nosebleed sections and having his picture taken with kids on his shoulders. Baker feels no sense of entitlement. His father, Carl, worked for 32 years in a lumber mill, and his mother, Beuna, was a caregiver for foster children. Growing up in Downey, Calif., a blue-collar suburb of L.A., Baker adopted conservative values that belied the tumultuous times. As student body president of Warren High in 1970, he sponsored a Support America Week, for which he was honored by the Freedoms Foundation. Yet on certain issues Baker was more open-minded than his father, who hailed from Possum Trot, Miss. After accepting a basketball scholarship to UC Irvine, Baker invited an African-American teammate to have dinner at his parents' house, and the two drove up in the big center'sbaby-blue convertible Volkswagen Beetle. "We got to the front door," Baker recalls, "and my dad wouldn't let him in. I cried that night, a lot."

At 30, after a stint as a real estate lawyer, Baker became the youngest mayor in Irvine's history and was working his way up the Republican Party food chain. He ran for Congress in 1988, and a hard-fought primary campaign culminated in a messy fiscal scandal that changed his life. "There was a lot of mudslinging," Baker says, "and I got caught up in it and made some mistakes. I needed cash to counter an attack, and I wrote a check from an account that wasn't mine, knowing I had money coming in the next day. It may have cost me the election, but