Beware, The Silly Season Is Upon Us : How to tell there’s an election coming soon. . .

This is that season when days and campaigns grow short. Something about it makes our politics and our politicians, well, silly.

Herewith, then, vignettes of the week just past. No endorsement expressed or implied. No significance alleged--beyond the comedic:

ACROBATS: Dan Quayle, Vice President of the United States, came to Orange County Thursday and promptly endorsed the term limits contained in Prop. 140. That measure was written by four-time L.A. County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, who, along with his Latino roots, last year discovered the indispensability of citizen politicians.

Quayle, the former incumbent senator from Indiana, denounced incumbency’s pernicious advantages while standing on the Tarmac of the El Toro Marine Air Station, surrounded by a military band, the waiting limousines of an official motorcade and the television cameras that inevitably follow an incumbent vice president.

The principal beneficiary of Quayle’s two-day swing through California was GOP gubernatorial candidate Pete Wilson, currently an incumbent U.S. senator and formerly the incumbent mayor of San Diego. He also endorses Proposition 140. While here, Quayle raised $1.2 million for Wilson, most of which must, of course, have come from average people who share their antipathy toward “professional politicians, lobbyists and special interests.”

Hours after Quayle delivered his remarks and a few miles north, incumbent Los Angeles City Council member Joan Milke Flores, who is seeking to unseat incumbent Secretary of State March Fong Eu, appeared before the locked gates of Fremont Place, where her opponent’s husband leases a home for the family. Flores was waving 10 years’ worth of tax returns and challenged Eu to come out and do the same--sort of mano a mano disclosure.

FIRE-EATERS: Meanwhile, in another part of the city, Democratic attorney general candidate Arlo Smith was lurking in the shadow of a Lincoln Savings and Loan branch waving a letter signed by his opponent Dan Lungren and 15 other Republican congressmen. Smith, the incumbent San Francisco district attorney, alleged the letter was a covert attempt to obtain government secrets for Charles Keating, former owner of the failed thrift. The letter, which Lungren--who was formerly an incumbent--says he does not remember signing, does not mention Keating or Lincoln Savings.

Then there was Dana Rohrabacher, the incumbent Republican congressman from Long Beach, and a fire-eating advocate of conservative “family values.” A former associate charges that, as a young man, Rohrabacher used marijuana, hashish and LSD. The 43-year-old Rohrabacher refuses to confirm or deny the charge and says his youthful mistakes, if any, are long in the past and nobody’s business.

We rather agree, though if the allegations are true, it would be interesting to know whether Rohrabacher’s antediluvian views on the National Endowment for the Arts predate his use of mind-altering drugs.