The Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher would tell you he’s just a regular guy who loves his country and wishes he had more time to go surfing. But for 30 years, his southern California constituents have also dubbed him “crazy Dana”.
He’s a guy who, in the days of the Soviet Union, signed up for a week to fight alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. A guy who, in the early 1990s, got into a drunken arm-wrestling match with a young Vladimir Putin. Putin “put me down in a millisecond”, Rohrabacher recalled years later. “His muscles are just unbelievable.”
He’s notorious for making an ill-advised link between “dinosaur flatulence” and global warming; for his open disdain of homosexuals and undocumented immigrants; for welcoming a notorious Holocaust denier to Washington; and for thinking that the Oklahoma City bombing – widely regarded as a conspiracy of homegrown far-right radicals – was an Islamist plot cooked up by Middle Eastern radicals in the Philippines.
Not even Rohrabacher’s enemies would deny he is a colorful man. After 15 terms on Capitol Hill, though, he is almost certainly about to be an ex-congressman.
Following a nail-bitingly close race – the first real contest he has faced since his original election in 1988 – Rohrabacher is lagging behind his Democratic challenger, Harley Rouda, by 3.6%, a margin that looks insurmountable as the last provisional and absentee ballots trickle in. On Saturday, Rouda’s campaign team did the math and declared victory.
“Going forward,” Rouda said in a statement, “my mission is to be the absolute best kind of public servant – honest, transparent, accessible and tireless in serving the greater good.”
Rouda’s implication – already voiced in multiple ways on the campaign trail – was that Rohrabacher has been none of these things. It’s certainly true that the once staunchly conservative 48th district along the Orange County coast, an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles, has fallen increasingly out of sympathy with Rohrabacher’s more extreme and eccentric positions.
His constituents don’t like his embrace of Donald Trump – they narrowly preferred Hillary Clinton in 2016. They also don’t like his climate change denial, don’t like his cosy relationship…
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