The Bell Curve:

When I moved to Newport Beach in 1959, I thought I was leaving a Chicago suburb that was surely the most politically reactionary in the nation. It didn’t take long before I was bumping heads with the John Birch Society en route to passing the championship along to Orange County. And nothing in those early years made that point more emphatically than the nature of the representatives we sent to Congress.

My first representative in Washington was a Santa Ana lawyer named James B. Utt whose contributions to good government included introducing a constitutional amendment to outlaw the income tax, rescinding our membership in the United Nations and warning his fellow citizens that Soviet Russia was behind sex education in the U.S. And those were just starters.

That was 50 years ago, but while Newport-Mesa was birthing a fine university and a magnificent arts center, echoes of this political role model have persisted. That has been possible because the candidates reflecting such thinking have been elected virtually without opposition that required them to be accountable. Democrats sent out to offer an alternative have been sacrificial lambs, upholding a myth of democracy without a prayer of winning.

This year there’s a sense of a real contest. The percentage of Democrats is growing in our 48th Congressional District. So, too, is the amount of Republican money coming into Democratic coffers. And there’s a different smell in the political air of the 48th District.

But the main difference is the enthusiasm, experience and self-confidence of the Democratic candidate in next November’s Congressional race. Her name is Beth Krom, and she told me with some satisfaction over coffee earlier this week that “when I first talked about running for this office as a Democrat, my friends saw it as a suicide mission. I’d like nothing better than to be very much in play for the political reporters, who say they won’t be covering my campaign because there’s no way I can win.”

She has some real chips to play, notably her two terms as mayor of Irvine, where she ran openly as a Democrat and was re-elected with almost 60% of the votes in a strong Republican community. Termed out of the mayor’s job, she was elected to the City Council, the platform from which she has launched her run for Congress over incumbent John Campbell.

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Krom holds a bachelor’s of science in education from the University of Texas. That’s where she met and married her husband of 26 years, whose work as an optometrist took him and his family to Waco, Texas, then to Irvine in 1985. There was a daughter and two sons, one of whom was killed in an accident a week before he was to graduate from college.

His mother has dedicated her race for Congress to him, “her most innately political child.”

Having made that choice, she has hit the ground running. With the help of an experienced team of election pros, she has a hand in everything, writing her own press releases and planning a series of events to get her name before citizens beyond the environs of Irvine. One such event is taking place Thursday evening in the UC Irvine student center. There a round table discussion, led by the UCI School of Social Ecology, on opposition to a piece of health-care legislation apparently will take place without the attendance of Campbell.

Krom’s offer to fill in was accepted and noted. There will be other such occasions coming up that will make it steadily harder for Campbell to hand pick his audiences.

Krom is clearly enjoying all of this. She said: “I’ve had to work hard for all my offices, but Campbell has never had to go before the people to ask for their support.”

She scoffs at the suggestion that she is using up her best stuff for a primary that probably won’t be contested, saying “I want as many voters as possible to get into the November habit in June.”

She is not worried about President Obama’s bad poll numbers rubbing off on her. Instead, she says, “I’ve learned that people won’t vote for me or reject me because of my party affiliation but because of what I bring to the job, so I’m not concerned about losing ground if I get too close to the president.”

She also shrugs off the notion that she missed her best opportunity in 2008 when the Democrats were sweeping scores of GOP bastions, saying “this is a much more interesting time to run for office.”

My conclusions? The Republicans had better pay attention to what the Democrats are doing in the 48th. It’s not the same tired old story.

The seats are no longer simply waiting to be claimed as usual.

Oh, yes, one other thing, I wish Krom had been on our side when the El Toro airport was up for grabs.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.