A Badge That Threatens Upheaval

However shallow the bathwater was in the fall that Sherman Block took in his own bathtub on Saturday, it was deep enough:

It has generated a tsunami that is sweeping shoreward. By the time it makes landfall on election day, it could inundate decades of habit and custom that have belied the legalism that the sheriff of Los Angeles County is an elective office.

Good. It’s a reckoning long overdue.

In six days’ time, voters in Los Angeles County may reelect, for the fifth term, a man who--to spin a twist in the long-ago statement by the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman--if elected perhaps cannot serve. A real prognosis may be three months away.

What is a tragedy for one man’s life is, for the office he occupies, a disruption that yanks back the curtain on a peculiar institution which has given us four sheriffs in 75 years, the latest of them Block, a man who inveigled the Board of Supervisors into lifting the mandatory retirement age so he could run once again.

Nominally elected--sometimes unopposed, sometimes with token opposition, often winning with mom-and-apple-pie margins--these men were in reality anointed:

In 1932, William Traeger quits after 11 years as sheriff to run for Congress, and the Board of Supervisors rubber-stamps his chosen heir, Gene Biscailuz. In 1958, Biscailuz retires and hands his sceptre to Peter Pitchess, who is thereafter elected and reelected. In 1982, Pitchess does the same for Block; the board appoints him to fill Pitchess’ term, which allows him to run with that megawatt word “incumbent” appended to his name.

Block’s emergency brain surgery, so near the election, kicked over the anthill. There is a rush to the rule books, a scurrying of what-ifs--what if he is elected but incapacitated . . . if is he is elected and dies . . . if he dies and is elected anyway?

What if nothing changes?

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Sherman Block’s obdurate fifth run for office risks forging legacies as dangerous and as double-barreled as an over-and-under shotgun. The first is ironic, the second, lamentable.

I don’t know how much history Block reads, but Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, kept as her trump card her refusal to name a successor. It made her seem indispensable, but it also made her subjects nervous as all get-out about being caught in the cross hairs once she was gone.

Part of the job description of every monarch, queen bee or queen, apian or human, is to create an heir. Block’s predecessors did. Block did not. Maybe he didn’t see a worthy successor in the ranks. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to groom one; an heir is a reminder of your mortality. Just before last June’s primary I asked him--was there nothing else he wanted to do in life? Go fishing? Play with his grandchildren? No, he had answered, there’s still much to do on the job.

With no designated heir, there was little chance of someone arising on his own to challenge Block for a job that is elective virtually in name only; Block’s endorsement was the good cop-keeping seal of approval, and almost every politician south of the Tehachapis welcomed it, and was usually pretty glad to offer his or her own too.

Secondly, lamentably, this was an election about nothing. It was not about autocratic budgets, not about brutality lawsuits that have stuck the county with millions in judgments and settlements, not about crowded jails and dying inmates.

It became nothing but a referendum on Sherman Block’s medical and actuarial charts. Whatever nano-chance it had of being anything else ended last Saturday in that bathroom in West Hills. Block’s opponent, former undersheriff Lee Baca, has campaigned almost as decorously as if he were running against his own father for whom he wished only the pleasure of his golden years.

Even as their man lies supine in a neurological ward, Block supporters are pressing their cause: to make good and sure that Baca loses. If Block wins reelection but is incompetent or dies, then, across this huge county, only three votes would select a new sheriff: the Board of Supervisors’.

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A couple of years ago, when the Sheriff’s Department was buying $466 toasters and premium coffee even as it poor-mouthed that it couldn’t afford to open the new jail, The Times asked a testy Block why, among other fiscal issues, his department was ordering a half-million bucks worth of two-ply toilet paper when the rest of the county got by on one-ply.

“We could save money if we used the L.A. Times,” he retorted. “That’d be even cheaper.”

As campaign issues go, it’s not much--but at least it’s about something.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.