Jackie Speier, shot by cult members in 1978, seeks return to Capitol Hill

Jackie Speier has waited a long time to make another run for Congress.

Speier, the leading candidate to replace former Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), first ran for Congress in 1979 in a special election to succeed her boss, Rep. Leo Ryan (D-Calif.). Ryan was the only House member to be murdered while performing his responsibilities as a congressman.

{mosads}Now running with the backing of most local and state Democrats, Speier has the inside track to replace Lantos, who passed away last week. She’s the only prominent Democrat to announce her campaign so far, which is surprising since Lantos had safely held the San Francisco-area seat since 1981. And like Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, Speier has a harrowing story of her own.

As a congressional aide, Speier accompanied Ryan on an investigation into Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple cult in Guyana. On that trip, cult members shot and killed Ryan, three journalists and a Jones follower looking to escape. Speier, hit by five bullets, was among the nine injured.

“I think people connect with me because of that and because my husband was killed when I was pregnant with my second child,” said Speier, 57. “Those people hope they can overcome anything that comes in their way because they see I’m still standing.”

Though she lost the special election to fill Ryan’s seat, Speier threw herself into public life. She served as a San Mateo County supervisor, state assemblywoman and state senator, compiling a record as a fighter for consumer rights.

“She’s nailed down every endorsement. The left has loved her. She has a high profile from running as a state senator and running for lieutenant governor,” said Steven Maviglio, a publisher of the liberal blog California Majority Report.

“It’s all but over.”

If she gets to Congress, Speier said she will work on increasing access to healthcare and ending the Iraq war.

Speier announced her campaign to replace Lantos in January, two weeks after he announced his retirement due to his battle with cancer. Though Speier last year was considering challenging him in a primary, the 12-term congressman endorsed her after she officially launched her bid.

“She works very, very hard,” Maviglio said. “And the press loves her; they have a long history with her going back to her Jonestown days.”

A special primary election will be held April 8. If no candidate receives a majority of votes, a special general election contested by the top vote-getters from each party will be held June 3, the same day as the primary for the regular general election in November.

Unlike other candidates looking to succeed departing House Democrats, Speier is virtually alone in seeking her party’s nomination. Whoever wins it will be heavily favored to defeat the Republican candidate. Lantos defeated his GOP opponent in 2006 by a 3-to-1 margin. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) won the district in the 2004 presidential race by nearly as large a margin.

In races for open Democratic seats this cycle, several candidates were prompted to run by the promise of serving in safe Democratic districts, said David Wasserman, House editor for the Cook Political Report. Rep. Niki Tsongas (Mass.) defeated four other Democrats in a primary before going on to win the seat left by Rep. Marty Meehan (D).

Rep. Laura Richardson (Calif.) beat nine Democrats in a primary before she won a general election to succeed the late Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D).

Should Speier win, she could serve on Capitol Hill for many terms. “Jackie Speier has been angling for this for quite a while,” Wasserman said. “The fact that she started running before Lantos announced his retirement in the House gave her a huge leg up.”

Some Democrats, however, want a competitive primary race. They’ve started an effort to draft Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, hoping to further stoke grassroots activity in California.

Lessig has been a strong critic of the Iraq war and the influence of lobbyists’ money in politics, and he’s been a vocal supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president.

If he got to Congress, he said he would seek to work with members of both parties on issues like campaign finance.

Lessig said that he would pledge to refuse money from lobbyists and their political action committees, and noted that Speier had accepted donations from insurance companies in a previous race.

“My view is that the system is broken when it produces a world where incumbents have a 99 percent election rate,” Lessig said. “That’s just a broken system. It’s not broken by accident; it’s designed that way. I do think it’s extremely important to think about who we’re coronating.”

Lessig, who has started a campaign committee, said he will decide this week whether to run.

Any serious challenge to Speier would require boatloads of money to pay for advertising in the expensive Bay Area, Wasserman said. Lessig, however, is poised to draw on donations from the Internet. A hero among bloggers for arguing the Supreme Court case against the constitutionality of a law extending copyright restrictions, Lessig has already been urged to run by bloggers on Open Left, The Atlantic and DailyKos.

“I like both of these individuals very much, and I would love to see Lessig jump in,” wrote Matt Stoller on Open Left, a leading liberal blog. “The Silicon Valley area is seeing a surge in local Democratic activity and organizing, as it is a blue area that had let its grass roots atrophy.”