George or Al? Answer Means Plenty in L.A.

Good thing this is on paper and not in stone, because by next month--by next week--this could all be so much fish wrap, which is a lot easier to shred than graven tablets.

Al or George? George or Al? It isn’t wholly academic or even mere rooting interest here: California delivered big for Gore--what would President Gore do for California? California treated Bush like a pair of month-old tube socks--how would President Bush crack the whip, or more likely, try to remake Reagan Country as Bush Territory?

And Los Angeles, a Democratic town with a lame-duck Republican mayor, watches the windsock with the rest for the prevailing winds from Washington.

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First, there’s that consent decree. It’s a piece of paper--103 pieces of paper, really; not since the Gettysburg Address has a federal document been confined to one page--providing for federal monitoring of how the Los Angeles Police Department does its business.

The Rampart scandal was the capper, but the feds have been dropping hints for a while about how the LAPD works, and finally the City Council and, more reluctantly, the mayor, signed on the dotted line.

But wait! George W. Bush is no lover of federal consent decrees, and has said he thinks local police issues should be handled locally. In some quarters--OK, the mayor’s office--there is a flickering hope that a Bush presidency might mean dumping the deal.

For Rafael Sonenshein, a political scientist who knows a lot about L.A. even though he teaches at Cal State Fullerton, the photo-finish election undoes that hope.

“The dynamics of this election are a lot different than they would have been had Bush won a clear victory. If Republicans had done better, Bush could have come in with a big mandate. Now he’s going to have enough to worry about without calling L.A. and saying, ‘By the way, you guys don’t have to keep records of officer misconduct.’ ”

All of which, he says, shows “that the real reason to do police reform is because it’s good for L.A., not [because of] some external evil empire.”

Then the Flying Erwin called me back--Erwin Chemerinsky, USC professor, constitutional scholar, phoning between flights. The consent decree is here to stay, he believes--but here’s the “but” part.

“If it comes to the point that the city is not complying with a consent decree, a Bush Justice Department is much less likely to vigorously enforce a consent decree than a Gore Justice Department. It’s not the consent decree that’d be changed, it’s the extent to which there will likely be a Justice Department commitment to enforcing it. . . . I think I should go catch my flight now.”

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Other Bush/Gore wobblers:

The L.A. mayor’s race. Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra is running for mayor, and the CW (common wisdom, not country western) is that he would split the Latino vote and maybe more with former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, who claims native son standing and big Westside support.

Becerra, who won reelection in a district so safe that it was like his mother cast eight out of 10 votes, still spent more than $750,000 on his campaign. A lot of that went for cable TV spots in which Becerra spoke of leadership and voter turnout--ads that showed Becerra’s handsome face far beyond the confines of his 30th District.

With a Democratic Congress or a Gore White House, Becerra might have found himself moving up in the Ways and Means Committee, which is Congress’ ready-teller window, or into a choice D.C. appointment, leaving the Latino mayoral field to Villaraigosa.

Gray Davis: Whatever noises Davis makes about staying the Sacramento course, the fact is that by 2004, the Gray Eminence, then probably in his second term, would be the chief miner of California’s rich grubstakes and, absent Al Gore, an heir presumptive to the top o’ the ticket. Mindful of this, at an election-night Democratic gala downtown, a few intemperate Davis staffers indulged in ill-concealed delight at the premature news of a Gore loss.

Appointments: Of all the Beltway palaver, the one that hoisted my eyebrows was a report that Dan Lungren is on the list for Bush’s attorney general. Now, Lungren lost the governorship to Davis by a numbing 20 points. As California attorney general, he let owners of certain assault weapons register their guns after a deadline barred it. And Dianne Feinstein--who regards assault weapons the way Superman regards red Kryptonite, and who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that judges such nominees--would no sooner let Lungren pass that gauntlet than Clark Kent would let the Daily Planet print “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

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