, he might ask her to hit him in his radiator-slat abs...
...Kathy accuses Dietrich loudly and repetitively of accosting her and intimidating her children...
...His guttural rasp would echo through the empty chamber as he delivered “special orders”— lengthy stemwinders that made him a C-SPAN star...
...She hounded the head of NASA for a ride in the space shuttle eight times in one meeting...
...Chief among the many instances that resulted in Dornan’s banishment, censure, or having his mike turned off was the one in ’85, when he took after Tom Downey (D-N.Y...
...She assures Dietrich that she’s endured about all the free speech she can handle for one campaign and that he best make himself scarce...
...George Stephanopoulos once called Dornan a Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...He said, ‘Let me get back to you, Robert,’ and I knew something creepy was coming...
...After losing the Democratic primary in 1996, Mike Farber founded the advocacy group “Dump Dornan...
...Mark is introduced over the loud speaker, and a chorus of boos and middle digits are extended in acknowledgment...
...time being anything but Bob Dornan—which is both his charm and his vulnerability...
...When it comes to Newt, Dornan is considerably less good humored...
...I’M A LATINO,” HE SAYS...
...Then at the end of the meeting,” Dornan says, “he falls asleep...
...Scared witless, Dietrich cowers and points, “That’s her...
...Mark looks at me and laughs...
...A few moments later, a red-headed woman in coveralls descends the stairwell screaming, “DIETRICH...
...There was, however, evidence that Sanchez—a Head Start baby, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and a congressional-freshman flower who even Newt Gingrich says is “very attractive”— launched her elbow into Dornan’s solar plexus...
...Since the start of this year’s campaign, he’s done his best to be the garrulous candidate and not spook reporters with his obsessiveness over the ’96 returns—though if you give him a voter-fraud opening, you’d better not make plans for dinner...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 8
