Presidential Contender Hunter Is No Stranger to Long Odds

WASHINGTON — Duncan Hunter was just a boy, but he could see his father needed the cash.

"We were flat broke and he was trying to get together the last bit of money to make a business deal," said Hunter. "He'd sold everything we had."

Well, it turned out, not quite everything.

"Dad was looking out the window, and we had a long line of palm trees that came up to the house," Hunter recalled. "And Dad said, 'You know, those palm trees gotta be worth something.' And within a couple of hours they were taking those babies out. I think we got 250 bucks apiece for them. There were a good 20 or 30 of them. So we made that deal — and dad made a profit on it."

A Marine who fought the Japanese during World War II, Hunter's father was never one to shrink from long odds. The lesson took. Now, as Hunter struggles to keep his flagging presidential hopes alive he, too, refuses to quit.

"I think I've got a chance," Hunter insisted in a telephone interview. "And that's what you get in America, you get a chance. And you don't whine about the odds or the difficulty, you go out and you take your best swing at this thing."

A decorated Vietnam veteran, Reagan Republican and 14-term U.S. congressman with 26 years on the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter is looking hard for the political equivalent of a long row of palm trees.

There are eight Republicans running for president. He's tied for eighth place. With Rep. Tom Tancredo.

A recent Gallup Poll of Republicans nationwide showed Hunter with the support of 1 percent. In political terms, he's down to family members.

As of the end of September, he had $3,227 in his campaign war chest, about enough for a round-trip ticket from Washington to Des Moines for him and a small staff. Coach.

"It is tough," Hunter conceded. "But on the plus side, it's clear that the voters haven't settled on any particular person. This is a race that is very much up in the air. I think I've got the best message, I've got the best credentials."

Hunter, 59, was born in Riverside, Calif., where his father built a successful business developing residential communities during the post-war boom years.

And while Hunter grew up an hour's drive from the Pacific beaches, the California of his youth wasn't exactly the place of sand, hot rods and surfer girls romanticized in the Beach Boys' sunny pop tunes.

"No, not for the Hunter boys," he quipped. "We were working hard for 25 cents an hour."

Along with his sister and three brothers, Hunter was raised to pull his share of the weight in the family home and to love the outdoors.

"I got my first hunting license when I was ten years old," he said, describing youthful days spent going after rabbits, deer and elk in the mountain and desert country east of Los Angeles. "We ate everything we shot."

After attending the University of Montana and later the University of California at Santa Barbara — he never graduated — Hunter enlisted in the army, became an airborne platoon leader and received a Bronze Star for service in Vietnam.

"I didn't deserve it — that was a show-up medal," he now says, taking more evident pride in the service of his son, also named Duncan, a Marine who has served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

"He took more incoming fire in 30 seconds in Fallujah than I did in a year," Hunter said of his son.

While Hunter was in Vietnam, he sent his pay to a hunting buddy in Idaho, who used it to help buy a 180-acre island with two miles of Snake River frontage. When he returned from the war in 1971, Hunter repaired to the Idaho spread to grow alfalfa and enjoy the outdoors.

"It was a great operation," he said. "I hunted and fished and had a great time and met a wonderful girl who became my wife, Lynne."

Three and a half decades later, the couple's idea of a perfect day is still being together in the great outdoors.

"We love to hunt and fish and hike and camp," said Hunter.

"While we were in Wyoming a couple of weeks ago my wife and I went antelope hunting and she got an antelope at 453 yards," he said. "The meat almost spoiled before we could get to it, it was so far away."

Anyone who's applied for law school will appreciate Hunter's approach.

"At some point a friend of mine called me up and said, 'There's one law school in America you can get into without a college degree,'" she explained. "I said, 'Where is it?' He said, 'San Diego.' And I said 'I'm packing.'"

In 1977, Hunter graduated from what is now the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, using the G.I. Bill to fund his legal education.

He hung out his shingle in a former barbershop.

"It was 80 bucks a month," he said. "That was my law office."

Three years later, his dad dropped by with career advice.

"He said, 'You could become a U.S. congressman."

Hunter, unsure of whether three years of largely pro-bono work assisting poor people in the heavily Hispanic neighborhood qualified him for Congress, suggested he might first start with a local office, city council, perhaps.

"He said, 'No, you'll just make enemies on the way up, you've got to run for Congress.' So we went out in the rain and got signatures."

The bid was a long shot. His district — tucked in the southwest corner of California — was 29 percent Republican and 56 percent Democrat at the time. Hunter won by 10,000 votes.

"We beat the odds. Toughest race we ever ran," he said. "I had no consultants. I did all my own television stuff. My dad wrote the copy. My mom designed the billboards. We ran a family operation."

California's 52nd District fans out from the eastern edge of San Diego about 100 miles north and east, taking in wealthy conservative suburbs and vegetable farms of the Imperial Valley, which civic fathers proudly call the "salad bowl of the country."

The Marine Corps Air Station Miramar straddles the district, defense contracting and technology are major employers and border concerns are kitchen table issues, ones that have assumed central prominence in Hunter's political career.

"He's interested in the sovereignty of the country, where the borders are such that we don't have millions of illegal immigrants coming into the country," said Hunter's longtime friend Jay LaSuer, a retired California state assemblyman and former under sheriff of San Diego. "By the same token, I don't think he has a problem with anyone coming to America if they go about it properly."

For most of Hunter's life, the narrow stretch of coyote flatlands between San Diego and Tijuana - "smugglers gulch" it was called - was a primary sieve through which illegal immigrants and drug dealers poured into California from Mexico.

In 1996, amid political controversy over the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, Hunter penned federal legislation calling for a double fence, divided by a high-speed border patrol roadway, to seal off smugglers gulch. Nine miles have been built, there are three to go, and Hunter claims the fence has sent regional crime plummeting by 90 percent.

Last year, Hunter helped author legislation to add some 854 miles of border fence across the Mexican border with parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

The Bush administration, he said, has built 5.1 miles.

"They haven't built a linear inch in Texas," said Hunter. "They don't want to build the border fence, and I think it's a major mistake."

Hunter has sometimes parted ways with his fellow Republicans.

In 1993, he was one of 43 Republicans to vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he felt would undermine U.S. jobs.

But he's been a staunch supporter of President Bush and his anti-terrorism actions.

Hunter backed a bill giving intelligence analysts the authority to tap phone and fax transmissions without a warrant, in cases in which analysts believe the communications might be linked, however remotely, to terrorist activity. And he credits Bush for going after al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan and for sending the message, in Iraq, that the United States won't stand by while threats gather.

"I believe we're going to leave Iraq in victory," he said. "This fragile (Iraqi) government is going to hang on."

When he's home in Alpine, Calif., Hunter attends the 400-member Trinity Baptist Church in nearby El Cajon. The pastor, Dr. Bob Winterton, often calls on him to deliver the benediction.

"He's very deeply spiritual, but he's not vocal about it, does not wear it on his sleeve," said Winterton. "The constant philosophical and spiritual elements that make up his character just don't vary. He is not a compromiser when it comes to philosophical or spiritual facts. Things are right or wrong."

For Hunter, few things are more wrong than abortion. He was a leading force behind recent legislation placing limits on so-called partial birth abortions of late-term fetuses.

"It's an important endeavor to try to remind people of the importance and the value of human life, I think that's the centerpiece of the Republican Party," he said.

And while he has pledged to support the Republican candidate, even if it's pro-choice candidate Rudy Giuliani, Hunter believes the soul of the party is at stake in the issue.

"If we get to the point where the Republican Party does not stand in the majority to protect the lives of unborn children, then the Republican Party as we know it will be no more," he said, "because our party is based on the value of human beings."

When a Baptist puts his beliefs in action, fellow Christians call it living out the faith.

Friends describe Hunter as that kind of man.

"He's the kind of guy that you used to meet 100 years ago who is just a straight shooter," said LaSuer, who frequently hunts wild Russian boar with Hunter in the tall grass and rocky terrain two hours north of Los Angeles.

Fifteen years ago, LaSuer recalled, Hunter set up a "Sea to Shining Sea" hike from the Salton Sea — a large inland lake — to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of roughly 130 miles. Over the next five days, Hunter — often hiking in wing tips — traversed the steep and rocky desert landscape, LaSuer and others at his side, raising money for the local Boy Scouts.

When wildfires swept through his district three years ago, Hunter worked tirelessly, LaSuer recounts, bringing military and financial aid to the more than 2,000 residents who lost their homes.

"While he was going that," said LaSuer, "his own home burned right to the ground."

And as the war in Iraq has taken the lives of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops, and left nearly 30,000 others wounded, Hunter has built a personal ministry of sorts, taking injured veterans hunting in the California wilds.

"He picks them up, furnishes them a rifle, furnishes them with ammunition," said LaSuer. "He will take those guys out hunting and always make sure they get an animal."

No matter how his struggling presidential bid turns out, Hunter has announced that 2008 will be his last year on Capitol Hill. The presidential contest, he said, is his last political race.

It won't be the end of politics, though, for the family.

Hunter's son, Duncan, gets out of the Marines later this month and is running for Hunter's congressional seat.

He'll get a little advice from a man who's been walking the walk in Congress for nearly 28 years, a man still living out the lessons his own father taught him, a man still looking to take his best swing.