He had a quiet, matter-of-fact, Iowa way of speaking, but from the first, I saw something in Charlie Brown. I saw an Air Force Academy graduate, an effective leader, an honorable man. I saw the future congressman.
I figured that as he got more experience on the campaign trail, the stiff awkwardness would fall away, and now that the braces were off his teeth, he would learn to smile all over again. But the stiffness and the self-conscious, Washingtonian "I'm afraid to smile" manner made it all the more plain that Charlie was quietly determined.
A newcomer both to the Democratic Party and to politics itself, he was taking on John Doolittle, the seven-term Republican incumbent who had turned California's 4th congressional district into a fiefdom controlled by his political machine. It was one of the largest and most rural of California's districts, stretched along the northern range of the Sierra Nevada, from Lake Tahoe to the Oregon border, encompassing some counties that didn't even have Democratic central committees. The 4th district was the reddest of the red.
It seemed a quixotic quest. Here was an unknown, willing to give up his secure job with the Roseville Police Department to campaign full-time against one of the mighty of the Republican establishment, a close ally of Tom Delay, an ear into which Jack Abramoff whispered. No Democratic congressional candidate had polled higher than the low thirties against Doolittle as he sailed through one reelection after another.
The political pros among California Democrats dismissed Charlie as an impossible dream. "He better raise a million dollars if he wants to be competitive," a top California Democratic Party operative said in October 2005. "That district is not in play," a sitting member of Congress said in January 2006. They looked at the California political map as a static chessboard across which it was impossible to move pieces, a gridlock of safe districts for one party or the other. When top Democrats look at that map, the coast is solidly blue, the east is red, and so it shall ever remain. They know the map, but they didn’t know Charlie.
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