ShareThisAfter nearly a quarter century out of office, 78-year-old maverick Republican Paul "Pete" McCloskey is taking on his party's establishment once again, this time challenging Rep. Richard Pombo, chairman of the powerful House Resources Committee, in the June primary election.
Pombo's support for changes in the Endangered Species Act and increased drilling on federal land, and his association with the House leadership caught in the bribery scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff, make it time for a change, said the former congressman from Palo Alto, Calif.
"The party has shifted way away from the Republican values I knew," said McCloskey, known for his opposition to the Vietnam War a generation ago. "This man Pombo is an embarrassment," he said as he opened his longshot election effort at a Lodi restaurant.
McCloskey acknowledged he didn't really want to make the campaign himself, but when he and other like-minded Republicans couldn't find another challenger to the seven-term incumbent, he decided to become a candidate again.
McCloskey has few illusions about the odds he's facing in the race for the sprawling 11th Congressional District.
Pombo, 45, a former Tracy City Council member, is a well-financed incumbent with more than $555,000 in cash on hand as of October. He easily has handled every election challenge since his first tight victory in 1992.
As for McCloskey, he just moved into the district Sunday and has $4,500 in his campaign account. He'll lend his campaign $50,000 _ "which covers half my remaining savings" _ and start trying to learn about local areas and issues he admitted he knows little about.
"We have been unable to find any credible Republican willing to challenge Pombo," McCloskey said in a 12-page campaign statement he released Monday. "For that reason, I declare my candidacy today."
McCloskey knows about uphill campaigns. In 1972, he challenged President Richard Nixon with a primary campaign centered on his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In 1982, he ended his 15-year career in Congress with a second-place finish in a GOP Senate primary where he told Republican voters he disagreed with President Ronald Reagan on issues including abortion, gun control, nuclear strategy and El Salvador.
McCloskey hasn't gone out of his way to court the conservative Republicans who'll be casting ballots in June.
In 2004, he urged Republicans to support Democrat John Kerry for president. In a letter on the Web site of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, a group he founded, he praised the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, saying that "like many great leaders, Yasser Arafat's true greatness may not be realized for many years."
McCloskey, a decorated Marine combat veteran, also was a co-sponsor of the first Earth Day in 1970. He opposes the Bush administrations efforts to weaken environmental laws and supports stem cell research, abortion rights and physician-assisted suicide. McCloskey also has called for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq within a year.
That's not a winning platform, said Wayne Johnson, a campaign consultant for Pombo.
"He's running in the wrong primary," Johnson said. "He's a stalking horse for the Democrats, and we're not going to play."
McCloskey has proposed a series of 12 debates with Pombo, but Johnson said none is going to happen.
"When the Democrats have their primary and choose their candidate, then we'll talk about a debate," he said. "We might as well debate Austin Powers as McCloskey, because they're both stuck in the '70s."
He also dismissed efforts to link Pombo to any scandals and argued that changes are needed in the country's environmental rules.
"What's embarrassing is this guy who writes odes to Yasser Arafat," Johnson said. "He was outside the mainstream of the Republican Party in the '70s, and what he's done in recent years shows he's outside the mainstream of America."
