Tossing a Lifeline to a Pol Pays Off for a Comic

Paul Rodriguez and Cruz Bustamante, the comedian and the politician, have been friends for a long time, odd as it may seem. And it seemed so odd to Rodriguez’s mother that Bustamante actually stopped by to see her in little Orange Cove, Calif., because she didn’t believe that her son the comic knew the lieutenant governor.

But there are friends and there are friends. Rodriguez was a contestant last week on the TV game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”; one of his “lifeline” contacts was . . . Bustamante.

And the $65,000 question that stalled Rodriguez: Who was president when the Berlin Wall fell?

The cell phone rang in Bustamante’s office. The 30 seconds began ticking . . . a buzz of staff suggestions . . . answer: George Bush (the first)!

Nevertheless, Rodriguez still polled the audience, which hemmed and hawed and tended to choose Ronald Reagan. Rodriguez, wisely, sided with his political pal and said “Bush.” He boosted his winnings to $125,000 and then blew it, walking away with $32,000 for the National Council of La Raza’s fund for undocumented workers killed or wounded in the attacks of Sept. 11.

Afterward, an aide said, Bustamante mused that he must’ve been crazy to agree to do that, and imagine the beating he would’ve taken if he’d blown a political question--and on top of that, he might have had to hit the comedy circuit with Rodriguez to make up the lost dough.

The Comedy Cruz? That’s optimism.

Sorry, Way Wrong Number

It isn’t the first of April, and it really was L.A. City Council President Alex Padilla on the phone, calling a DreamWorks executive named Andy Spahn, to wheedle him into supporting Padilla’s compa Tony Cardenas in the March City Council runoff election to replace Joel Wachs.

The two had played phone tag before they finally connected, and Spahn might be forgiven for glancing at his calendar to make sure it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke:

Cardenas is running against Wendy Greuel--and Spahn is Greuel’s boss and her major, major supporter.

Rather than just saying “Goodbye,” Padilla persisted, asking whether Spahn is really entrenched, and whether he could not, maybe, “do something for Tony,” like a fund-raiser.

Spahn, who said he “truly didn’t know what to make of it,” contented himself with saying no, that he was backing Greuel 200%.

And an MIT-degreed rocket scientist like Padilla knows that 200% is a lot of backing.

The Law Catches Up With a Votin’ Fool

Inasmuch as a lot of Americans were not overwhelmed by their choices in last year’s presidential election, it should be heartening that one California voter evidently felt exactly the opposite.

Alas, his way of showing it was, the authorities say, against the law.

Ventura County prosecutors have charged Thomas Anthony Ruder of Moorpark with two counts of voter fraud and seven counts of perjury. They say he used the alias “Austin Cassidy” to vote twice in the March 2000 primary, and twice again in the November election. Arraignment is set for the day after Christmas.

Ruder and his attorney were not commenting; voter registration records show that Ruder and Cassidy have the same birthday, the same phone number and the same address--but Ruder is a registered Republican and Cassidy a Democrat, and therefore may have canceled each other’s votes out.

Transplanted Brain Shows Signs of Confusion

It turns out that the man leading the secession charge to break the San Fernando Valley off from L.A. has already done a little splitting of his own.

Jeff Brain voted in three L.A. city elections, even though he was living in Glendale at the time.

He says this is not a problem because he intends to move back to L.A. real soon now.

When he does, he may be listing as his voting address the place he tried to register as his voting address in September: the Sherman Oaks office of the Valley VOTE secession group.

But to register to vote at a place other than your home, California law requires you to get a court order for “Confidential Voter Status,” swearing under penalty of perjury that you face a “life-threatening situation.”

A statement from Valley VOTE rather puzzlingly cites its leader’s concern that anti-secessionists might show up at his “his ex-wife’s home where his children reside”--as if Brain were registering her home as his voting address--and then solemnly notes that because Brain heads the secession effort, “precaution is warranted.”

As Valley VOTE pointed out, “celebrities” sometimes obtain the court-ordered confidential status. Brain, already acting like a beleaguered star in the face of political-reporter paparazzi, told a Times reporter that any questions about his voting history were “smear attacks.”

As for the prospect of anti-secessionists hunting Brain down and mobbing him . . . L.A. County’s registrar-recorder notes that state law has, since 1995, made a person’s voting address and particulars “unavailable to the general public,” except for “election, scholarly, journalistic, political or governmental purposes.”

Charter Members of the Spin Club

In our last cliffhanger episode, Orange County political insiders were grunting and shoving against one another over a ballot measure that would take away from the governor and give to voters the job of filling an unexpected vacancy on the county Board of Supervisors.

That’s because the present governor is a Democrat who might very well put a Democrat in that empty chair, and ruin the nice GOP clean sweep of the board. One of the guys who is in favor of this, Supervisor Todd Spitzer, expects there to be an empty seat because he’s going to run for the Assembly, and his pal, Bill Campbell, is termed out of the Assembly and wouldn’t mind having Spitzer’s present job.

The two politicos who don’t want this to happen have written a ballot rebuttal, which begins with the instructions, “Hum lightly to the tune of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ Theme Song’:

“This is the story of a Supe named Todd/a local politician lookin’ for a better job . . . “ Watch for it in voter pamphlets arriving early next year; listen for it wafting out of voting booths across Orange County.

To this, the Supe named Todd said, “It’s so typical of campaign consultants to assume that Orange County voters are hillbillies.” And it’s so typical of Spitzer to have to have the last word.

Quick Hits

* The campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon Jr. was dark last week after Simon was called for jury duty. He did, however, name as his campaign manager Rick Ahearn, a Beltway political consultant who had worked as a special assistant in the Reagan White House and on the presidential campaign of another Republican rich guy, Steve Forbes.

* Danney Ball, a light-year longshot GOP candidate for governor who has pledged to spend no more than $20,000 in the primary, notes hopefully that both he and George Bush ran for Congress in 1978, and both lost, “but of course he went on to become governor of Texas, and now I would like to do the same thing here in our state.”

* Luke A. Stedman, who spent five years as marketing manager of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, now holds the inside-politics job and title of “director of advance” for House speaker and Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert.

* Ken Morrison, a losing Tustin City Council candidate and, handily, a lawyer, won a $5,000 judgment in a small-claims defamation suit against a mobile home park developer who financed a last-minute mailer accusing Morrison of financial misdeeds, including taking “a walk on his student loan”--when Morrison has never had a student loan.

Word Perfect

“I don’t think there can be two people as dumb or as hateful.”

--Vista Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, speaking about the arrest of Jewish Defense League Chairman Irv Rubin and associate Earl Krugel for allegedly plotting to bomb a mosque and Issa’s San Clemente office. Issa angered the JDL after he was quoted--misquoted, he says--by an Iranian newspaper as being sympathetic to Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

*

Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Michael Finnegan, Jean O. Pasco, and Margaret Talev.