Revolt of the elders: where sprawl meets rangeland, a GOP warhorse sets out to save his party from itself

Mother Jones, Sept-Oct, 2006 by Dick Russell

DON'T BE UNDER ANY ILLUSIONS that I'm a great man," Pete McCloskey insisted, his steel-blue eyes fixed on his interlocutor. 'Tm just pissed off." It was mid-May, three weeks before the Republican primary in California's 11th Congressional District, and McCloskey was holed up at his law firm, preparing for a debate. On one wall was a cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt shaking his fists at a corporate malefactor. Another held a painting that portrayed Richard Nixon's Oval Office as a shark tank. There was also a photograph of McCloskey's current nemesis, a rancher and property-rights advocate turned congressman by the name of Richard Pombo, being patted on both cheeks by George W. Bush.

Back when he was in Congress, between 1967 and 1982, McCloskey was a maverick-the first Republican to challenge the war in Vietnam, an advocate for Nixon's impeachment, cochairman of the first Earth Day. But never before had he felt as if the party of his affection and long loyalty and the one that governed the country were entirely separate, and possibly hostile, entities. "I've been a Republican since 1948," he said, "before Pombo was born. But I'm ashamed of what my party has become, and to me, Pombo represents the very worst of it."

In announcing his candidacy late in January, the 78-year-old McCloskey had characterized his campaign as "a battle for the soul of the Republican Party." He'd left his Yolo County ranch to rent a room in Pombo's district some 90 miles away. He'd traveled thousands of miles through four counties looking to unseat the powerful chairman of the House Resources Committee--a man whom Bush had nicknamed "Marlboro Man," whom the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had dubbed "one of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress," and who had been engaged in undoing every stitch of the legacy left by McCloskey's generation of lawmakers. It was, McCloskey had cheerfully admitted earlier, a "damn foolish thing to do"-not a pointless thing, and not entirely hopeless, bur definitely the kind of errand a man would undertake when he saw no other way. "I'm under no illusions that my fight will be successful," McCloskey said, "but somebody had to do this."

By 4 p.m., it was 97 degrees in the San Joaquin Valley, and McCloskey's campaign RV, emblazoned with the words "Real Republican Values Express," was parked outside Williams High School in Pombo's hometown of Tracy. Pombo's motor home, with its "Rancher-Congressman" sign, sat 100 yards up the street; staffers handed out granola bars, "nourishment while you listen to Congressman Pombo's commonsense solutions on energy and transportation." (Cars, and their cost, were a hot issue in the San Francisco Bay Area bedroom community, where 91 percent of workers commute, some as many as five hours a day.) A man dressed as Abraham Lincoln arrived with a bullhorn and intoned: "The party I started has been riddled with corruption and lack of integrity." Inside, the crowd was standing room only.

McCloskey took the stage, a tan suit encasing his 6-foot-plus frame, his shock of white hair bright in the spotlight. Pombo made a late entrance with his wife, Annette, and their three teenage children. He had close-cropped dark hair and sported a mustache, goatee, and gold chain. More than half the audience rose in a standing ovation, with a lone voice yelling, "Down with the crook!" "Ride 'em, cowboy!" someone yelled back.

"I went to Washington because I wanted to change the way that Washington worked, and I felt like I could," Pombo said, his soft, high-pitched voice contrasting with McCloskey's theatrical baritone. McCloskey talked about the four generations of Californians in his family, and how he'd actually contributed $100 to Pombo's first campaign. When he said that Pombo had recently taken campaign money from "three people who've pled guilty to bribing congressmen," he was booed.

A week later, as McCloskey was handing out campaign literature outside a Stockton hall where Vice President Dick Cheney was holding a $500-a-head Pombo fundraiser, a much younger, much bulkier man approached him. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," the man said. McCloskey replied, "I think we ought to have ethics in Washington." When the man continued, "You're a liar," McCloskey cocked a fist and stepped up nose to nose. "Who are you calling a liar?" he said evenly.

"MCCLOSKEY HAS ALWAYS been one of these guys who's fearless," says former Colorado congressman Jim Johnson, a longtime friend. McCloskey earned two Purple Hearts in Korea. He then went to Stanford Law; the firm he started after graduating, in 1955, is now California's largest. An outdoorsman who loved backpacking in the High Sierras, McCloskey left the firm in 1964 to form the state's first law office devoted exclusively to land use and environmental concerns.

In 1967, J. Arthur Younger, McCloskey's congressman in the San Francisco Bay Area's mid-Peninsula district, died from leukemia, and ex-child star Shirley Temple Black announced her intention to seek the seat as a Republican. "We had Ronald Reagan as governor, another actor named George Murphy as a senator," McCloskey recalls. "Something snapped." Temple Black was urging more U.S. involvement in Vietnam; McCloskey, after sequestering himself for a month of study, came out against the war. He was 39, sandy haired, and Kennedy handsome. Walking neighborhoods and knocking on doors, he pulled off a stunning upset. The campaign inspired a book titled The Sinking of the Lollipop.