Contra Costa Times, CA

San Fernando Valley is no longer Reagan Country
By Tony Castro, Staff Writer

Article Launched: 10/18/2008 12:00:00 AM PDT

It is a shift that has turned what once was Reagan Country into
Democratic territory in recent presidential campaigns, with this
year’s landmark Nov. 4 election expected to be no different.

"The San Fernando Valley was historically conservative, and it was
Reagan Country when Reagan was governor and later president," said
Allan Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based Republican consultant and
strategist. "Outsiders still think of it that way. But it’s no longer
true. It’s an area that still has a lot of active Republicans, but
they’re by far the minority.

"The Valley today is Latino. It’s Jewish. It is almost the Westside of
L.A."

Once ethnically isolated from Los Angeles – from which it sought to
secede just six years ago – the Valley today is far removed from the
Valley of the 1980s, when it was known as "America’s Suburb," the home
of shopping malls, car dealerships, Valley Girls and Republican
conservatism. Now, it has become a reflection of L.A.’s diversity.

The locals in the sun-reddened hills above Chatsworth have long called
a hillside rock formation "The 12 Apostles," but in the 1980s a few
jokingly rechristened it "Ronnie and his Kitchen Cabinet."

"It’s Reagan Country," said Shep Woods, who grooms horses at one of
the stables off Lake Manor Drive, which snakes through the hillside
and becomes Box Canyon Road overlooking the Ronald Reagan Freeway on
the way to Simi Valley. "Or used to be."

In the generation since Reagan was president, the political landscape
of the San Fernando Valley has undergone a dramatic shift shaped by
demographic, racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and socioeconomic
changes that have altered the reality, if not the perception, of the
area. Population now diverse

In 1950, non-Latino whites accounted for at least 90percent of the
Valley’s population, and in 1980, that figure was still 74percent.

Today, the Valley is 42percent Latino, 10percent Asian and almost
5percent African-American. And 25percent of the Valley falls under the
Census Bureau data description that includes Armenians, Iranians and
other Middle Eastern ethnic groups. More than 40percent of the
Valley’s residents are foreign-born.

"Individually, as groups, the numbers are significant," said Daniel
Blake, professor of economics and director of the San Fernando Valley
Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.
"As a whole, the numbers are staggering."

Those statistics do not begin to include the role that religion and
lifestyle play in the Valley. The Jewish population is significant,
estimated by some analysts at 15-20percent. Muslims account for an
estimated 5percent.

Homayoon Hooshiarnejad, publisher of Asre Emrooz, a Valley-based daily
Farsi-language newspaper, goes so far as to liken the Valley to the
Middle East, where historically rival religions, cultures and people
have forged a confluence of identities that no one individually
controls.

"It is hard to say what the cultural influence of Iranians, some of
them Jewish and some of them Muslim, has been on the traditional San
Fernando Valley, but it is important," he said. "By sheer presence
there is influence. The culture, heritage, values."

So, too, has been the quiet impact of alternative lifestyles, most
noticeably by gays and lesbians, whose presence has come to the
forefront this year. The first gay couple to marry in Southern
California was from North Hills, and more marriages of same-sex
couples from the Valley have followed.

"Imagine all that in the Valley Girls days," said University of
Southern California professor and author Elizabeth Currid, who
specializes in the role of popular culture in shaping society.

"You add more people into the mix with different ideas, different
backgrounds, different values, it’s just implicit that you’re going to
change the dynamics, and I would argue that more diversity is always
better."

The political impact is telling. By the 2004 presidential election,
almost two-thirds of voters in the five City Council districts wholly
within the Valley voted for Democratic nominee John Kerry. That
exceeded how he did in Los Angeles County or California – or even in
his home state of Massachusetts.

Republicans say the changing of the guard in the Valley was the
product both of the demographic shift of the last generation and the
state party’s own ultra-conservative positions of the 1990s.

Possibly no one personifies that change more than Alex Wisner, 46, of
Chatsworth, a one-time foot soldier in what became known as "The
Reagan Revolution" in American politics.

A small-business man and lifelong Republican, Wisner once registered
Valley voters for Reagan and recalls that time fondly.

"I was a Ronald Reagan Republican," he said. "I remember registering
so many Democrats who were re-registering as Republicans, all because
of Ronald Reagan. I still consider myself a conservative, but I’ll be
voting for Barack Obama. He’s the new Ronald Reagan."

Such words would seem like political blasphemy to most Republicans,
especially when just to the west of the Valley earlier this year, all
the GOP presidential hopefuls sought to out-Reagan one other and claim
his legacy when they debated at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
in Simi Valley.

Significantly, it is now Simi Valley and nearby Santa Clarita that
have become what the Valley once was politically – the "New Reagan
Country," said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at
California State University, Fullerton.

"It’s away from the midpart of Los Angeles … and the Valley," he
said. "And it’s where Republicans all sort of worship at the shrine of
Ronald Reagan."

But Lynn Kissinger of Chatsworth remembers all too well when that
shrine encompassed much of the Valley.

Kissinger, 80, and her husband, Ed, are lifelong Republicans whose
presidential voting history chronicles the GOP story of the past five
decades: Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, Richard Nixon and Barry
Goldwater in the 1960s, Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s, down to
Reagan in the 1980s and on to the Bushes.

For the past half-century from her home just below Box Canyon,
Kissinger has seen the West Valley bloom from an extended orchard to a
suburban oasis whose occasional shifts of underground faults have been
no match for the changes in the human landscape.

"The Valley homestead after World War II was fairly simple with
returning GIs, mostly white, looking for a nice safe space to live and
raise their kids," said Elizabeth T. Adams, a professor of popular
culture and folklore at CSUN. "What has happened is that a diversity
of folks have moved to the Valley since then for a variety of reasons.

"And over time, neighbors having normative experiences with people of
different backgrounds and different religions realize that they
actually do have a lot more in common than they have differences.

"There comes a multicultural understanding that conquers irrational
fears."

Lynn Kissinger, for one, knows that something became different in the
past few years, something that, while she can’t put her finger on it,
nonetheless has altered the way she views her world. Her children are
grown, and she now has a family legacy in her grandchildren.

What brought about her change is personal, and she is hesitant to talk
about it publicly. But she has confided to her daughter, Holly Huff,
57, of Santa Susana Knolls, who said her mother will soon be doing
something that would have been anathema to Republicans of an earlier
time.

"She says she won’t be voting for a Republican for president," Huff
said. "It’s the first time. She will be voting for Obama, and it has
nothing to do with race. Race isn’t an issue for her. What is an issue
for her is the world and all the challenges we face. And she has had a
change of heart as to who she has faith in to meet up to those
challenges.

"She has seen change, and it doesn’t frighten her."

tony.castro@dailynews.com 818-713-3761