Larry Wilson: Where are GOP candidates like Pete McCloskey?
Everyone’s always saying, and they are not wrong, that the California Republican Party is dead in the water, sinking like a boulder would.
You know what would make the California Republican Party float, and fly across the water’s surface like an America’s Cup hydrofoil?
Running more candidates like Pete McCloskey.
McCloskey, who died last week at 96, was the kind of politician the moribund current CGOP can only dream of.
Born in Southern California — Loma Linda — he represented the Palo Alto area in Congress from 1967 to 1982. After graduating from South Pasadena High, he attended Oxy, then Caltech, then graduated from Stanford and Stanford Law School. From Wikipedia: “He served in the Korean War as a member of the United States Marine Corps. For his service, he was awarded the Navy Cross and the Silver Star. He won election to the House of Representatives in 1967, defeating Shirley Temple in the Republican primary. He co-authored the 1973 Endangered Species Act. He unsuccessfully challenged President Richard Nixon in the 1972 Republican primaries on an anti-Vietnam War platform and was the first member of Congress to publicly call for President Nixon’s resignation after the Saturday Night Massacre.”
He wasn’t just a Republican. His family was Grand Old Party since his great-grandfather escaped the Great Irish Famine in 1853 and came to California’s Central Valley as farmers near Merced. He won two Purple Hearts in Korea, and volunteered for Vietnam. Though he, with the rest of reasonable Americans, turned against that war, he didn’t retire from the Marine Reserves, as a colonel, until 1974.
It’s well to remember that what we consider a liberal part of California, the San Francisco Peninsula, wasn’t so progressive in an earlier era. He later said that he thought he “was the first Republican elected opposing the war” despite the fact that his “constituency, two to one, favored the war in 1967.” In early 1975, he went to see for himself the effects of the U.S. bombing in Cambodia, and said afterward that his country had committed “greater evil than we have done to any country in the world.” Pro-choice, he was also co-chair of the first Earth Day in 1970.
He was by no means perfect as a politician, by my lights. There was a mean almost anti-Semitic streak. After the Israeli bombing of an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, he said, “We have to respect the views of our Jewish citizens, but not be controlled by them.” Defending his remarks later, he said, “There is a strong Jewish lobby … I do not understand why the Jewish community should resent it being labeled as such. They are a very effective lobby.” The Anti-Defamation League properly hounded him. We all have our Achilles’ heel.
But where is the otherwise principled, iconoclastic, independent-thinking California Republican — liberal on social issues, conservative fiscally — who could get elected to statewide office in our state today? It’s not Steve Garvey.
Where are the party leaders who would search out such a candidate? If they found one, they might also find that moderate Democrats and independents would flock to someone who wasn’t knee-jerk progressive on every issue, who could stand up to the public employee unions, who had in fact met a tax and a bond issue that he didn’t like.
Instead, today’s GOP candidates stay in the MAGA mold in a state that finds such weird ill-educated reactionary populism anathema, bemoaning “the Democratic supermajority,” standing no chance of returning to the majority themselves.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.