Come One, Come All to the Quackenbush Show

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome!

Tonight, the Golden Dome Club in the capital of the great, golden state of California is proud to present the Amazing Quackeno, master magician of the age!

You’ve heard of his astounding powers of transmutation, and now you will see for yourselves: how he can transform simple, ordinary money into anything he commands!

Marvel as he converts more than a quarter-million dollars of insurance company conscience money into a football camp that his own children attended!

Gasp in wonderment as he turns a million dollars into TV spots starring him with pro basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal!

And tonight, for the first time, he will leave you breathless as he shrinks nearly a half-billion dollars in potential insurance company bad-conduct fines down, down, down into a mere million-dollar gift to a foundation of the magician’s own creation! And now, here he is--the Amazing Quackeno!

Will you please swear the witness?

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I don’t know what the population of Northridge was on Thursday, but it should have been, temporarily, zero. Everyone within damage range of the 1994 earthquake should have headed to Sacramento, to take in the act of Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush.

This legislative show was a Quackenbush performance of sorts--a hearing into his conduct in creating a foundation with insurance company money, one that seemed to do little to aid the victims of earthquakes past and mitigate the damage of earthquakes yet to come.

Compared to this educational and research foundation, earthquake safety could have been better promoted by discouraging people from moving to California in the first place.

But anyone in the orbit of politics has to admire, however grudgingly, the audaciousness, the chutzpah of this. Where other politicians are namby-pamby in how they shuffle the bucks, Quackenbush is a damn-the-torpedoes guy, jaw-dropping in his boldness.

Of the $12.8 million that insurance companies forked over as penance in lieu of fines after the Northridge quake, a hefty portion was evidently spent buttering the bread of various Quackenbush loaves.

Where others merely crept, Quackenbush leaped. Not for Quackenbush the benevolent agencies set up with leftover campaign money at career’s end, like former Rep. Edward Roybal’s eponymous Institute for Applied Gerontology at Cal State L.A., or even a former Orange County supervisor’s gift of $20,000 to a high school football program.

Quackenbush is light-years beyond the Arizona legislator who spent campaign dough on baby-sitters and golf club rentals. In 1994, Quackenbush tagged as “king of special interests” his opponent who took $200,000 from insurance company sources. Four years later, the Q spent almost that much of his campaign money, heavy with insurance company swag, to repay the second mortgage he took out to finance his wife’s losing run at a state Senate seat.

What imagination--to give a half-million dollars of quake foundation money to the Sacramento Urban League, on whose board Quackenbush sits. What vision, to give $12,000 to the National Latino Peace Officers Assn., who otherwise might not know what to do in an earthquake.

For now, Quackenbush regulates an insurance industry accused of redlining and gouging minorities. He is termed out in 2002. Before then, he puts do-good dough in the threadbare and worthy pockets of minority programs. Insurance is an oddsmaker’s game; what are the odds that this is about the office he now holds compared with the offices he may yet seek?

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The Amazing Quackeno deserves our thanks for showing how far the envelope of smelly-but-legal political money can be stretched. This is an offense of degree, not of kind. This is not only a quicksand patch of insurance firms but the whole swamp of special interest money.

I joined friends for dinner the other night with political columnist Elizabeth Drew. She contends that one obstacle to reforming cash-and-carry politics is that most people simply do not realize how much “free” political campaigns--financed by special interests and not the public purse--cost them. Every dollar of big special interest money is a brick in a wall raised up in front of the voter to block his path to the people who represent him.

But personally, I want the Amazing Quackeno to pull this trick off. That $1,010 earthquake insurance bill I just got in the mail, for a pittance of a policy whose deductible will cost me six months’ income if I ever have to use it--I intend to write it off as a charitable contribution.

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