Moderate Republicans spurn Tea Party and want business to boom

Migrants and marijuana are tolerated by some voters, writes Lara Marlowe in Newport Beach, California

Migrants and marijuana are tolerated by some voters, writes Lara Marlowein Newport Beach, California

RICHARD NIXON was born, buried and memorialised with a library in Orange County. Its residents so revered John Wayne, who kept a house in Newport Beach, that they named their airport for him. Without this Republican heartland in the “blue”, Democratic state of California, Ronald Reagan would not have been elected twice to the governor’s office and, eventually, to the White House.

The eponymous orange groves are a distant memory, razed to make way for the aerospace industry, which thrived on the defence contracts that longtime Republican Congressman “B-1 Bob” Dornan brought home from Washington. The economy has shifted to tourism – Disneyland, Balboa Island, Laguna Beach – the service industry and high-tech.

Immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam and Korea now comprise more than half the population in parts of Orange County. “B-1 Bob” was ousted by Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, in 1996. In next week’s midterm elections, Sanchez is fighting a Vietnamese Republican, Van Tran.

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Brian (68) and Ellen (54) are the sort of people Nixon had in mind when he referred to the silent majority: reasonable, affluent, white, upper-middle-class Americans. Decades ago, Ellen was my college room-mate. The other night, we discussed politics over dinner at the Capital Grill in Costa Mesa.

Like 43 per cent of Orange County, Brian and Ellen are registered Republicans. That proportion has fallen in 20 years from 56 per cent of the voting population.

But these Republicans are more temperate than their counterparts in Arizona and Nevada. When Sarah Palin came to Orange County to campaign for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the Republican gubernatorial and senatorial candidates respectively – both found excuses not to be seen with her. “I’m dismayed by the Tea Party,” says Ellen, a self-made businesswoman like Whitman and Fiorina. “The Tea Party are extreme,” chimes in her husband Brian, a retired Orange County executive.

Brian and Ellen want one thing from the November 2nd midterms: jobs. Ellen has fired 14 of 30 employees at her company, which designs infrastructure for communications systems. She cut the salary she pays herself from $180,000 in 2008 to $80,000 in 2009, to zero last January. Brian’s son-in-law, a financial comptroller, has been out of work for more than a year.

The couple are living off savings and Brian’s pension, in a four-bedroom, Japanese-style designer home a few blocks from the sea. Both drive imported luxury cars and they spend free time on their small yacht.

“We assume this will pass,” says Ellen. “But there are lots and lots of people in desperate straits.”

“We would not be able to even come close to maintaining our standard of living if we hadn’t saved so much,” says Brian. “American business needs to get us out of the recession – not the government.” Brian supported the invasion of Iraq “because Bush snr didn’t finish the job” after the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. Ellen was “massively uncomfortable” with the Iraq war. “When the weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist, I lost all confidence. I’m definitely not a Bush fan,” she says.

Brian and Ellen have occasionally voted Democrat, though not since Bill Clinton stood for the presidency in the 1990s. “I thought Bill Clinton was a very dynamic person. He still is,” says Brian.

In the midterms, they’ll vote Republican. Brian’s distaste for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former governor Jerry Brown is palpable. When he was last governor in the 1980s, “Brown lived in an apartment, not the governor’s mansion. He drove an old Plymouth – it was more about him being a hippie. A state the size of California has a right to expect more than a Moonbeam,” he says, using Brown’s old nickname of “Governor Moonbeam”.

Conservative as they are, Brian and Ellen both support legalising marijuana, as allowed by a proposition on the November 2nd ballot. “It’s a question of resources,” Brian explains. “Law enforcement spends too much time and energy trying to control it. It’s like cigarettes and booze . . . If people want to do these things to themselves, let them.” Brian and Ellen attribute their approach to immigration to, in her words, “our engagement with the other side”. She does volunteer administrative work for a hospital that helps immigrants.

He is using his retirement years to runs a literacy programme for immigrant children. “If we help to educate the immigrants, they’ll have less impact on the population of Orange County,” Brian explains. “It’s much less expensive to pay for education than prisons.”

Ellen casts her support for amnesty for immigrants in a more positive light. “Many of my employees have been from the first generation of Asians and Latinos,” she says. “They have been fabulous to work with. Their work ethic is amazing . . . People here illegally are an engine of our economy. They’re doing work that no one else will: gardening, nannies, care for the elderly, cleaning ladies, car washers . . .”

Meg Whitman employed an illegal Mexican immigrant as a housekeeper for nine years. Despite Whitman’s claim the woman lied about her status, her popularity did not recover from the revelation. The latest Los Angeles Times opinion poll shows her trailing Brown, 39 per cent to his 51 per cent.

In a televised debate, Brown told Whitman her plan to send Mexicans back after they work in California on temporary visas was inhumane and tantamount to serfdom. “That’s plain Moonbeam,” says Brian. “We didn’t force them to come here. We didn’t put them on a slave ship. They came because they wanted to work, and we’re paying them for it.”

There is already partisan gridlock in Washington, so a Republican victory can’t make it worse, says Ellen. “I’d like to think it would bring Obama to his finest hour,” she says. If so, she might even vote for him in 2012.

They place a premium on leaders “who can work with the other side”. At the moment, “people are reacting so harshly that it created the Tea Party”, says Brian. “I think we’re going towards a counter coup. All of this extremism will drive people towards the middle. It will probably take the time of the recession to recede.”