Oct. 27 - NOv. 3, 2016
NEWS of the WEEK cONt’D
24th District cont’d from p.17 Hired by Whitfield in 2012, Fareed said he saw firsthand the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. He quit, he said, because of the “zero-sum-game, winner-take-all” shortsightedness of a political system in which participants focus more on winning elections every two years than getting things done. Speaking almost evangelically about wonky-sounding reforms such as “biannual budgets,” “single-subject legislation,” automatic-spending sunset provisions, better fiscal oversight, and other “systemic” changes, he also boasts he has the “will,” “spine,” and “backbone” for the job. During the 14 months working for Whitfield, Fareed, along with other Congressional staffers, flew to Turkey for a 10-day “educational” tour sponsored by a pro-Turkey lobby group. (Whitfield is a cofounder of the Congressional Caucus on Turkey and Turkish Americans, which is opposed to Congress formally recognizing as genocide the Ottoman government’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians around the end of World War I.) Fareed also worked on a Whitfield bill to protect Tennessee walking horses from cruel training methods. Whitfield’s wife, then a paid lobbyist for the Humane Society, used her husband’s congressional offices and staff to meet with as many as 100 other congressional members to promote the bill. The House ethics panel later rebuked Whitfield for this. He claimed he did not know at the time his wife was a Humane Society lobbyist — even though his staff did. He resigned this September. Ultimately the bill did not pass. When Fareed quit in 2013, he moved back to Santa Barbara and worked, he said, for the family company. A year later he announced his candidacy for Congress, running against Republican stalwarts Chris Mitchum and Dale Francisco in the primary, to challenge 10-term Democratic incumbent Lois Capps. Republican party veterans strongly urged him to wait his turn and run for other offices. He refused. What Fareed offered in lieu of experience was energy and money. He gave his campaign $200,000. It helped. In the 2014 primary, Fareed came in just 600 votes behind Mitchum and 5,000 votes ahead of Francisco. He was 26 years old. When Lois Capps announced in 2015 she would not seek another term, both Carbajal and Fareed’s engines were revving. Carbajal had been painstakingly positioning himself to succeed Capps for some time. To get to November, however, Carbajal would have to run against popular Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider in the June primary. Capps famously endorsed Carbajal in that primary, bringing the party establishment to Carbajal’s side. Fareed, likewise, wasted no time making his intentions known. To make November, Fareed would have to beat Katcho Achadjian, a popular and well-respected assemblymember from San Luis Obispo who had supported Fareed in 2014.
In the 12 years Carbajal has been a supervisor—winning election three times —he’s never run a contested race against a viable opponent. As supervisor, Carbajal was accessible, likable, and indefatigable. If he found himself sideways with liberal supervisors such as Janet Wolf, he’d figure out how to patch things up. Carbajal always made a point to get along with 5th District supervisors, first Joe Centeno and now Steve Lavagnino — traditionally seen as adversarial to the South Coast environmental agenda. Without Centeno’s support, for example, Carbajal never could have secured the votes for his signature accomplishment, the children’s health insurance initiative that reduced the number of uninsured minors from 16,000 to 1,500. (Republican Centeno, incidentally, is supporting Fareed.) The second time Carbajal ran, Montecito moneyed interests went searching for a candidate to run against him. They couldn’t find a soul. Ultimately, they opted to support Carbajal. The third time Carbajal ran, his opponent left town halfway into the race.
With carbajal and Fareed, the political is also the personal. these candidates really do not like each other. Carbajal has run largely unopposed, in part because of his prodigious fundraising prowess. No one is more relentless. One developer confided Carbajal called him 10 times in one week. In the Democratic primary, Carbajal outspent Schneider by nearly two to one, secured almost all the pertinent endorsements, and fielded more precinct walkers and get-out-the-vote telephone callers. It wasn’t even close. Fareed’s access to campaign cash has set him apart, as well. It was the $200,000 he donated to his campaign in 2014 that brought him within striking distance of Mitchum. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has since questioned how Fareed could give himself more than he actually earned and whether Fareed fully complied with campaign finance disclosure law. But it was in the 2016 primary that Fareed’s ability to raise large quantities of campaign cash raised eyebrows. The money came from donors who owned skilled nursing-home facilities outside the district. He has since argued that he had to go around the party establishment to wage a viable campaign against an entrenched insider like Achadjian.
CONT’D ON P. 21 independent.com
NovEmbEr 3, 2016
THE INDEPENDENT
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