After Bonnie Donovan gave 24th District Congressional candidate Bob Smith a big two-thumbs-up in an SBCurrent column last month, I realized it was about time that I too conduct a sit-down with the candidate.
After all, this column is called “Purely Political.”
We met in Linden Square, the recently opened (May, ’25) retail, restaurant, and courtyard space on Carpinteria’s main thoroughfare, just a few blocks from the beach.
Before I had the chance of asking him a question, Bob says – as we take seats at a table in the center of the courtyard –, “We know the district’s tough, right?”
I nod in the affirmative.
“It’s a D-plus-eleven district at best,” he continues with machine-gun rapidity, “So it’s a tough district to win [for a Republican].”
He’s certainly right about that, but he believes he has a chance to upset five-term Democrat Salud Carbajal. “Because I’m not a career politician,” he says.
“Okay,” I think to myself, “He’s not a career politician, but so what?” Bob’s wife, Adriana Gonzalez-Smith, ran for Carpinteria City Council in 2024 and garnered a respectable 42.7% of the vote against the incumbent Natalia Alarcon (who now serves as mayor), so his wife is certainly steeped in the town’s politics.
“He must be too,” I conclude.
Regardless, we quickly got to the point; I ask him why someone would vote for him.
“What do I offer?” he wonders aloud. “I don’t think I’m ideologically what either the far right or the far left would love as a candidate, right? But, as a systems engineer, I’m a professional in the process of Washington D.C. from the government side, not from the political swamp side. I understand how the process works. I understand how budgeting works. I understand how the presidential budget works, what Congress’s role is, how the staffs work there, how committees work.”
I tell him that’s great, but Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, are not necessarily fond of people who are familiar with Washington, D.C.; they don’t see that as a plus.
“So,” he says, “I have spent an entire career solving problems, and that’s what I’m offering voters.”
When asked why we should replace Salud with him, Bob says one of the main reasons is that Salud doesn’t bring anything back to this area; in the last year of the Biden presidency, for example, Salud attracted a miserly $15 million from the federal government to the district, which is peanuts, especially from a guy who should be at the top tier of his party.
“He’s not a mover and shaker,” Bob notes disparagingly, scoffing at Salud’s one contribution in the ten years he’s been in office: renaming a post office.
Bob says Salud refuses to work with, or have anything to do with, the Trump administration, “which leaves the 24th District impoverished,” he says, adding, “We’re just a district that’s being left behind.”
I wondered what would make him uniquely available to do better, especially as a first-term representative. “You’d be a junior legislator, the lowest guy on the totem pole,” I tell him.
“That’s right,” he admits. “But, Salud is a senior congressman, right? He’s in a safe Democrat district, yet he is not on one appropriations committee. He’s on one minor subcommittee. So you put me in there as a junior. What do I have that tips the scale on that? One, I would be the first person that’s won a coastal district in well over two decades on the Republican side.” Bob believes that alone would give him leverage in Washington, D.C., mainly because the national Republican Party would be likely to go all-out to help him retain his seat.
Plus, he says, he already knows “how Washington DC works, and that’s a skillset most newcomers don’t have.” Bob has been an acquisition DC program manager and has managed a billion-dollar program. He believes his military career would also be a big plus.
“I’m not a scary vote for anybody, right?” he says. “I’m somewhere within that standard deviation of center. And if people really came to their senses about what they need to solve, it would be getting some of these career politicians out and getting some pragmatic problem solvers in.”
Naturally, he sees himself as one of those “pragmatic problem solvers.”
He believes he could easily attract more federal funding to the district than Salud and suggests that one of the many ways would be to work with the Trump administration towards increasing the research budgets of both UCSB and Cal Poly.
“UCSB has more attached Nobel Laureates than anyone else in the entire state except for Stanford and Berkeley,” he notes, “and [UCSB] is in the bottom ten percent of federal research dollars. Why do we even have Nobel Laureate professors if we’re not bringing in research dollars?”
Bob notes how poorly local schools do, especially in the Lompoc area, and points to areas such as Los Alamos in New Mexico, and Huntsville, Alabama, where investment in research has beefed up all the local schools.
“You can attach that [research] to programs and internships and STEM programs and all these other things,” he says, to raise the quality of local school standards and results.
Another Reason for Voting for Bob Smith
As a retired U.S. Navy Commander (he worked his way up the chain of command from enlisted seaman to full commander, and anyone who’s ever served knows how difficult that climb must have been!), he says he’s familiar with small modular reactors (SMRs), which power many naval ships. He believes he can work with other congressmembers (Democrats and Republicans) to launch a prototype program in this district.
“Who’s been doing small modular [nuclear] reactors for seventy-five years without a single radiological incident?” he asks, and answers: “The United States Navy.”
He becomes animated as he suggests that an operating SMR at the Vandenberg Space Base could meet the Central Coast electricity demand going forward. “The energy grid is completely broken in California, and if we don’t fix this,” he stresses, “we are going to lose Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas.”
He says we don’t need giant Diablo Canyons any longer (though he’d push to keep the one we do have open). “Small modular reactors work,” he notes, adding that, using thorium (a naturally occurring mineral) as its energy source, a working SMR can be built on a single acre of land. “The U.S. Navy already uses the process on its submarines and aircraft carriers.”
And, once activated, apparently, “all you have to do is connect power lines to it.” Bob says that PG&E has already said they could and would connect to small modular reactors on military bases and bring them into the civilian grid. These small reactors are “quiet, will bring down energy costs, improve power output,” and “there’s no emissions whatsoever.”
Other Problems to be Solved
Bob Smith points out that the Golden Dome (protective shield) for America is being built with $175 billion over the next three years, and Vandenberg is a top-tier player in that. Salud works against the Trump administration and will do nothing to help in the effort. Instead of fighting against the plan, as Carbajal is likely to, Bob Smith would dive right in to move it forward.
“If you’re going to do all this new development at Vandenberg with the federal government, I’m going to need infrastructure updates up there. I’m going to need housing up there. I’m going to need to work with local hotels with all these federal employees that are going to be there. I’ll need some of that money to improve Lompoc and the surrounding area’s infrastructure to support all the increased activity. That money is already going to be spent by the DOD [Department of Defense, now Department of War], but if California keeps working against the DOD, it’s not going to be spent here for us.”
•••
In Part II of this interview, we’ll examine Bob Smith’s backing of conservative issues and will delve into state politics, including his support for Steve Hilton and the unofficial “Golden Ticket” of Hilton for governor, Gloria Romero for Lieutenant Governor, Michael Gates as Attorney General and Herb Morgan, for State Controller. The four promise to tackle fiscal responsibility, education reform, and the high cost of living.
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Bob has my vote! Bob can press Carbajal on why he voted against disclosing the Congressional Sexual Misconduct Files in which American Taxpayers, unbeknownst to most of us, have been financing. Apparently, the slush fund to protect these deviant robber barons spans 29 years to a tune of $18M! And Saluds' vote signals he's perfectly ok with it. His virtue signaling moral outrage is on full display when it comes to the release of the Epstein Files but it mysteriously goes dark when it comes to providing cover for the sexual misconduct of his fellow members of Congress. Salud is a disgrace and it's just more obtuse logic and double standard behavior from our "Representative". Salud needs the boot!
What a wildly competent and accomplished candidate! He could truly do wonders for the central coast.
Bob Smith has my vote!
If I was a Democrat, he’d also have 8 more of my votes, also a vote from each of my dogs, and a vote from my deceased husband. Hopefully we will have a system for free and fair elections by then. 🙏🏻