Conservative leanings delivered the 4th for McClintock

In the end, state Sen. Tom McClintock’s victory over Doug Ose in the Republican primary for the seat of retiring U.S. Rep. John Doolittle had as much to with the realities of the 4th Congressional District as the candidates themselves.

The conservative tilt of the district, which gave George W. Bush 61 percent of the vote in 2004 and supported the 2003 recall of Gray Davis by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent, made it a natural fit for McClintock, a veteran state legislator who is widely considered to be something of an icon in right-leaning circles. The tendency for party die-hards and activists to turn out in Republican primaries made the task that much more difficult for Ose, who is widely perceived as a moderate.

“It was an uphill climb the day he got in,” said Richard Temple, Ose’s chief political adviser, referring to McClintock’s March entrance into the race. “Most candidates didn’t want to take on that challenge. Ose did.”

The task of McClintock’s team, led by strategist John Feliz, campaign manager John Huey, media consultants Bill Criswell and Bill Bayne, and spokesman Stan Devereux was to portray McClintock as a principled conservative who wanted to go to Washington to keep Republicans from losing their way, while painting Ose, a former U.S. congressman, as a raging liberal.

“People knew who the conservative was,” said Feliz, just hours after celebrating his campaign’s victory at the Sierra View Country Club in Roseville.

In advertisement after advertisement and press release after press release, the McClintock campaign took Ose to task over his conservative credentials, accusing him of everything from being a tax-and-spend liberal to supporting social security benefits for illegal immigrants.

“We don’t need another Republican that votes like a liberal Democrat,” said an announcer in one McClintock radio advertisement. “Yes, there’s a real difference between our candidates for Congress. Tom McClintock is a proven conservative and Doug Ose is just too liberal.”

With McClintock claiming the ideological territory, Ose took an alternative route, arguing that McClintock had personal deficiencies making him unfit for Congress. Ose spent nearly $3 million out of his own pocket slamming McClintock as a carpetbagger who fed from the state government’s trough, going so far in one television advertisement as to suggest that McClintock’s taking of state-sponsored reimbursements was taking money away from American soldiers in Iraq.

Ose, a multimillionaire land developer, invested heavily in his campaign team, bringing in Ray McNally and Richard Temple, two of the most prominent political consultants in the state. Handling press duties was sharp-tongued communications veteran Doug Elmets.

It was difficult to talk about the race without mentioning Ose’s well-oiled campaign, which produced a blizzard of slick mailers and crisp, hard-hitting television spots. “Ose probably has a much better campaign team than McClintock,” U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy said several weeks before the primary.

But Ose’s focus on the personal wasn’t enough to turn the tide in the conservative district, which at the outset had given McClintock a 40-point lead in one poll.

“They pointed out very deftly that McClintock was an outsider, that he didn’t live the district,” said Feliz, the McClintock strategist, adding that Ose was in his view a formidable candidate. But Feliz argued that Ose made a mistake by ceding the conservative argument.

“Why didn’t they talk about his conservative credentials?” asked Feliz.

Elmets, the Ose spokesman, strongly disagreed with that assessment. “We talked about how conservative Doug Ose was all the time,” said Elmets. “The reality was that Doug Ose was the true conservative in that race. Tom McClintock is a libertarian.”

“It’s all a matter of perception. He was effective in portraying himself as a conservative and painting Doug Ose as a liberal,” added Elmets.

The major question facing McClintock as he moves into a general election battle with Democrat Charlie Brown, a retired Air Force officer and 2006 candidate for the Roseville-area seat who is framing himself as a moderate, is if he can capture the nearly-31,000 voters that supported Ose in the primary.

It’s a reality McClintock seemed to implicitly acknowledge Tuesday, when he offered something of an olive branch to the opposing side. “Tonight, the differences among us as Republicans pale into insignificance with the differences between us and the direction the other party would take us,” he said.

Brown aides, meanwhile, see an opening to win Republican votes. “There’s a clear chasm,” said Brown spokesman Todd Stenhouse. “There’s clearly a division on that side.”

But McClintock aides, competing in a district that has shown itself as solidly conservative, do not believe it is to their advantage to run a more moderate-style campaign in the battle to win additional votes against Brown.

“The center is conservative in the 4th Congressional District,” said Feliz. “Charlie Brown, why don’t you join us in the center?”