Shadow Boxer

Yesterday, California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore announced his candidacy for the United States Senate, challenging Barbara Boxer in heavily Democratic California. In 1998, Boxer won reelection by 10 points. In 2004 she defeated her opponent by 20. Barack Obama defeated John McCain in California by 61% to 37%. James Poulos spoke with Assemblyman DeVore about his run for office, the challenges and opportunities facing California conservatives and Republicans, and what it might all mean nationally.

On paper, Chuck DeVore looks like the typical well-credentialed Republican contender for high office. President of his high school freshman class, 1981 chairman of Cal State Fullerton’s college Republicans, DeVore retired from the Army Reserve last year as a Lieutenant Colonel and served as special assistant for foreign affairs to Caspar Weinberger from 1986-1988 — for a time, the youngest Pentagon appointee in the Reagan White House. With a degree in Strategic Studies and experience as vice president of research for a firm that worked for Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman, DeVore’s national security background and establishment bona fides call to mind the sort of solid, conventional campaign — and candidate — that’s dominated state GOP politics in the past.

But Obama is headed in, Bush is headed out, and the past is a poor indication of the kind of politics DeVore intends to bring to his run against Barbara Boxer. Over the course of nearly an hour, DeVore referenced national security only once — while discussing border control in the larger context of some fresh thinking on California’s illegal immigration problem (about which more later). Immigration reform, he explained, “starts with the premise that naturally we have to secure our borders […]. That is definitely job number one, and that’s clearly why president Bush’s attempt at immigration reform was an abject failure, because nobody trusted that Washington would actually secure the borders before moving forward.”

Situating that sort of open criticism of the administration within a broader reconsideration of how conservative principles translate into practice is typical of the way that DeVore distinguishes his brand of conservative Republican politics. In place of the nationalized rhetoric of the Bush era — which relentlessly portrayed Democrats as fatally out of touch when it came to the conflict John McCain described as the transcendent issue of our time — DeVore consistently advances an assertive but reasoned mix of pragmatism and principle. Its aim? To deliver confident, competent domestic governance unobstructed by ideological hangups.

This is a high aim indeed after the legacy of the past eight years. But DeVore is able to parlay his command of the right message into an early indication of how it might play out in actual state governance — in a deep blue state as large and diverse enough as America itself, and with no shortage (at least in absolute terms) of Republicans.

Accordingly, DeVore presents the contrast between himself and Sen. Boxer as one between a smart, nimble, Republican future and a contrarian, rigid, liberal past. Boxer’s thinking, he says, “has not evolved,” and is “now out of sync with the majority of Californians.” Positioning himself as squarely within a majority of Californians favoring “modern nuclear power” and a “plurality” who believe “California needs California’s oil,” DeVore calls it “disappointing but not surprising that a politician who first ran for office when Richard Nixon was president, the laptop wasn’t even a dream, and people were wearing polyester bell bottom pants” wouldn’t “get with the times.”

California voters, he says, will conclude they simply “can’t afford Barbara Boxer” — or her “old-style doctrinaire liberalism” — anymore. But they’ll do so, if he’s right, because DeVore will be able to augment and reframe traditional Republican issues like energy and taxes, which served the GOP well this election season but not nearly well enough. Instead of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” DeVore pitches offshore drilling in conjunction with the nuclear energy that alone, he says, can “make the sort of ‘revolutionary’ change” in “our reliance on fossil fuel emissions” that liberals themselves insist is so important.

And in place of a disembodied “cut taxes” refrain, DeVore ties corporate and capital-gains rates to the role intellectual property plays in California’s uncertain economy. “Without that new venture capital coming in, our ability to generate new intellectual property that keeps Californians working” is “in jeopardy,” he says. “With the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire and with Barbara Boxer wanting more taxes, I can’t imagine how those higher tax rates on capital and on business are going to help the California economy. It would seem to me,” DeVore submits, in what already amounts to a closing argument, “that people are going to be wanting a practical, commonsense conservative to be offering them solutions to these problems two years from now.”