‘When you break the huddle, you go’: Xavier Becerra’s polarizing playbook

Xavier Becerra could have taken the win. But he couldn’t help himself.

As a freshman House member in the early 1990s, he had helped preserve welfare payments to blind, disabled and elderly legal immigrants, despite reservations from Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the Democratic chair of the powerful Ways and Means committee. At a weekly whip meeting, Becerra rose to thank leadership for backing the compromise. But when Rostenkowski grumbled about the deal, Becerra kept talking, insisting on immigrants’ rights to those benefits, as the elder lawmaker grew increasingly incensed.

It was a jolt to a chamber steeped in hierarchy. The boyish newbie stood his ground in a war of words with the imposing lawmaker 30 years his senior. The stunning breach in congressional deference tanked the negotiated compromise and Becerra’s hopes of nabbing a coveted seat on the committee.

The image of Becerra as a stubborn, saber-rattling upstart seems, at first blush, totally incompatible with that of Becerra as the current Democratic frontrunner for California governor. The veteran politician, who rocketed to relevance in the final months of the campaign, presents as perpetually mild-mannered and politically nebulous, feeding a perception in some corners of California and Washington that he is a lightweight. But his murky policy positions and amiable demeanor belie a willfulness that has been a trademark in his approach to campaigns and governance for nearly 40 years.

“I didn’t always agree with him. Once he’s reached a conclusion, it’s hard to dislodge him from that conclusion,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a fellow California Democrat. “But I will say this: He does not just jump to a conclusion.”

Becerra’s protracted deliberation has earned him a reputation among some colleagues of being indecisive or slow to act. But he has taken — and stood by — risky stances throughout his career. Some were later vindicated, earning him fierce loyalty among people who have worked with him. Others strained relationships with colleagues on the Hill, caused friction at the White House and perpetuated a reliance on a tight inner circle that has repeatedly been rocked by scandal.

POLITICO spoke to more than 50 people who have known or worked with Becerra over the course of his career, which includes decades in Congress, four years as California’s attorney general and a term as Health secretary in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet. Many were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a leading contender in Tuesday’s primary in the race to run the nation’s most populous state.

His ardent supporters, trying to square the harsh critiques</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/07/xavier-becerra-california-governor-race-biden-officials-00909552","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7e0000","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7e0001","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>the harsh critiques that have surfaced particularly from members of the Biden administration, say Becerra’s painstaking decision-making process coupled with an unshakable faith in his conclusion, could be behind the rancor.

“That mentality is not always going to win you friends, and it might at times make you less effective if you’re in Congress or one of the many Cabinet secretaries in the Biden administration,” said one former high-ranking official at California’s Department of Justice, who added, “that mentality is probably a good one if you’re the chief executive of California.”

As he runs for governor, though, Becerra has appeared to intentionally cultivate an air of ambiguity. After getting a surge of new attention from interest groups after former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign collapsed</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/13/influencers-allegations-eric-swalwell-00869517?user_id=66c4bbb25d78644b3a94b94b","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0000","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0001","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign collapsed amid allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, Becerra, in private meetings, has been light on policy specifics and ideological beliefs.

Some who’ve met with him have been perplexed by the dearth of vision; one Sacramento lobbyist said the lack of a prepared pitch felt “vanilla and underperforming.” But Becerra has framed his unformed plans as proof of being a reasonable negotiating partner who welcomes outside input — an implicit contrast to his top Democratic rival, Tom Steyer, who has taken a more openly antagonistic stance against statehouse interests.

Becerra does not present himself as someone who seeks to make powerful enemies, though that’s exactly what he did in the showdown with Rostenkowski at the outset of his congressional career — until several years later, when Rostenkowski was felled by a corruption scandal. The next year, Becerra got his long-desired post on the Ways and Means Committee and the disputed benefits for legal immigrants were partially restored.

The freshman year standoff was then seared into his office lore with a quip: Rostenkowski’s in jail, and Becerra’s on the committee.

Becerra is an incongruous fit for this current era of political bombast — less showman than suburban accountant, in Costco shirts, wire-rimmed glasses and a crew cut he’s worn since the Clinton administration.

It’s been the same choir boy mien for decades, said Arturo Vargas, who met him at Stanford University and lived with him one summer as a grad student.

“I saw what he ate and I saw what he drank, and he was more likely to drink a glass of milk than a beer,” Vargas said.

So when Vargas learned Becerra was making a bid for an open Assembly seat in the San Gabriel Valley in 1990, he was “floored.” He assumed Becerra’s wife, Carolina Reyes, a doctor who was a fixture in Chicano student activism at Stanford, would be more likely to run instead.

“I didn’t quite see him, frankly, running for office because there’s a certain amount of ego and thick skin and all the stuff that we know that it takes to be a political candidate,” said Vargas, who served more than 30 years as the CEO of the National Association of Latino Election and Appointed Officials. “He is so humble, mild-mannered, cerebral, somewhat of an introvert that I didn’t see in him the qualities that one would expect of a political candidate.”

But Becerra had the backing of then-state Sen. Art Torres, his former boss; Rep. Ed Roybal, the senior statesman of Hispanic elected officials in California; and the self-dubbed “Macho Dogs,” a clique of campaign combatants in the factional battleground of Los Angeles Latino politics.

It was a hard-fought win, as was his first congressional race two years later. But once Becerra securely claimed the solidly blue Eastside Los Angeles district, he never again faced any real threat for his seat, allowing the young congressmember to focus his energies on building up clout on Capitol Hill — and establishing a work style that would endure well beyond that.

“You get everybody in the room and you huddle,” Becerra told POLITICO in an interview. “But when you break the huddle, you go. Because one of the frustrating aspects about government is you go nowhere, and I think it’s important to go somewhere.”

When new staffers would join Becerra’s congressional office, Debra Dixon, a top aide for nearly two decades, would offer some advice.

“You’re talking to a Stanford-educated lawyer. He does things in the Socratic method,” she’d tell them. “You have to be ready to answer five questions of increasing level of difficulty and specificity. This is your first day — just try to get through the first three and eventually you’ll get up to the five.”

Becerra would mark up papers with a red pen and send back documents with typos, insisting that getting the details right was essential for accomplishing big things. But the grueling work resulted in a close-knit team that stuck with their boss for a long time; to this day, members of the office still have Christmas reunions on both coasts.

From the start, Becerra angled for the leadership track on the Hill. Within five years, he had landed the chairmanship of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He also found a key ally in Nancy Pelosi, who brought him into the fold of House Democratic leadership. By 2012, he was elected by his peers to be Democratic caucus chair.

“That job is hard because everybody complains to you about everything,” said a former Pelosi staffer. Its importance “cannot be diminished.”

But the post did not always translate to enduring popularity in the caucus. Some House members describe Becerra as distant and reserved. “If you took a gun to my head and asked me, ‘Who are Xavier Becerra’s friends — or who were they?’ I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know,” one House Democrat said.

Congressional support for Becerra has been conspicuously absent in his gubernatorial bid, even as he emerged as a Democratic frontrunner. There are 25 California Democrats now in Congress who served with Becerra; two-thirds have not endorsed him.

“He’s aloof, and there’s a reason why his campaign was invisible for like a year before the Swalwell thing caused people to maybe look again at him,” a second House Democrat said. “He wasn’t running hard. He wasn’t hitting the phones. He wasn’t calling colleagues asking for endorsements or anything like that.”

The member derided Becerra as “never a profile in courage,” but allies credit him with sticking his neck out on key votes, such as opposing the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s and being out in front on health care legislation.

“He was outspoken on health care reform long before the Clinton administration got into it and was a key ally in passing Obamacare during the Obama administration,” said Ron Klain, who worked for both Democratic presidents before serving as Biden’s chief of staff and was an early backer of Becerra’s gubernatorial campaign. “At a time when we were in trouble in the House, Xavier helped get the votes together to pass Obamacare and get it over the finish line.”

But his insistence in pushing a public option in the Affordable Care Act put him crosswise with his powerful patron. Pelosi, upon hearing that Becerra had suggested to progressive members that Democratic leadership had given up too easily, remarked in a caucus meeting she had “tire tracks on [her] back because Xavier threw [her] under the bus,” POLITICO reported at the time</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/story/2009/11/pelosi-thrown-under-the-bus-029650","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0002","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0003","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>POLITICO reported at the time.

Health care wasn’t the only point of friction with his fellow Democrats. Becerra had emerged as a leading voice in the caucus for immigration reform; he initiated a secret bipartisan working group in 2007, and the effort got fresh life</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.propublica.org/article/washington-congress-immigration-reform-failure","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0005","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0006","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>got fresh life after the 2012 presidential election. But as talks progressed, Becerra said Republicans had proposed what he saw as a poison-pill provision that would have effectively blocked immigrants from qualifying for health care under the ACA.

“I could never sign off on that,” he said in an interview last week.

But other participants in the meeting said there was a path to work through the disagreement on health care that lawmakers from both parties said they could back — except Becerra, who said he could not commit without checking with Pelosi. Becerra’s refusal to budge infuriated other participants, who saw him as backtracking on progress they had made.

“It literally was an amazing thing to watch, because a guy who we’ve been dealing with for a long time all of a sudden was a different person,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, one of the Republicans in the group. Tensions rose so high that Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, tore into Becerra in a closed-door meeting, according to Diaz-Balart, who said he thought the two were about to come to blows. Gutierrez could not be reached for comment.

“So that’s the Becerra I know — his word is as good as wet toilet paper,” Diaz-Balart said. The talks sputtered soon after.

Becerra’s handling of the immigration talks, as well as his public option positioning, fueled Pelosi’s frustration in him, according to a person familiar with her thinking at the time. Eight years later, when the Biden administration named Becerra to a Cabinet post, she chided a top Biden aide about the choice.

“‘You should know who you’re hiring,’” Pelosi said, according to POLITICO’s Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin in their book “This Will Not Pass.” “Noting that she was a former colleague of Becerra’s, and a fellow Californian, she added archly: ‘I may have some valuable information.’”

Becerra was well on his way to establishing himself as a power player in the House when he decided to make a head-scratching detour: a run for Los Angeles mayor in 2001.

“I never understood it,” Vargas said. “I wanted to keep seeing him in Congress. I didn’t think the mayor’s office was one where I thought he could have the most impact.”

With former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa already in the race, Becerra’s decision fractured the city’s Latino political class, who feared two Latino candidates would split the vote. Gloria Molina, the matriarch of Becerra’s political family lineage, and Henry Cisneros, a former Clinton Cabinet secretary, urged the two candidates to broker a deal to have one contender stand down.

But according to the Los Angeles Times</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-10-me-10618-story.html","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0007","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0008","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>according to the Los Angeles Times, “the plans collapsed because Becerra refused to go along. When the four-term congressman insisted on continuing his mayoral bid — even if objective measures proved that he was not the stronger candidate — Cisneros and Molina became frustrated and broke off the discussions.”

His decision to stay in fed into a long-standing knock against Becerra — that he was not a team player, that he put his own interests ahead of the political alliances that helped propel him to power.

“He’s been a beneficiary of the camps, but he’s never delivered for anybody else. One of the raps on him is that he’s ‘Johnny One-way,’” said one longtime member of the Latino political establishment.

There was little apparent upside for Becerra’s mayoral bid. He admitted almost a year into running he had not articulated an overarching vision</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-mar-12-mn-36618-story.html","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0009","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f000a","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>an overarching vision for what he’d do in office. The most enduring part of his campaign was a scandal over a misleading robocall ad that angered his allies and prompted a scathing editorial</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-may-24-me-1809-story.html","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f000b","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f000c","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>scathing editorial from the Los Angeles Times. He limped back to the Hill after getting less than 6 percent in the primary, the most glaring black mark on his electoral record.

Washington seemed to offer more solid ground for Becerra to build his ambitions. In 2016, he was vetted to be Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential pick and was mounting a bid to be the top Democrat on the Ways and Means committee. So when he emerged later that year as Gov. Jerry Brown’s surprise choice</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/becerra-appointed-california-attorney-general-232063","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f000d","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f000e","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>surprise choice to fill a California attorney general vacancy, some friends were surprised to see him head west.

Even more puzzling was his decision four years later to move back, this time as Biden’s HHS secretary. He willingly gave up one of the most enviable posts in California politics, a natural stepping-stone to the governor’s mansion.

“Moving to HHS secretary didn’t make any sense,” said one senior California health official. “Maybe he missed Washington, but from a political perspective, I can’t imagine why — if he wanted to be governor — he wouldn’t stay as AG.”

The move was also politically perilous. Becerra had no relationship with the incoming president prior to taking the job; notably, Biden mispronounced Becerra’s surname when he was announced as the incoming secretary.

The appointment to attorney general, and later Cabinet secretary, forced Becerra into a role he had not inhabited in nearly 30 years in elected office: executive. He brought many of the same practices, as well as key staff, from his congressional office into these much larger agencies.

It was not always a compatible fit. Becerra relied heavily on his longtime congressional chief of staff, Sean McCluskie, to oversee the operations at DOJ and HHS; together, one former aide said, their dedication to their inner circle could hobble the work they tried to accomplish. (McCluskie, along with another top adviser</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/14/dana-williamson-plea-deal-corruption-case-00920078","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f000f","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0010","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>another top adviser, pleaded guilty to a scheme to siphon money</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/18/why-dont-you-know-scandal-singes-becerra-in-california-governors-race-00655837","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0011","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d7f0012","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>scheme to siphon money from a dormant Becerra campaign account, a controversy that threatened to upend his former boss’s gubernatorial bid.)

Becerra did make his own imprint on the California DOJ. He founded a standalone health rights and access unit, which put the department in a strong position to defend the Affordable Care Act against a Republican-led lawsuit against the individual insurance mandate. He established an environmental justice bureau to regulate the development of warehouses for companies like Amazon, a cause that threatened to raise the ire of union workers who built the structures.

The causes were close to his heart, particularly as the spouse of an OB-GYN and the son of an immigrant laborer. His improbable climb — from a working-class kid, the first in his family to go to college, to the ultimate authority on such issues — only strengthened his resolve, said Arsenio Mataka, who served as a top adviser at both the California DOJ and HHS.

“We would be at the decision-making table and he would say to me, ‘Isn’t this great? You and I get to make this decision right now,’” Mataka said.

But the limitations of Becerra’s management style came into sharper focus when he joined the Biden administration. Becerra had, in the view of one former White House official, “the hardest portfolio of any Cabinet secretary” — the Covid pandemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade, the baby formula shortage, mpox, a ransomware attack at a major health care company, just to name a few. Some of those issues, including his handling of unaccompanied minors at the border, became fodder for withering attacks</u>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/27/xavier-becerra-progressive-backlash-00891871","_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d800000","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"0000019e-848d-d36f-abdf-ffdd5d800001","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>fodder for withering attacks in this gubernatorial race.

He tackled those problems with the same methodical decision-making process that he had honed over the years, marked by rounds of expert consultation before landing on a conclusion. The approach at times clashed with a White House pressing for a quicker response.

“He was fully aware of that, but he stuck with the playbook,” said Jeff Nesbit, who was the public affairs chief at the Department of Health and Human Services. “He did it because it had worked for him, and he genuinely believes that’s the way you deal with these issues.”

He brought over a coterie of advisers, including McCluskie. But fissures with the White House soon materialized.

“He struggled with internal administration and White House politics,” said a former senior White House official. “He rarely helped to resolve tensions for the benefit of the overall team. There were no bridges being built.”

Several former Biden White House officials said that they felt he lacked a strong grasp on details of his agency, and one said that his team was unusually fixated on learning in advance what reporters would ask in the media appearances he did agree to do.

The Biden team chose to run its crisis-response efforts out of the White House, prompting negative news stories dinging Becerra as an invisible Cabinet secretary. For his part, Becerra showed little interest in boosting his visibility through cameos at press conferences if he had no defined role.

If the White House asked him to attend an event, “he’d always ask the same question: ‘Am I going to be a potted plant?’” Nesbit said.

Allies say some of Becerra’s biggest successes were out of the public eye. Neera Tanden, who led the White House Domestic Policy Council for the latter half of Biden’s term, credited Becerra with delivering on tough assignments, such as the unwinding of pandemic-era Medicaid subsidies while minimizing the number of people who lost health coverage.

“There are big problems you’re working on, but no one ever hears about them because you are actually successful,” Tanden said. “He directed everybody, and he didn’t micromanage, but he was accountable.”

She also credited his “top-notch” slate of counselors that he named to the agency. But the influx of new senior staff was less welcomed by others in the administration. A second former White House official said they had lost count of how many were ultimately brought on and for what purpose.

“He never really trusted the agencies to run their stuff. And so he essentially created a whole other layer of bureaucracy that was not needed and caused a lot of friction [with] the White House,” the official said.

Becerra pushed back on the suggestion that extra top aides were a detriment to his work.

“Look at what the Biden agenda was. We checked the boxes. He wanted more people covered — we set a record. He wanted to make sure Obamacare worked — we set records. He wanted to make sure we got vaccines out — 700 million,” he said. “And that’s because we had really talented people. And I could get really talented people because I’d been around DC for 24 years, and I knew who was good. So I had damn good counselors.”

Inside the agency, reviews from the HHS staff were mixed. Some felt the additional tier of advisers kept the secretary at a distance.

“He wasn’t around very much and didn’t actually give us a mission,” said Mara Burr, the former director of multilateral relations in the Office of the Secretary at HHS.

But others in the agency praised his even-temperedness, even in the midst of public health crises, and the deliberative habits he had honed over the years. “In a world where people can be so brash … it was a welcome approach,” one former HHS official said.

A year or so after leaving the agency, Becerra once again found himself pondering a major decision. His campaign for governor was stuck in neutral, with poll numbers in the single-digits and sluggish fundraising. Democrats started clamoring for low-performing contenders to drop out, worried too many candidates could lead to the party being boxed out of the state’s top-two primary.

But Becerra, after weighing the evidence, made up his mind; he’d only consider leaving the race if it looked like he had no chance by late April, not before.

“For me it wasn’t a question,” he said. “I wasn’t going to get out just because somebody said get out.”

This time, his resoluteness proved prescient. Now, on the eve of the primary election, he’s within striking distance of the governorship.

Carmen Paun and Dustin Gardiner contributed to this report.

المصدر: Politico