Primary Issue
Will local Democrats choose new blood or stick with a familiar face in Congress?

BY JILL KRAMER

The Sun conducted separate interviews, first with state Assemblyman Joe Nation, then with Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, to discuss the upcoming primary race.

State Assemblyman Joe Nation has a sky-high electability quotient: He’s smart, likable and good-looking to boot. You’d think the Democratic party would be hoisting him on its shoulders and carrying him to Washington. Unfortunately, he’s from the wrong district. Here in the unabashedly liberal 6th District—represented for the last 14 years by the unabashedly liberal Lynn Woolsey—the Dems just don’t need him. His primary challenge for Woolsey’s seat in the House of Representatives is receiving no support from party leadership.

Termed out of his seat in the Assembly, Nation is a pro-business Democrat who is progressive on social issues. “In Sacramento people think I’m this wildly liberal, left-wing guy from Marin,” he says. “I co-authored the gay marriage bill last year. I’m 100 percent pro-choice. I’m rated 100 percent on the environment. I oppose the death penalty in all cases. Where I’m different from some of my Democratic colleagues is I try to be more fiscally responsible.”

Faced with a $44 billion public works bond measure recently, Nation was one of a handful of Democrats to oppose it “because it was going to put the state so much further into debt,” he says. “This would have handcuffed the Legislature for the next five years. We’d end up with no discretionary funds in the budget. If there were an economic downturn, we’d have to suspend Prop 98, which I would never do. I will raise taxes in a second before I’ll ever cut funding for public schools.”

For someone who calls himself a fiscal conservative, Nation is surprisingly willing to raise taxes. He has recently proposed a 5-cent per gallon state tax to fund freeway expansion. If elected to Congress, he wants an additional 5-cent federal tax for research and development of alternative fuel vehicles.

He believes that protecting the environment is good for the economy, and he gets top scores from the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, though he parts ways with most environmentalists in his support of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). “No one has yet demonstrated to me how NAFTA has resulted in a degradation of environmental conditions in the United States,” he says. “Of course we have to be ever-vigilant, but, conceptually, I think you have to be in favor of free trade if you represent California. Twenty-five percent of our economy here locally is dependent upon trade and I think we have to do what we can to expand it.”

He angered consumer advocates four years ago when he opposed state Senator Jackie Speier’s (D-Hillsborough) privacy protection bill, undermining its passage with a watered-down version of his own. (A stronger Speier bill was eventually signed into law.) He has no friends among proponents of single payer healthcare, having co-authored a bill to rival state Senator Sheila Kuehl’s (D-Santa Monica) single payer plan. The Nation-Keith Richman (R-Northridge) plan would require all Californians to carry basic health insurance, shifting tax revenues from high-wage to low-wage workers to subsidize the cost. Kuehl says that sort of shifting from one pocket to another never gets done in reality. Kuehl and Speier are both supporting Woolsey, as are Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Nation is a youthful 49 years old with rosy cheeks, sandy hair and blue eyes that he often closes as he speaks. He grew up in Richardson, Texas, a well-heeled, mostly white suburb of Dallas, though Nation likes to emphasize his up-by-the-bootstraps origins. He had a paper route from the age of 12 and held restaurant jobs all through high school and college. His father was a seismology researcher at University of Texas at Dallas. Nation was the middle of three sons.

He earned an undergraduate degree at University of Colorado, Boulder, in economics, French and German, then worked for three years as a Pan Am flight attendant. He married another flight attendant, a Novato girl, in 1983. They moved to Washington, D.C., when Nation won a fellowship to attend graduate school at Georgetown University, studying economics, foreign policy and anti-satellite weapons. Madeleine Albright, a professor there at the time, was his adviser. He worked as her assistant when she was the foreign policy adviser to Geraldine Ferraro during her run for vice president under Walter Mondale.

It was his first exposure to campaign politics and he didn’t like what he saw. “Politics is poking and jabbing and trying to position yourself. What I really like is policy. Policy is saying, we’ve got a problem with our dependence on foreign oil—how do we solve it? That’s what I really like to do.”

He studied public policy analysis in the doctoral program at RAND in Santa Monica, then did postdoctoral work at Stanford University in defense conversion, writing a book, The De-Escalation of Nuclear Crises. After their twin daughters were born, Nation and his wife, Linda, moved to San Rafael to be near her parents. He taught foreign policy at Monterey Institute for International Studies for two years, then spent the next eight teaching economics and public policy at University of San Francisco.

His first political run was in 1992, for the congressional seat that went to Woolsey. After that, he lowered his sights and won a seat on the Marin Municipal Water District board, where he served for eight years. Then it was on to the state Assembly in 2000.

• • • •

NATION SAYS EDUCATION was the issue that prompted his run for Assembly, and it’s one of the reasons he’s running for Congress now. He has a long list of supporters among school district board members in Marin and Sonoma counties. The California County Boards of Education named him Outstanding Legislator of the Year for efforts like his Schools of Choice bill, which allows students to transfer between districts. He also authored a resolution asking Congress to allow states to modify Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. “We had an accountability system here that was implemented in 1999 and No Child Left Behind overlays on the state system,” he says. “If you’re in a state that doesn’t have an accountability system, No Child Left Behind is probably tolerable. But for us it was absolutely a major blunder.”

He has been hammering Woolsey for her votes in favor of No Child Left Behind. “Lynn now says No Child Left Behind ‘has become punitive.’ That’s the wrong verb tense,” he says. “No Child Left Behind was punitive on the day it was introduced, it was punitive the day she voted for it the first time as well as the second and third time she voted for it.”

Education seems like a peculiar platform from which to launch an attack against Woolsey, whose voting record is praised by education advocates. Families, children and education have been her primary focus throughout her career. A grandmother of four, Woolsey is the senior Democrat on the Education Reform Subcommittee, which will reauthorize No Child Left Behind next year. She has drafted a reworked version of the law that she calls the No Child Left Behind Fix. If it passes, she says, it will correct the problems of the federal system and improve upon the California system.

“As it is now, the state plan leaves pockets of poor kids behind. They never catch up. In my fix, they do. With a kid who’s an English learner or who’s socioeconomically disadvantaged, the California system assumes that a year’s growth is good. In my bill, they improve more than a year, so that by the time they’re through with their education, they’re on the same level as the rest of the kids. Because they can be. But the kids who can’t be, like those with cognitive disabilities, would be measured on their own ability, year by year.”

The original No Child Left Behind Act had wide support among Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, George Miller, Feinstein and Boxer, as well as Woolsey. The vote came at the end of 2001, when President Bush was enjoying a honeymoon in Congress. “A few months after No Child Left Behind we found out what kind of president George Bush would be,” says Woolsey. “He signed that bill into law and cut his budget for it within a week. The budget is $40 billion underfunded from what it would take to make it anywhere near successful.” She hopes to see it fully funded, and is getting input from national and local education groups on improvements to the system.

Woolsey has recently crafted an omnibus bill, the Balancing Act, to address the needs of working parents and their children. It includes the expansion of paid family leave, improved childcare, universal voluntary preschool and after-school programs. “My whole reason for this is it’s the kids that are getting squeezed by society’s pressures on all parents to be in the workforce,” she says. “Parents shouldn’t have to choose between raising their child and helping a sick parent of their own or their job.”

Woolsey’s manner is unassuming, unpretentious and unstudied. She’s been extraordinarily accessible to her constituents, holding one-on-one meetings by appointment several times each year. Never one to play to the crowd, she follows her own moral compass and it so happens that her political leanings have always been in step with those of her constituents. She wears little makeup. Readying herself for a photo shoot, she relies only on her reflection in a window to run a comb through her gray hair. She’s never colored it. She speaks animatedly, gesturing broadly.

She takes pride in being identified as the first former welfare mom to serve in Congress, and much of her legislative work has centered around disadvantaged kids. Originally from Seattle, she married at age 20 (48 years ago) and dropped out of college to work while her husband finished his own education. They moved to San Francisco when he got a job as a stockbroker and Woolsey became a stay-at-home mom. The marriage ended after 10 years when her husband had a mental breakdown and walked out, leaving her with three children, ages 5, 3 and 1. She took a job as a secretary at an engineering firm in Novato, but had to supplement her income with welfare until she was promoted to Human Resources manager. She married one of the engineers at the firm, a single dad, and the whole family moved to Petaluma in 1971. A few years later, she went back to school to study business, eventually leaving her job to start her own personnel agency.

She became involved in local politics by chairing a land-use referendum opposing a development project that would have threatened the local agriculture industry. The project was defeated handily and two years later Woolsey ran for city council. She served for eight years, helping to establish a homeless shelter and creating a city plan that included low-income and senior housing.

She entered the national arena in 1992 in the race for the seat that Boxer vacated for her run for the Senate. It was the same year that she and her second husband ended their marriage with their friendship intact. She was one of nine Democrats in the primary, including Joe Nation. Her Republican opponent, Dr. Bill Filante, became terminally ill during the campaign and dropped out. It also helped Woolsey that the 6th District boundaries were moved farther north that year. She’s easily won re-election ever since.

• • • •

SAFE IN THE knowledge that her constituents are with her, Woolsey has taken some of the most progressive stands of anyone in Congress. These days, she’s best known as the first congressperson to call for pulling the troops out of Iraq. She’s spoken out against the war on the House floor over 100 times. And now she’s gratified to be joined by a growing chorus of other voices. “We’ve progressed from a resolution that about a dozen signed onto, to an amendment on the House floor that 128 members—including five Republicans—voted for, then an informal hearing which led to proposals to the president that 61 members signed, outlining a multilateral, non-militaristic position that we think he should be taking, and bringing our troops home.”

With reports of warrantless wiretapping in the news, Woolsey is also feeling vindicated for her vote against the Patriot Act in October 2001. She co-chairs the Progressive Caucus with Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland. The two have called for killing outmoded weapons systems and cutting the nuclear arsenal down to 1,000 warheads. The $60 billion that plan would save would be better spent, they say, on programs like beefing up inspections of shipping containers and moving toward energy independence.

As senior member on the Energy Subcommittee, Woolsey inserted language in the last energy bill addressing the need for alternative fuels. “Energy, to me, should be the drumbeat for Democrats,” she says. “It’s our security as a nation to be independent of foreign fuel. It’s protection for our environment to have clean fuels. It’s our economy. Clean energy is going to be the future industry of this world and our scientists are coming up with the concepts and the technology and Germany and Japan and China are building the product. Well, there we go again! We’ve lost an industry that should be here. It’s also pertinent to education because we need science and math so we have individuals in this country to go into this flourishing field.”

When Woolsey is criticized, it’s usually for not doing enough. “Lynn is very identified with getting out of Iraq—which is something near and dear to my heart—but I think we need a more balanced approach to the issues confronting us,” says San Anselmo councilmember Peter Breen, a Nation supporter. “I think Joe would be able to provide some real leadership in the Democratic party, which is, in my view, really hurting badly right now.”

Woolsey, on the other hand, believes that Democrats are on the rise. She expects that the party will retake the House this November. And, she says, when—not “if”—that happens, her constituents will see big changes. “A majority of even one means that the Democrats are the chairs. We pick the legislation that comes to our committees, we choose what legislation comes to the floor, we choose what amendments are allowed. Right now, being in the minority, there is no control over any of that. Which is why people feel so frustrated with the Democrats: ‘When are the Democrats going to do something?!’ I think I have a very good chance of being in the driver’s seat of the Education Reform Subcommittee [next year]. And that would give me a very big voice. When we fix No Child Left Behind, it’ll be the Woolsey bill, believe me.”

Marin Democratic Central Committee chair John Alden says the party’s chance to win the House is a “historic” opportunity—one that only comes up once in 15 or 20 years. “It’s rare that the House shifts from one party to another. When it does so, it’s usually in a mid-term election with an unpopular president, in a year when there are issues of crisis level going on politically. This year’s corruption scandals, the war and Bush’s incredibly low popularity ratings and the fact that the numbers in the House are currently pretty close give this year’s election all those hallmarks.”

While the local committees take no election positions, deferring to the state committee, Alden says that many Dems feel that Nation’s run against Woolsey could hurt the party’s chances. “Whenever somebody challenges an incumbent Democrat in the party primary, that ends up causing a lot of Democratic donors to put their money and energy and time into that race instead of races against Republicans in November in other parts of the country where we have a chance to take back House seats. He’s got a right to run. It’s just a question of how invested he is in having a Democratic majority in the House. If he really were, I think he’d say, two years from now would be a better time.”

PHOTOS BY KEN PIEKNY

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