PLEASANTON, CALIF. — The sun was hardly up when Jerry McNerney shut his front door behind him, a bowl of Great Grains Maple Pecan Crunch in his stomach, a brown suit and his good black shoes in a garment bag for later.
In the 16 hours before he returned home, the freshman congressman who was never supposed to win would put on 40 pounds of gear at a firehouse and spend nearly two hours at a grocery store, talking to voters by the beer nuts.
He would toss down half a quesadilla at a strip mall, meet more voters at a hardware store, and chat with business types before putting on the suit and shoes for two 7 p.m. dinner commitments, an hour and 20 minutes apart.
Lately, this is a typical Saturday for McNerney, the 56-year-old wind engineer who a year ago felled a GOP Goliath, Richard W. Pombo, shocking the political establishment. Now nearly halfway through his first term, he has set out to prove his victory in this traditionally Republican district of farm country and upscale exurbs east of San Francisco was no fluke.
One of 30 Democrats carried to the House of Representatives on a wave of voter discontent, he is high on the GOP's 2008 target list. His race for a second term promises to be one of the nastiest and most expensive in the country -- the opposition papered his district with attack fliers the day he was sworn in. And many see it as a test of how durable the Democrats' 2006 victories will be in a presidential election year.
But McNerney, whose antiwar, pro-environment campaign was fueled by liberal activists, is proving to be a more moderate lawmaker than many expected. In 10 months, he has managed to tick off liberal bloggers who are pledging to take their money elsewhere, while picking up support from Republicans at home who can't remember the last time they liked a Democrat.
Converting the base
For a man who has spent his life pondering the complexities of math and harnessing the power of wind, McNerney's political calculus is fairly simple: meet as many voters as he can.
So he makes the five-hour cross-country flight from Washington every Friday night and back every Monday at dawn, a record few geographically disadvantaged California members can claim. Airsick-prone, he has been ill on the plane twice, and he came down with bronchitis two other times.
