Chapter 8:
Senate Campaigns
Elected to the State Senate in 1974, I had more power
than ever at the Capitol, and more opportunity to get things
done, and that power and opportunity both supported and
beguiled me. I worked hard at it, with some real measures of
success, and I didn't take as much time to politic in the
district. Also I'd kind of had it going to this that and the
other event over five counties.
In the senate election I'd beaten a qualified
Republican, who'd worked hard and had some support, and I'd
defeated him very convincingly. This made me a little cocky.
I'd been elected in an area which by its nature would
ordinarily re-elect incumbents (so I was told by a couple of
political pros), so my prospects in the '78 election were
according to this theory good. I featured myself hovering
over my district, standing astride the vineyards, sugar beet
and tomato fields, cities and small factories, like the jolly
green giant. As Elected Senator I stood above my five
counties, seeing into all of them and being seen from them
all. Anyone trying to defeat me might make a little headway
in his own hometown but wouldn't be observed by the bulk of
the voters in the other counties. When we were wondering, in
'77, who the Republicans might run against me, I remember
thinking their best choice might be another giant--Johnny
Miller, star professional golfer from Napa.
Meanwhile, my five counties were starting to
take a closer critical look at their giant green senator. Wine interests
in Napa, closer critical look at their giant green senator. Business
interests in Solano County wanted to help Dow Chemical build a
petrochemical plant near Suisun Marsh, and organized labor was
very strongly supportive of it. I didn't outright oppose it
but I took a strong stand against bending the protective
environmental rules so that Dow Chemical could do its damndest
without ecological safeguards. The plant wasn't built and
labor never forgave me.
As a State Senator I had changed a lot. I'd learned it
was more important to act like a leader than look like one.
This wasn't a change which took place on being elected to or
sworn into the senate, like becoming 'an officer and a
gentleman', like the 90-day wonders of World War II. It really
didn't have much of anything to do with the senate, and the
changes took place gradually. It was just that by that time I
realized they'd taken place. My fascination for perqs and
other trappings of office was relatively short-lived. It was
1969 and '70 when I had the expensive and definitely fancy
Thunderbird as a state vehicle. Following my flight in the T-
Bird, my next cars were American Motors Matadors. I remember
Willie Brown saying, with scorn in his voice, "Dunlap, you're
not getting a Rambler!?"
My 'Rambler' Matadors were moderately priced and had low
exhaust emission ratings. I felt I was entitled to a good car
that ran well, but that the public didn't need me to spend
money on unnecessary frills. I also wanted to contribute to
clean air and set a good example. Personally I felt better
practicing what I preached.*
In 1975 I was the author of a bill which created the
first Agricultural/Labor relations board in the United States.
It was a great bill, prepared by Governor Jerry Brown's
office, and after a hard fight it became the law. I was proud
of my part in it but it made me very unpopular with the Agri-
business corporate interests in four of the five counties I
represented. My opponent in 1978, Jim Neilsen, came from Agri-
business himself and was eager to lead their crusade against
me.**
Although the wine people in Napa County doubted they
could beat me, they were happy to have in Neilsen a young
standard bearer. Though we'd shared a concern for conservation
we'd continued to drift apart politically--I hadn't gotten my
hiking trails but they had gotten most of their new wineries
and parking lots--I was more concerned with supporting Cesar
____________
*John Tuteur, fellow democrat in Napa, was my voluntary
conservation advisor. John pointed out how heavy a pollution
contributor the T-Bird was (and other 8 cylinder hi powered
vehicles were), and I took this value into consideration along
with the fact that the cost was substantial. Moderate sized
and priced cars not only looked better to people, but were
better.
**Neilsen was a fertilizer and pesticide salesman. Corporate
interests in his 'field' felt best served without governmental
monitoring of Ag and Labor relations.
Chavez and the needs of those who picked the grapes, and they
knew it.
To some large extent, I looked on them as enemies and sort
of wrote them off. I didn't quit trying to work with them, but
it was not a high priority. I forgot that it's harder to
treat someone as an enemy if you see them often. The Round
Table, remember? They were not all bad, some of them might've
been educated to a more liberal labor position--but I would've
had a hard time identifying with them more than I did. As I've
said before, I liked the Napa Valley better when it was known
for prunes and the State Hospital rather than fine wines,
grapefields, and golf. As I was growing up in Yountville, it
used to be that when you said you were from Napa, people
laughed--"Oh, just got out, huh?"--the physical proximity to
an 'insane asylum' was a condemnation by association. Modern
consciousness of mental health issues is possibly more
enlightened. (Although it is still a major institution for the
mentally ill and developmentally disabled, the existence of
Napa State Hospital is not even known, today, to most
tourists). Now, Napa County Boosters might say, "We've climbed
from the ridiculous to the sublime, from prunes to fine
wines." I look on prunes as plebian and that's a good word in
my vocabulary. David's friend Robyn, of the tree in the
Capitol Park, has called attention to the fact that prunes are
a joke, but of course I have a little trouble acknowledging
this because raising and marketing them was my father's
original occupation.* And then, I do like simple plebian
things--like, say, gruel.**
My lack of affinity for the Silverado Country Club and
the fine wine set may be partially reverse snobbery or 'sour
grapes'. I'll never work hard enough and make enough money to
be in the Upper Upper Crust, so maybe I find it mentally
healthy to believe it's bad to be there. On the other hand, my
judgement tells me that it's not a very high pursuit (noble
liberal nose held high in the air here).
Another clash was over Proposition 13, the 'tax
limitation', which I strongly opposed and which was
overwhelmingly adopted by in-district and statewide voters in
the primary in June '78. Proposition 13 was also known as the
Jarvis/Gann Initiative. And the day before the November
election every household in my district received a letter from
Howard Jarvis endorsing my opponent and telling people not to
vote for me because I'd worked against their initiative (which
____________________
* My Dad was a Napa County prune farmer who was one of the
original organizers of a dried fruit grower's cooperative
known as the California Prune and Apricot Grower's
Association. He went on to hold various positions in the dried
fruit marketing business.
** I have a poem on the subject of gruel--it goes like this:
If you haven't had gruel
made with St. Bernard drool
then you don't know what slime is at all.
essentially protected property owners from paying an equitable
increase in their yearly taxes when the assessed value rose).
My so-called 'soft' position on crime was used against me in
every re-election campaign from 1968 on. In 1974 when I first
ran for the Senate, a Republican in the primary actually
performed a little jingle about me and crime and spending, as
part of his public appearances. It followed the form of the
Doublemint Gum commercial--but he didn't actually 'sing' it.
Double your taxes
Double your crime
Elect John Dunlap
Now's the time
And then of course he went on to tell how terrible I really
was. This jingle made Janet and Jane mad when they first heard
it at a candidate's night, but it didn't catch on, and its
author was defeated even by his fellow Republican. I guess it
was too cute, or accompanied by too little money.
Neilsen, in November of 1978, also used my position
against me. I knew that doubling penalties on robbery,
burglary, and rape had been statistically and psychologically
demonstrated not to decrease the crime rate nor make anybody
safer, and I consistently refused to vote for phony solutions
just because they were popular. It'd be a real disservice to
make people believe something was done to help reduce crime,
when it wasn't. I still strongly believe this argument, but
it's a hard one to sell. People want simple solutions. My
opponent said that he and three fourths of the people in the
district were for capital punishment and that I was against
it, just as I was against the Jarvis/Gann Initiative. This
chain of circumstances was artfully used in his media
campaign, which included direct mail ads, newspaper, TV, and
radio. With all the money in his campaign coffers Neilsen
could've put his messages into fortune cookies in all the
Chinese restaurants in Sacramento.
In 1978 political trends were changing toward the
conservative and Republicans were gaining. It would've started
sooner if it hadn't been for Watergate. The Republicans were
on the rise and they knew it. Because of my strong liberal
positions in a semi-conservative district I was particularly
targeted by the hierarchy of the Republican party--financial
coffers were opened and poured on my opponent's breast (plus,
the Gun Nuts lobby, a republican auxiliary, donated a lot of
money).
PICCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
In my own '78 campaign, we tried an experiment which
turned out to be a tactical mistake. Too late to stop it, I
heard Jess Unruh had tried the same thing and caught a lot of
flack for doing it. It was masterminded by some experienced
people who'd done well using the same technique to raise
dollars for 'issues' up before the voters. It involved sending
door-to-door canvassers out collecting money for my campaign.
The problem was that they got paid on a percentage basis, and
when the newspapers in Santa Rosa and Napa got wind of this,
they roasted us over the coals. As I see it now it was a
blunder--my extreme concern for getting together money to run
this campaign had warped my judgement.
As it turned out, we did raise a lot of money in the
usual ways, but it was late in coming in and I had to spend a
quarter of my time and a third of my energy raising money when
I should have been campaigning.
I flew to Los Angeles, within the last two months before
the election, for a fundraiser given by Alan Sieroty at his
parents' home in Beverly Hills. It brought in a little over
2,000 dollars. I also flew to Orange County for another
fundraiser which produced a similar amount, and I drove to
Palo Alto where an environmental group gave a joint fundraiser
for me and a couple other legislators. I netted $1,500. My
campaign also put together a hundred-dollar-a-plate lunch in
San Francisco. I caught hell with the press for out of
district fundraisers. But all of the money came from people
who shared my liberal philosophy.
One out-of-district trip that the press didn't get wind
of netted me $15,000 dollars. They'd have loved to hear of that
one. In late September Jerry Whipple, Vice President of the
United Auto Workers, called my office and left word he had a
check for me and wanted to talk to me personally and could I
get to San Jose to pick it up. He didn't like to put me out
but he wasn't gonna be able to get up to anywhere nearer to
me--I had to be in Santa Rosa at 10 or 11 in the morning, and
Sacramento that evening. I ended up finishing my meeting in
Santa Rosa and driving to Sacramento, where we rented an
airplane. A friend who was a pilot flew me to San Jose, which
took half an hour. I remember flying low over the delta where
the Sacramento and Joaquin Rivers come together--there's a lot
of very rich soil and a lot of water--then having to climb to
go over the hills just east of the San Francisco Bay. We were
in a two-seater, one prop plane. I felt a little scared as the
motor had to work to get us up there.
At the San Jose Airport someone met us and took us to
where Jerry was. I waited for five or ten minutes and saw him,
for less time than that. He first gave me the check, and said
he'd wanted to deliver it to me personally because he'd wanted
me to know he felt there was a leadership fight coming up in
the Senate and he hoped I had 'an open mind as to the future'.
He probably had a new speaker pro tem in mind but he didn't
mention anybody, and I would've considered it inappropriate
for him to have done so. I said I certainly did have an open
mind. I didn't tell him that during the last three months,
four or five of us had been meeting once a week for breakfast;
we were not laying plans for any particular candidate, but we were a
small caucus of dissatisfaction, and we had the same thing in
mind he did. I understood that the check was supposed to be
for $15,000, since that was what I previously asked for, and
he'd said something like "well I think maybe we can put it
together." He did and it was.
Although there are some similarities, United Auto Workers
differs from a "corporation" in basic ways. The interests of the workers
are genuinely the primary driving force of the organization
(though where there are people, there are individual agendas).
Their campaign contribution was to me an affirmation of
shared philosophies/policies. But then, for fifteen thousand,
maybe Whipple was hoping for some blind devotion in return.
I think as I left Jerry said, "Sorry to take your time;
campaign hard. It's important that you get back there."
"It's a tough one Jerry, but I think I'm gonna win."
I left Jerry's one-story office building and headed down
the concrete walkway, carrying the envelope with the check in
it and Bob Connolly, the pilot, and I were driven to the
airport. I'm sure I must've checked my inside coat pocket for
it about ten times before I turned it over to the campaign
treasurer.
Over 12 years in the legislature, my relations with
organized labor were generally very good. Labor generally
backed good humanitarian legislation, and we just usually felt
the same about most issues. In later years I disagreed with
them on some environmental issues. They felt some
environmental protection endangered employment, and on a few
occasions they were concerned that certain of my tax reform
proposals would decrease job opportunities. Their concerns in
both areas were encouraged by their employers in the
industrial complex, who opposed me on both environmental
protection and tax reform, as well as labor law.
Election days I always got my hair cut or gardened or
both, and didn't do anything else. Of course I should've been
lookng well-groomed for the campaign, but I might not have
found time. Janet and I often went out to dinner and made a
grand tour of the various campaign headquarters in my three
closest counties.
In 1978 we ate at a fine new Benicia restaurant which
used to be a whorehouse when I was in college. Janet and I
were joined by Mike Gage, Nancy and Bob Sharp, and maybe Reba
Trill. While everyone else was either having a drink or in the
bathroom or somewhere, Mike and I managed to have a couple of
minutes together. Mike fortunately, through the luck of the
draw, had a very weak opponent in his race for the assembly
and was considered a shoe-in. In '76 Gage had been elected to
an Assembly seat covering half of my Senate district. Some in
Napa had said this was the Dunlap Machine mandating its choice
on the people. I'd gone out of my way to help and support
Mike--without me he couldn't have made it but the so-called
Machine couldn't have pushed just anybody into the job. He
really wanted it badly. So he was willing to work like hell.
Mike thought if he got elected he could make a difference--and
this idealism was appealing to me and the voters.
map of yours and his districts
also in ch 1 or 2
In the restaurant Mike asked me whether I thought I was
going to win Sacramento and Yolo counties. I said "Yes,
definitely." Maybe not by a lot but I felt more secure there
than anywhere else. He then gave me a piece of paper which
predicted my winning by 2,000 to 5,000 votes. He'd figured
that I'd lose Solano County and Sonoma County by a little, and
my winning in Yolo and Sacramento would put me over the top. I
had it figured similarly in result but not the same breakdown.
I'd been worried off and on for a year--his predictions at the
time reassured me.
After dinner we went to Vallejo headquarters--at this
time I was behind in early returns, but this never meant much
of anything. Republicans were always more apt to have the
foresight to turn in absentee votes, which are counted first.
Typically Democrats wait till the last minute and vote between
five and eight election night.
I stuck around there a little longer than I'd intended,
hoping there'd be some favorable news before I left. But
things stayed very indefinite. We left the Vallejo
headquarters at about 9:30, splitting with Mike, who went on
to Santa Rosa.
After we left Vallejo we headed for home where we could
check the results further. Janet and I could always continue
our headquarters tour later in the evening. On the way home I
got a scare. A reporter from a Sacramento radio station was
predicting a Neilsen victory; however, the report was based
only on the absentee vote count, which was meaningless, so I
relaxed a little. We went on home, and there were a score or
so of well-wishers around, wondering if we had any results
they didn't. My daughter Jill had arrived from Fairfield where
she had been running the get-out-the-vote campaign. She and I
ducked most of our guests and went into one of the back
bedrooms where there was a telephone and called Peter Coye, my
campaign manager, hoping he had some detailed results on
Solano and other counties. He did; we were winning about as
well as anticipated in Sacramento and Yolo. But there were
areas of Solano County that were not as good as we'd hoped.
Earlier I'd felt optimistic but scared. By now I figured I had
about as much chance winning as I would calling the flip of a
coin.
I stewed briefly over what I might have done better or
differently but mainly focused on the present and tried to
keep my spirit (and hopes) up. Earlier in the campaign a
reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle had traveled with my
opponent and me, each for a day, in order to write a feature
for his paper. It appeared on page 7 of the first section. He
asked me if I thought Jim Neilsen was a dangerous man. I said,
"No, I don't think he'll have a great effect on things if
elected. He'll just be another Republican." The reporter told
me later he thought I'd say Yes, that Neilsen was dangerous,
and he was disappointed I hadn't, because his next question
was going to be: if I realy thought so, wasn't it my duty to
shave my beard, which was going to lose me 2,000 votes?
print chronicle article here
I forget exactly what happened next but I think Janet and
Jane and Peter and I and Jill were all in the back room on the
phone on and off for an hour or so. Jane had been helping in
Fairfield, and Peter was helping to run things in Santa Rosa
but had left there as soon as the polls closed to return home.
Phone calls to Sonoma County showed us to be, in both
Sonoma and Santa Rosa, behind a little more than anticipated.
Somebody in the front of the house was listening to the local
radio station, KVON Napa, and it looked like I was behind in
Napa County, where Mike had predicted I'd win.
Probably about this time I took a break and went out to
the front of the house and there were at least fifty or
seventy-five people around drinking or eating and acting a
little worried but smiling and saying 'how's it look, John? I
guess this one's gonna be a cliffhanger.'
I was myself coming to the sneaking realization that the
cliffs were crumbling, but I said I didn't know for sure but
within a half hour or an hour we'd have some more results
which would tell the tale. And after a few minutes I retreated
again to the back of the house feeling that my machine, with
me still in the driver's seat, was grinding to a halt in front
of all my friends.
Another phonecall to Solano County confirmed, in my mind,
that we were losing it; and radio reports continued negative
from Napa. Unless the trend miraculously changed, defeat by a
narrow but decisive margin appeared almost certain.
It'd felt good to have several of my kids helping in the
campaign and to have Janet and them around now. I also felt
like I was letting the family down, though--like I'd been
carrying the Dunlap coat of arms and had dropped it in the
mud. It felt worse than getting arrested for drunk driving.
My son Peter had worked in the campaign for several
months at a nominal salary of about 350 dollars a month. Jill
had taken a leave of absence from her job for a month and put
together the campaign in Santa Rosa and Fairfield. And Jane
had worked after school and evenings for the last week or two.
I didn't mention these feelings to anybody. Janet and I and
the kids talked together a little and agreed that I was
probably losing, and they loved me, and that was that. I felt
at this point I had to go out to the front of the house and
spend some time with people out there, let them know the
truth, smile, let them know I could take it. Some of them were
there I think because they'd always come to my house election
night, period. Others were there because they hoped for good
news. But I think at least half of them were there because
they knew or suspected defeat and wanted me to know that they
cared, were shocked, and that they weren't just fair-weather
friends.
It was difficult to smile and shake hands and try to be
jovial but it seemed the only thing to do. Some people were
half plastered and on the maudlin side and a few insisted the
results must be wrong and that I was surely going to win, but
I didn't give them any hope.
It was a little like a funeral. A defeated candidate like
a surviving spouse has lost part of his life and has to re-
establish contact with something else. Like at an Irish wake,
having a lot of people around somehow makes things easier. And
it makes you move, gets you off dead center--the candidate
still standing on the bull's eye, targeted by the Republicans
and now doomed...politically speaking, there was no tomorrow.
During the period I was out in the 'wake', Janet drew me
aside-it wasn't really drawing me aside but she drew me to a
corner of the kitchen with lots of people around yakking and
some of them had had too much too drink, so it wasn't
impossible for her to speak to me in a quiet way and for
nobody else to hear. She said she wanted to say something, and
that was that she had worked to help me win, and that she
wanted me to win because she knew that was what I wanted, but
since I hadn't, she was glad, and she wanted me to know that,
because it meant she got me back. And I understood what she
meant and hugged her or something.
Defeat and death, funerals, wakes. and burials are
similar. Some honest grief is appropriate. So I grieved, some.
Now I wouldn't have all those people to work with me, and for
me this was a real loss of power and companionship. In the
next three weeks I'd be shutting down five offices and saying
goodbye to the staff of two committees--trying to help them
find jobs and find one for myself.
A defeat in '68 would've been a more serious ego blow--it
would've been, "Jesus H. I don't belong in politics, I never
did, I wasted my time, I'm no damn good; now after one term,
they're telling me this." But by '78 I'd proved I could get
re-elected several times and that I could get some things
done.
That same evening I even thought of a couple of good
things about getting defeated. I wasn't going to have to
decide how to deal with a couple members of the staff with
whom I'd been having problems. And I wasn't gonna have to deal
with all of the tremendously big problems of the goddamn State
of California and the picayune problems of all the trolls that
lived under bridges in Napa and the other four counties.
Later that night I got Jim Neilsen on the telephone just
before he left his Woodland headquarters. I just said, "Well
it looks like you're winning and I wanted to congratulate you
and say you ran a tough campaign." I couldn't say he'd run an
elevating campaign nor even a good one--he didn't know what to
say, really, either, so he said he'd look to me for advice and
I told him I'd give him a lot of advice but I really didn't
think it would be what he was looking for. We weren't unfriend-
ly with each other--but we were awkward. We closed off the
conversation and hung up.
In the wee hours of the morning Peter Coye and I spent
half an hour to an hour stewing around trying to put together
a statement for the press, because I knew they'd be calling
first thing in the morning expecting something. Finally, about
4 or 5 AM I realized I was really tired, and I could probably
put one together quickly in the morning after a couple of
hours sleep. So we went to bed and I set my alarm for 7, got
up, and had a statement ready a little before 8, when the Napa
Register called. KVON called a half hour later and I gave it
to them then, called my Sacramento office and talked to a very
sad secretary and read the statement to her and told her to
send it to the wire service. The statement read in part, "I
look forward to the time when people again believe that the
most important things are those we do together. If my campaign
has brought that time any closer it has been successful." It
occurs to me now that I might have to some extent
'outsloganned myself'--my capsulizations, completely
understandable to me, may not always have been spelled out
enough during the campaign. What I was saying with my "people
get together" slogan was that I hoped all the anti-tax and
anti-government attitude would pass and people would recognize
that government was an instrument to help them do things
together. I may have said, at some point in a speech, some-
thing like, "I look forward to the time that when a stranger
comes to your community you take the greatest pride in showing
off your public school or park, rather than the country club
or fancy eating joint."
I'd lost the election but I wasn't about to admit total
defeat. I thought to myself, at least I haven't completely
lost my idealism, as I remembered my first speech to the Yolo
County Democratic Central Committee in my unsuccessful
campaign for the State Senate in 1960. I'd said, "political
campaigns should be real educational opportunities--for the
candidate to educate the public on issues but also for the
public to educate the candidate." Obviously, this is how it
should be, and this is how it was part of the time. But: a lot
went on between the opening salvo of 1960, and the swansong of
1978, and it hadn't always fit the educational model. As I sat
the day after the 1978 election surrounded by family, I
thought of how I'd relied on the family photo through six
campaigns. This was hardly educational, except as it gave the
kids and Janet and me on the job training in how to pose.
After I'd issued my press releases we sat around and had
lots of breakfast at home--some of the people had stayed all
night. Jill and Peter were there; Jane reluctantly went to
school; Mike Gage and some others came by. My son David called
from Santa Barbara, and I had to tell him I'd lost and I again
felt a little ashamed for letting the family down. It felt
good that he'd called but it did remind me that this wasn't
just one big happy breakfast.*
The Register photographer came out that morning and my
picture was in the evening edition. He told me I looked more
relaxed than in any picture he'd ever taken of me. This was my
last front page picture (until some future unforeseen
notoriety that is).
some picture or other here
______________
*After my defeat, David revised the first verse of his
Father's Day song as follows:
He was born on a prune ranch
And he dug his way to a Sacramento Home
Now he's not a stone in the BBQ pit
He's a Gold Chip off the Capitol Dome
Around noon I went to my downtown Napa office and called
the governor's secretary of legal affairs and asked for a job.
Although it was unquestionably smart to get my oar in as fast
as possible, I was surprised at myself for moving that fast.
When I got home that afternoon, I think I maybe slept for
an hour, then waked up to read about my defeat and the reasons
for it in the Register. They didn't mention my beard but that
probably was one of the reasons. Gage, during the campaign,
did everything from being angry and mad, to being the
political sophisticate, to crying, to try to get me to shave
off my beard. At a campaign meeting he wasted an hour going
through various conniptions about it, and I finally said, "Now
look, Mike, if a year ago I'd realized how tough the campaign
was going to be, I probably would've shaved it off. But I'm
not gonna do it now, it's too patently phony." I also thought
to myself how badly I'd feel if I shaved my beard off and lost
too.
picture
A day or so after the election I got a call from John Burton.
John had gone on to Congress. He said something like 'you
son of a bitch what'd you let him beat you for?' and he asked
if I was in debt fom the campaign (if I had been he probably
would have helped me raise money or given me some from his
campaign fund).