Steve Wiegand: Race to succeed Doolittle is a GOP-vs.-GOP contest

I drove up to Auburn Tuesday to see Tom McClintock rhetorically throw his hat into the ring.

"The ring" in this case refers to the 4th Congressional District, and the cliché is historically appropriate. Apparently derived from a frontier tradition of throwing one's headgear into a boxing ring to announce one's pugilistic intentions, it was popularized as a political term by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

"My hat's in the ring. The fight is on, and I'm stripped to the buff," Roosevelt said as he announced he would challenge a heretofore fellow Republican, William Howard Taft, for the presidency.

Which is what McClintock was doing Tuesday, although he kept his shirt on. The race to replace retiring-under-a-cloud incumbent John Doolittle is now pretty much between McClintock and former Rep. Doug Ose, a fellow Republican.

The Democratic candidate is Charlie Brown, a retired Air Force officer who came fairly close to upsetting Doolittle in 2006, mostly because of an FBI probe into Doolittle's links to the felonious doings of former D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But the 4th CD, which sprawls from Roseville to the Oregon border and from Orangevale to Lake Tahoe, is Reep country, with a heavier GOP registration than all but four of California's 53 congressional districts.

History is against Brown as well: Since 1966, according to UC San Diego politics prof Gary Jacobson, just five Dems have won a congressional seat in California in districts where Reeps had a lead in voter registration, and none of those had nearly the 17-point gap that the 4th CD does.

Which brings us to another political cliché: "carpetbagger." This came into use after grubby opportunists packed their belongings in cheap valises and flocked to the post-Civil War South to loot the locals.

Constitutionally speaking, members of Congress don't have to actually be from the areas they represent, and neither Ose nor McClintock lives in the district. Ose resides in Sacramento, although he's said to be in the process of renting a place in Granite Bay. McClintock, who currently represents a state Senate district centered in Ventura County, lives in Elk Grove.

Tuesday, McClintock said he won't be moving to the district until the current legislative session is over out of deference to his constituents, although it wasn't clear how living in Elk Grove is better for residents of his Southern California senatorial district than living in, say, Rocklin.

And it may not matter much. After McClintock got done with his hat throwing on the steps of the handsomely historic county courthouse, I stopped by the Auburn Barber Shop.

A couple of locals, Claude Allen and Verne McHenry, were chatting outside, and I asked them if they saw McClintock as an interloper.

"Not at all," Allen said. "I don't have any qualms about that. He'll be back in Washington anyway."

"Where he'll probably get nasty, being with those other individuals" in Congress, McHenry added.

It thus appears the Ose-McClintock thing is going to come down to what might be called "the McCain factor." Put another way: Is Ose conservative enough for the 4th CD?

McClintock is pretty conservative, which is like saying Dracula was a night person or Lady Godiva was an extrovert. If McClintock were any farther right, he'd be left.

Ose, on the other hand, is what liberals refer to as a "reasonable Republican." During his previous six-year stint as a congressman, Ose was part of a moderate GOP group called the Main Street Partnership. He's also been endorsed by a bunch of Republican stalwarts such as former Gov. Pete Wilson, whose own conservative credentials were questioned from time to time.

Both guys will have the money to keep up with each other, so it's going to be an entertaining race.

Keep your eye on the right lane.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Steve Wiegand, (916) 321-1076. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/wiegand.