Buddy, Can You Spare 4 Million Bucks?

I won twelve bucks at poker the other night. I’m thinking of donating it to LA 2000.

They must need it more than I do. The committee holding up Los Angeles’ end of the Democratic National Convention has come up about $4 million short of the $35.3 million they pledged to collect to pay the tab for the convention here in August, the first in L.A. since 1960, when the Democrats sent John F. Kennedy forth from the Sports Arena against the native son, Dick Nixon.

I’d donate it because I worry what might happen if they don’t get that 4 million.

I worry that the convention will have to levy pay-per-view fees on C-SPAN.

I worry that they’ll have to install pay toilets at Staples Center.

Too bad politics is no longer conducted in smoke-filled rooms. If it were, Los Angeles could simply make up the 4 million from its tobacco settlement money.

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It’s a big season for big bucks.

First it was Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, offering to put up a million dollars from her officeholder discretionary fund to find out once and for all whether Belmont, the Superfund-candidate super-school, can be salvaged.

To use a poker metaphor, it’s a measure of desperation over school crowding that Molina was willing to show her hand. At a time when the county is again seeking fed waiver billions, to let it be known that there’s a million bucks sitting in the supervisorial equivalent of petty cash is like waving $20s in a hungry man’s face.

Up in Sacramento, the state budget is flush. It is loaded. A hundred billion dollars, nearly 3 billion of that bouncing back to us in tax cuts. There is so much money that the CHP, which is getting $4 million for convention crowd control, built in a $1-million equipment request on behalf of the LAPD for convention security. To some mirth and much raising of eyebrows, the million-dollar wish list included a $2,400 paper shredder and mountain-climbing equipment.

Now it is the city of Los Angeles’ turn. Already committed to $4 million in transportation, another couple of million or so for police overtime, it is now being asked to put up $4 million in cash, and another $2 million for transportation--the very thing the national Democratic Party promised not to do.

Its chairman, Joe Andrews, taunted Republicans for pocketing $16 million from Philadelphia, the state of Pennsylvania and even the state of New Jersey for the GOP’s 2000 convention. That guarantee was reinforced in much less arrogant terms by Richard Riordan, a Republican mayor thinking not of welcoming Democrats but of repeating the windfall that came of the city’s support of the 1984 Olympics. Now the Democrats have brought in fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe. A man who raised $26 million in one night for President Clinton should find raising $4 million as easy as collecting pennies from the sidewalk. Maybe he can persuade Gloria Molina to part with her $1 million.

Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad put a million into the convention kitty. Movie mogul David Geffen, like Broad a co-chair of the local convention effort, has yet to make out a check. Maybe he’s waiting to hear the quid pro quo; the common wisdom holds that if Geffen were to drop a fiver in a homeless man’s begging bowl, he’d want the man’s cardboard sign changed to read, “The David Geffen Fund for the Homeless.”

Everyone likes something for nothing, but everyone insists on something for something. In that, the local committee has found itself at cross purposes with some Democrats. Unable to tell donors that their money will guarantee them box seats or credentials to the big show, the locals nonetheless got wind of a Southern California congressman raising money on the home front, offering convention credentials to any $15,000 donor to his campaign.

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The council too will want to know what it gets for its $4 million--apart from the pleasure and the political capital of pillorying Mayor Richard Riordan and his rich friends for asking for public money.

This party is too far along for L.A. to close the door and turn off the lights and pretend we’re not home. It’s too important to do on the cheap. A well-run city that shows some style and panache on the nightly news will help to wipe out the embarrassments of the rained-out washout of last New Year’s Eve’s public year 2000 fetes. Think creative financing. Consider putting up money against a matching-fund pledge from Moneyman McAuliffe.

The council may vote Tuesday. By then, the euphoria of a Laker championship may be just the thing to put them in a party mood. The Democrats’ party.

Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Al Martinez. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.