Charlie Brown Launches Second Sortie Against Doolittle for California Congressional Seat

By Thomas Gangale
California Progress Report
Oakland, California
8 September 2007

He had a quiet, matter-of-fact, Iowa way of speaking, but from the first, I saw something in Charlie Brown. I saw an Air Force Academy graduate, an effective leader, an honorable man. I saw the future congressman.

I figured that as he got more experience on the campaign trail, the stiff awkwardness would fall away, and now that the braces were off his teeth, he would learn to smile all over again. But the stiffness and the self-conscious, Washingtonian "I'm afraid to smile" manner made it all the more plain that Charlie was quietly determined.

A newcomer both to the Democratic Party and to politics itself, he was taking on John Doolittle, the seven-term Republican incumbent who had turned California's 4th congressional district into a fiefdom controlled by his political machine. It was one of the largest and most rural of California's districts, stretched along the northern range of the Sierra Nevada, from Lake Tahoe to the Oregon border, encompassing some counties that didn't even have Democratic central committees. The 4th district was the reddest of the red.

It seemed a quixotic quest. Here was an unknown, willing to give up his secure job with the Roseville Police Department to campaign full-time against one of the mighty of the Republican establishment, a close ally of Tom Delay, an ear into which Jack Abramoff whispered. No Democratic congressional candidate had polled higher than the low thirties against Doolittle as he sailed through one reelection after another.

The political pros among California Democrats dismissed Charlie as an impossible dream. "He better raise a million dollars if he wants to be competitive," a top California Democratic Party operative said in October 2005. "That district is not in play," a sitting member of Congress said in January 2006. They looked at the California political map as a static chessboard across which it was impossible to move pieces, a gridlock of safe districts for one party or the other. When top Democrats look at that map, the coast is solidly blue, the east is red, and so it shall ever remain. They know the map, but they didn’t know Charlie.

Charlie, with his understated demeanor, kept campaigning. He won the June 2006 Democratic primary by a comfortable margin. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's website listed the 4th district race as uncompetitive, and continued to do so as the Abramoff scandal broke, Delay posed for his police mug shot, and Charlie's poll numbers climbed into the forties. When he arrived at a television studio to debate Doolittle, local TV news coverage described the crowd outside as giving Charlie "a rock star's welcome." Charlie, the quiet rock star.

In September 2006, when polls showed the race to be a statistical dead heat, the DCCC put the district on its "watch list," and eventually it pumped some money into Charlie's campaign. Up to that point, Charlie and his wife Jan had done it on their own, and they had rattled the Republicans so badly that President George W. Bush flew in to make several campaign appearances to keep Doolittle afloat. A sitting president--“the war president”--brought in to battle political unknowns.

On Election Day, Doolittle eked out a 9,000-vote victory. I don't know if the Democratic pros sat around the next morning playing woulda coulda shoulda. A decent amount of party support early on might have swung those few thousand votes. But, win or lose, Charlie drew heavy fire from Republican forces from outside the 4th district, which might otherwise have been deployed elsewhere to defeat other Democrats.

It wasn't much of a win for Doolittle, it was more like snatching a slow and agonizing political death from the jaws of a quick and merciful one. Even though he got to keep his house in the Washington suburbs for two more years, he had to suffer the FBI as unwanted but warranted visitors as the Abramoff scandal continued to unravel. And whereas Doolittle easily defeated his primary challenger in 2006, he faces at least two challengers in 2008, with a third weighing his options. There's blood in the water, and the sharks are circling.

Meanwhile, Charlie Brown is stronger than ever. He has two years of campaigning experience, where before he had none. He has a campaign organization, whereas he and Jan started from scratch to nearly unseat Doolittle. And this time, they're not alone. This time they have early support from the DCCC and Democracy for America.

Charlie smiles now, and with good reason. He heavily damaged the target on his first mission, one that others said was hopeless. A second sortie will finish off the target. On 7 September, at Auburn Airport, I saw Charlie and Jan take off on their new mission. As they flew northward to campaign stops in Grass Valley and Quincy, they looked out over the Sierras, and also over the political landscape that they had changed.