San Francisco Chronicle - Ro Khanna Challenges Status Quo in Race Against Rep. Mike Honda

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By Carla Marinucci

Even as a boy growing up on the other side of the globe from his ancestral homeland of India, his mother says, Rohit Khanna was shaped by his family's tumultuous history in the world's largest democracy.

"Like all Indian parents, the dream is that your child would become an engineer or a doctor," said Jyotsna Khanna, a retired teacher who emigrated from India in the 1970s. But as the American-born Ro grew up hearing his grandfather's stories of spending five years in prison during India's fight for independence alongside Mohandas Gandhi, she said, his love of politics seemed inborn.

Today, the 37-year-old Khanna is taking on a fight that, he readily acknowledges, is nowhere near as high-stakes - or historic - as the one waged by his politician grandfather decades ago.

Still, his 17th Congressional District House race against a fellow Democrat, Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose, is a seen as a potential watershed in California elections - and an audacious challenge to the political status quo in Silicon Valley.

Questioning orthodoxy

The Fremont attorney's decision to run against a seven-term incumbent from his own party has left Khanna, who has never held elective office, vulnerable to criticism that he "hasn't paid his dues," said San Jose State University political scientist Larry Gerston.

Khanna makes no apologies.

"Questioning the orthodoxy of institutions has been a consistent theme my entire life," said Khanna, a former deputy assistant commerce secretary who served as a trade representative in the Obama administration, and an intellectual property attorney who is now a lecturer at both Stanford and Santa Clara University.

The race between Honda and Khanna has been defined as a generational battle for the mainland's only Asian-majority district, a petri dish of California's changing demographics. It pits the 73-year-old Japanese American congressman, who spent part of his childhood in a World War II internment camp - and who has since become a symbol of what was once widely known as the Santa Clara Valley - against Khanna, a son of immigrants whose rise dramatizes Silicon Valley's emerging South Asian tech clout.

But it has also raised the issue of whether Khanna is simply too disruptive in forcing a battle between the traditional Democratic Party establishment and labor, which are lined up behind Honda, and the tech community, whose movers and shakers are largely backing the challenger.

Formative talks

Khanna says his views about politics were shaped by his maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, a prominent journalist, scholar, author and social worker with whom he spent summers as a child in India.

"We'd play chess and talk about the Vedas and Upanishads," the Hindu scriptures, as well as books and life experiences, Khanna said. And the grandfather talked of his years of imprisonment for the cause of Indian independence from the British empire, stories that made a deep impression on the boy.

Khanna said he understood that his mother grew up in humble circumstances because his activist grandfather - who was later elected to the first postindependence Indian Parliament and became a government minister - made sacrifices for a cause he believed in.

"It left me with a sense that public service, done well, is meaningful," Khanna said.

It runs in the family: Khanna's younger brother, Vikas, is one of two federal prosecutors assigned to investigate the Bridgegate scandal that has engulfed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Khanna's parents say their older son's unusual intensity and focus on political and policy issues dates back as far as they can remember.

"He always had a passion to be involved in things," said his father, Vijay Khanna, a chemical engineer.

Challenging Yale

Khanna recalled that the first time his son stepped up to a political podium in Pennsylvania, where he grew up, the 13-year-old boy was barely tall enough to reach the microphone.

"The school board was going to make some decision" about eliminating funding for youth programs, the elder Khanna said, "and he went to the meeting to get in line and speak against it."

By 14, his son was writing letters to the editor against the first Gulf War. Five years later, he was a veteran at challenging the institutional status quo: His Yale Law School admissions essay boldly questioned the value of the LSAT, the Law School Admissions Test, as a true measure of a student's potential.

"If Gandhi had to take the LSAT," the young Khanna wrote, "I wonder where he would have gotten."

As a law student, he organized a boycott of the Yale Law Journal, arguing it didn't publish enough writings by women and minorities. It was not a position designed to "endear myself" to the law school faculty or "future donors in my campaigns," Khanna says wryly today.

In 2004, still in his 20s and newly arrived in the Bay Area, Khanna raised eyebrows when he challenged 10-term Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos from the left over his support of the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. The tilting-at-windmills campaign angers some Democrats to this day, but it "may be the most idealistic thing I've ever done," Khanna said.

But it also fueled critics who say Khanna possesses an overarching ambition for political office.

After losing his race against Lantos, Khanna moved to Fremont and explored a possible 2012 run against Rep. Pete Stark, a 20-term Democratic incumbent. He decided against it, he said, because he wanted time to immerse himself more in regional issues. Stark went on to lose to another Democrat, Eric Swalwell.

Proud of ambition

Gerston said the charge that Khanna is driven by ambition and willing to "hop from place to place" in search of a House seat isn't entirely fair, but "what gives the argument legs is that it's the first office he's run for."

Honda, in contrast, put in stints on the local school board and in the state Assembly before winning his first House race in 2000.

Khanna, soft-spoken and deliberate, becomes animated when asked about such charges.

"I don't apologize for ambition," he said. "I wish Mike Honda was a little more ambitious. ... I wish he was more ambitious with his votes.

"The people who built this valley were ambitious. The people who built Google were ambitious. The people who built Facebook were ambitious," Khanna said. "This is an ambitious district.

"Ambition is what built the valley - and built the country - and people in this district want someone who is going to work hard for them and do big things."

Offering energy

The argument is at the core of Khanna's campaign: that the capital of the innovation economy needs political representatives who not only understand it, but will energetically promote cutting-edge ideas such as teaching computer coding in the schools from an early age.

Khanna has called for tax incentives for startups and for encouraging tech giants to expand training in advanced manufacturing to keep more jobs at home.

It's a strategy designed to draw a contrast with Honda, who Khanna says has pushed through just one bill in his 14 years in Congress, to rename a local post office.

Honda counters that as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he has sponsored dozens of bills to boost the region's economy and helped secure $900 million to extend BART to San Jose. The former science teacher says he's a tireless advocate for his constituents, for science and technology education, and is "a voice for the voiceless" on civil rights issues.

After a June 3 primary in which Honda finished in first by 20 points, Khanna has substantial ground to make up. Some of his mentors say they're not surprised at his focused drive in the face of such daunting political odds.

Nathan Tarcov, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, said he could not recall any student "making so strong a positive impression" as Khanna did when he studied there in the 1990s.

Khanna was the unusual standout, he recalled, who received A-pluses on three major required research papers - then submitted an optional fourth, "though he couldn't have possibly improved a perfect grade."

Then he organized a student conference on global issues and talked world leaders such as Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into attending, Tarcov said.

Asked what drove him to such lengths to impress, Khanna laughed. "Neurosis," he said. "You need a little of that."

But it was also at the University of Chicago that Khanna learned a lesson in humility in politics - one that has become fodder in recent attack ads. Honda's campaign charges that "he had to step down as student government president" because of a scandal in which a fellow party member overspent $275 in an election, a violation of the school rules.

Tarcov said Khanna "didn't have to do it," but wanted to take responsibility on his party's behalf. He called the move "admirable."

Trade controversies

It was that sense of duty that helped bring Khanna to the attention of Francisco Sánchez, a former commerce undersecretary who recruited Khanna in 2009 to be a U.S. trade representative.

Sánchez said Khanna was energetic in overseeing domestic trade issues in "about 100 different cities around the country," and disputes Honda campaign attack mailers that say Khanna resigned "after missing performance marks."

"I was happy to have him on my team," he said, adding that Khanna moved on after two years with a solid record.

Sánchez also dismissed a mailer from a super PAC supporting Honda that attacked the challenger, warning: "Don't let Ro Khanna outsource our jobs." The mailer, criticized by some Indian community leaders as racially coded stereotyping, said that "with many good paying jobs getting shipped to other countries, Ro Khanna maintains that outsourcing is good for the American economy."

Sánchez said Khanna, author of a book about how U.S. manufacturers can keep jobs and business at home, was "a tireless advocate to help American companies be competitive - particularly in overseas markets."

Voter frustration

Khanna said the attacks are examples of why people grow frustrated with politics.

"Our founders weren't out there, schooled in fundraising and precinct walking. They were schooled in big ideas - and the biggest impoverishment of our politics is that it's lost some of that," Khanna said. "The question is - how do you bring that back?"

Gerston, the San Jose State political scientist, says some of the challenger's moves have made Honda-Khanna matchup "the race to watch, not only in the Bay Area but in the country."

"We've seen the Republicans fend off challenges of the Tea Party," he said. "And for Democrats, Khanna represents a legitimate challenge to the establishment ... whether someone so different in appearance and background can change the mold of the party."

Surmountable challenges

Khanna, who has appeared at more than 180 town halls and forums, and knocked on more than 5,000 doors in the 17th District to ask for votes, says he's learned that "our challenge is largely one of apathy - and perhaps the infusion of money - instead of real conversation."

"But I think those are very surmountable with sustained engagement," he said. "And it just means you may not be able, in one interview, to get your message across. It may take five years. It may take 10 years. But eventually, I think, these ideas will break through."

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