The walking man

SCOTTSDALE -- Jim Ogsbury knows how to walk neighborhoods. He doesn’t mess with marker caps anymore – “I got sick of fumbling with them,” he explains – now he’s got a retractable one to mark off houses on his walk sheet. He also uses it to knock on doors, joking he “must have permanent tissue damage in my knuckles” from all the doors he’s knocked. By his count, that’s now about 16,000.

Today he is taking his quest for the Republican nomination in the 5th Congressional District to a quiet Scottsdale street, rich in what Ogsbury terms “loyal Republican voters.” He plans to spend the afternoon, from 1:30 until dark, introducing himself to residents of house after house, chatting with the voters inside and putting campaign literature into their hands personally.

Congressional candidate Jim Ogsbury: Campaign photo“Every day somebody will tell me, ‘this must be so grueling,’” Ogsbury told PolitickerAZ.com. He chose a short-sleeved green and white-striped shirt and navy slacks for his trek. The thermometer was pushing 110 degrees, and the only cooling off Ogsbury will have for a few hours will be from a water bottle and the air conditioning escaping Republican houses. “This is the part I love,” he said.

The part he doesn’t like is the money. “That’s that underbelly to politics,” he said. “That’s distasteful.”

Distasteful, but necessary.

In a six-way race, money can be the difference between getting your name and message out and having it swallowed up in the general static. Ogsbury won’t be able to outspend David Schweikert, the former Maricopa County treasurer and former Arizona House majority leader, who has amassed a war chest of over $500,000 -- the highest of any of U.S. Rep. Harry Mitchell’s would-be challengers in the 5th district, which takes in Scottsdale, Tempe and areas to the northeast of the Phoenix metro area. He doesn’t enjoy the name recognition of Laura Knaperek, the former state representative from Tempe who beat Schweikert in one poll that only included those two and Mitchell.

He isn’t out of the money hunt, though. As of the beginning of the third fundraising quarter, Ogsbury was second to Schweikert in funds, with $323,000 in the bank. He was also the first to hit the airwaves with a cable news ad buy, mainly on Fox News. Knocking doors is a cheap, if time intensive, way to get your face out there. He estimates he will knock on between 75 and 150 doors in an afternoon, which adds up to thousands over the life of a campaign.

It is precisely Ogsbury’s retail politics approach, spending a large part of his week in a door-to-door introduction campaign (he has never held elected office), that has many observers of the primary calling it a three-person race between Ogsbury, Schweikert and Susan Bitter Smith, a lobbyist for the Arizona New Mexico Cable Communications Association. She was the last entry, and brought $150,000 of her own money and deep-pocket fundraisers to the race. She ended the second quarter with just shy of $250,000.

'I got tired of yelling at my TV...'

Like Bitter Smith, Ogsbury has made his money primarily as a lobbyist. The Harvard and Arizona State University-educated attorney has represented clients such as the cities of Mesa, Chandler, Surprise and others, as well as the Nature Conservancy. In mid-2007, though, Ogsbury decided to hang up his lobbying spurs and hit the campaign trail.

“I got to the point in my career where it was time to shelve my business interests,” he explained to one potential Scottsdale voter. “I got tired of yelling at my TV.”

When he was yelling, it was usually over what he has dubbed “out of control government spending.” Economic conservatism is the message that comes in loudest and clearest in his talks with residents who open the door – which ends up being about one out of three, a good ratio for a weekday afternoon.

Ogsbury has his pitch down well after so much time on the trail. He hits the bullet points straight off.

“I distinguish myself by being a native Arizonan, and I have actual experience cutting government programs,” he says.

He rarely, if ever, mentions his lobbying activities, but speaks at length about his time as congressional staff director to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. He was hired in the wake of the 1994 Republican wave and Ogsbury waxes fondly about the good old days of conservatism with his prospective constituency.

“Those were heady times, man,” he tells a balding senior who appears in shorts and slippers, asks him what his big issues are, and gets an excited spiel on government overspending. There was a time when a younger Jim Ogsbury, a newly minted congressional aide on Capitol Hill, bore witness to a principled conservative assault on bloated government, as the candidate tells it, an assault that succeeded in forcing a huge contraction in the federal budget.

However, the tale of the Republicans slaying Big Government always has the same sad ending when told by Ogsbury:

“It lasted a few years, then Republicans became the stewards of big government.”

Door after door, that line gets every listener nodding.

Ogsbury is good at engaging his contacts. He jokes about his unassuming appearance, relating the story of one child who announced Ogsbury’s presence to his parents by saying, “It’s just an old bald man in a suit.” (For the record, he’s 49).

He is candid about his biography, explaining his decision to enroll in law school at ASU “not out of a burning desire to practice, but to defer the real world as long as possible.”

He encounters relatively little reservation from the strangers opening their doors to him. Reactions to his pitch are mainly positive, the worst merely non-committal. He is speaking to a friendly crowd, after all. One man summed up the general sentiment toward the incumbent thus: “I know who’s not going to get my vote. That’s that asshole who’s up there right now.”

The candidate declined to agree with the characterization of Mitchell, but laughed along nonetheless.

Ogsbury is not positioning himself on the right flank in the 5th district primary. He calls himself a “constitutionalist,” which means his limited-government worldview does not include an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage. He thinks the largest part of solving the energy crisis should be met by building more nuclear power plants, and, while advocating a missile defense shield against Iran, emphasizes diplomacy over force.

The people who open their doors today don’t talk about that much. They want to know where he stands on immigration.

The immigration issue

As evidenced by Bitter Smith’s prominent use of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s endorsement, and the outspoken anti-illegal immigration stance of former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth, who Mitchell upset in 2006 to take the seat, the 5th district Republican field seems well aware that many voters in the Sept. 2 primary will be casting their ballots largely on the basis of the candidates’ immigration views.

Here is an area Ogsbury may be vulnerable. As he explains to many a “loyal Republican” today, his immediate concern is securing the border – no more, no less.

“We’ve got to secure the border first,” he tells one woman. “It doesn’t make sense to do anything else if we don’t have the border under control.”

Ogsbury is emphatic on this point, even taking pains to explain that, while he is no fan of government spending, he thinks this is an issue where federal intervention is appropriate, and necessary.

“If it takes 20 to 30 billion dollars to secure the borders, that’s perfectly acceptable,” he says. “We’ve got to disaggregate this issue from the rest.”

The woman agrees, but presses him. “Then what?” she asks.

Ogsbury’s response -- “I’m not looking past border security” – does not seem to satisfy the woman, or several others with whom he speaks.

However, when not in front of a potential supporter, Ogsbury is frank about the “then what?” problem.

“There has to be some way for good people to become citizens,” he said. “The non-native workforce has got a role in the economy.”

When asked whether that can be construed as amnesty, the very whiff of which can send some conservatives into a frenzy, Ogsbury laughs uncomfortably.

“Amnesty is a loaded, loaded word,” he said. “It’s a matter of semantics.”

Connotative nuances aside, a path to citizenship is exactly what caused the conservative revolt against President Bush, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Phoenix) and other Republicans when it was included in the failed immigration reform packages of 2005 and 2006. Ogsbury claims that he would support a “touch back” provision, requiring illegal immigrants to return to their home countries before re-applying for legal status.

He thinks the wrong thing to do is “create a patchwork of guest worker programs, employer sanction laws” and so on. He also recognizes that mass deportation is not a viable option, either, leaving some sort of forgiveness of lawbreaking the only alternative.

That may not be the only trouble spot for Ogsbury. He frequently mentions the balanced budget proposal he recently put out, which he claims would save Americans $1.37 trillion over five years. A number of citizens seem impressed with the idea of a candidate projecting that kind of command of the economy, and a few appreciative eyebrows are raised when he brings it up.

A close reading of the proposal, though, reveals a few holes. Many of the cuts would be from the federal workforce, which Ogsbury thinks should be reduced by five percent, or about 4,770 workers. It’s hard to imagine the affected agencies being willing to see their staffs reduced by such significant amounts, or their allies on the Hill going along with it – particularly when introduced by a freshman, as Ogsbury would be.

Also, while specific cuts are mentioned at the Department of Agriculture and other places, there is a chunk of discretionary spending cuts, totaling almost $700 billion over the five years of his plan that is not specified, other than to say it would come from reducing discretionary spending back to fiscal year 2000 levels. Those unnamed cuts represent 50 percent of his balanced budget plan.

The extent of the damage those questions will cause, if any, remains to be seen. The crowded primary is just getting into full swing, with over a month and a half left until a nominee is chosen in the district.

Until then, Ogsbury will be walking.