Simon Says: Rudy Knows Best

Bill Simon’s campaign Web site calls New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani Simon’s “not-so-secret political weapon.”

If it ever was a secret, it isn’t now: Simon often begins his running-for-governor stump speech by pointing out that he was having breakfast with Giuliani when the two planes hit the World Trade Center.

And last week, Simon journeyed to New York for a photo-op meeting with his old boss from the U.S. attorney’s office, then made a pilgrimage to “ground zero,” where a cousin and five of Simon’s friends died.

As New York Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg learned, Giuliani’s endorsement is golden--the kind of capital you can take to the polls, if not the bank. Simon is hoping it’ll be the same coin of the realm when Giuliani comes to California to campaign for him.

The sheer scale of this state has always sucked up campaign dollars like a Hoover upright--the vacuum, not the president. The National Journal’s political “Hotline” figured that if Bloomberg had been running here, victory, calculated in CalBucks, would have been this:

In New York City’s single media market, Bloomberg spent $10 million to reach 6.9 million homes. The same results in California’s 11.6 million Nielsen-numbered TV households would have cost him $116 million--more than three times the dough that even fund-raising phenom Gray Davis has managed to scare up.

Devices and Desires, Orange County Style

The late House Speaker Tip O’Neill adjudged all politics as local. In Orange County, all local matters become political.

Building an airport ordinarily has nothing to do with putting bad guys in prison. Ah, but in Orange County there’s an election coming in March that’s about both, and so the district attorney’s race has not hesitated to step beyond matters criminal into matters aeronautical.

A deputy D.A. named Wally Wade is challenging his boss, incumbent Tony Rackauckas, by talking down both plans for a commercial airport at the old El Toro Marine base--and Rackauckas himself, for supposedly supporting the airport.

There are places in the southern reaches of Orange County where stopping the airport sounds even more urgent than stopping crime, and a while back, Rackauckas seemed to be applying his own tar and feathers: He put his name on a ballot argument against an election-2000 measure that would have hamstrung the county when it came to building new airports and jails.

Then last year--and here’s where international politics got local--Rackauckas also yanked out of his prosecutorial lineup a criminal complaint filed against one George Argyros.

Argyros--now U.S. ambassador to Spain, and beyond concerning himself with new airports--was one of the loudest cheerleaders for an El Toro airport. He also allegedly overcharged renters in his apartment empire, a matter that was slowing up his confirmation to Madrid, until two things happened:

Rackauckas punted the case to the state attorney general, Bill Lockyer, whose office negotiated a $1.5-million payout settlement by Argyros’ company, Arnel Development. A presumably grateful Rackauckas then hired a political ally of Lockyer’s to handle some big environmental case in Orange County.

Now Rackauckas, mindful that rich people often put their money where their gripes are, went penitently to the south Orange County home of Republican check-writer and new-airport-hater Ron Cedillos. There, he made his mea culpas and was welcomed back into the fold with open arms and open wallets.

Home Brief Home for Some, but It Wasn’t for Her

In spite of the fact that it could ruin her chance for a cameo role in the sitcom-to-be, Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Garden Grove says it’s bunk: She didn’t briefly bunk in the D.C. townhouse owned by a veteran California Democratic congressman.

George Miller’s Beltway townhouse, where Democratic congressmen and senators sleep on rollaways and sofa beds during the Capitol workweek, has the stuff of comedy in it, which is why writer Al Franken is working on a pilot. Word was that Sanchez stayed there in her first few days as a freshman representative, in a bedroom gallantly given up by one of her colleagues until she could find her own place.

Her office didn’t respond when first asked about this, but now the Democrat says she was doubling up with a Connecticut congresswoman, Barbara Kennelly, on a sofa bed where New York’s Geraldine Ferraro had slept before she went off in 1984 to make history as the first woman nominated as a major-party candidate for vice president. As for the Miller quarters, Sanchez says she has never even set foot in the place. Al Franken will just have to imagine that she did.

Take 2 Million Aspirin and Call the Government in the Morning

OK, so it wasn’t anthrax, but the virtual ailment spread fast enough: the “hi” virus in Los Angeles County computers.

Supervisor Gloria Molina and colleague Don Knabe were at a board meeting when their laptops popped up the feared “hi” message. They “started joking about it--probably Osama bin Laden communicating with us,” Molina said. Then the virus began sending itself again, flying under the pilfered identities of her own aides and others in her e-address book.

“I said, ‘Shouldn’t somebody warn somebody before it’s opened and infects the whole system?’ . . . This is supposed to be a time when we’re protecting ourselves from cyber-terrorism, but at the same time everybody was very laid back about it, which was very discouraging to me.”

Molina is especially worried about the county’s vast databases of tax records and legal files. Not long ago, the board was asked to approve $3 million for more and better protections. But “I’m glad we stopped the $3-million expenditure,” she said, because “nobody was alarmed at the time we should be alarmed,” when the “hi” virus hit. “We have virus protection, but it didn’t seem like anybody was doing any of that yesterday, so why do we need something more sophisticated when we’re not even doing the basics?”

Quick Hits

* Tuesday’s L.A. municipal votes will, barring a runoff, put either Tony Cardenas or Wendy Greuel into the City Council seat left empty when longtime council member Joel Wachs departed to head a New York arts foundation.

* Campaign veteran Andre W. Lewis, the son of Colin Powell’s first cousin, was hired as deputy political director of the Gray Davis reelection campaign.

* Politics changes the Chapman University Board of Trustees as George Argyros steps down as chairman now that he’s ambassador to Spain, and Rep. Loretta Sanchez takes a seat on the board of her alma mater.

* The California Republican Party is paying $31,000 in fines to cover 20 counts of campaign reporting violations found by the state’s political watchdog, like failing to disclose $4.15 million in payments to subvendors in 1995 and 1996.

* Former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan will start election year 2002 riding in the Rose Parade on a medical firm’s float whose theme is “Helping Friends in Need,” showing kids tending their dolls’ and toys’ aches and pains (a float fantasy, not the face of health care of the future).

Word Perfect

“I rarely have any kind of congestion. . . . I’m never seen to expectorate anywhere.”

--L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn, in a deadpan comeback to writers’ characterizing him as “phlegmatic,” speaking at the Los Angeles Press Club’s Headliners awards.

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Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Mark Z. Barabak and Jean O. Pasco