Me and My Shadow

Los Angeles mayoral finalist James K. Hahn is sticking so close to Mayor Richard Riordan, hoping for an endorsement for the June 5 runoff, that you could call him “Maxi-Me.” (At 6 feet 3, Hahn is too tall to qualify as “mini” anything.)

Despite the hardly secret years-long antipathy between the two, Hahn was in the audience at a Los Angeles Times Festival of Books event honoring Riordan’s work for literacy, then found his way upstairs afterward to a private reception, hovering close.

And two days later, when the mayor’s staff threw a surprise party for Riordan’s 71st birthday, Hahn showed up bearing a chocolate cake with a frosting portrait of Riordan and the sugary words “from Jim Hahn.” The mayor then left for a brief vacation in Acapulco. Hahn stayed home to campaign.

Dark Days

If singer-songwriter John Phillips hadn’t died in March, this would have killed him: Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey, on the floor of Congress, singing his own version of “California Dreamin’,” wittily renamed “California Schemin’ ”:

All the streets are dark

Blackouts every day

FERC just took a walk

And let the gougers play

I’d still stand a chance

If I was in L.A.

California schemin’ on such a winter’s day

There are two more verses, but the price you paid for this newspaper buys you a reprieve from the rest of it.

Millionaires’ Row

The noises from the all-Republican race for Orange County’s 47th Congressional District could sound like a piano concerto vs. the Taco Bell. If rumors are true and GOP Rep. Chris Cox is indeed to be anointed a federal appeals court judge, arts patron and biotech bigwig Mark C. Johnson has $1.5 million in a ready-to-run account for Cox’s seat. But Bill Campbell, an assemblyman from Orange, is also at the ready. Though Campbell isn’t saying how much lucre he is set to throw at the campaign, that ringing sound coming from his cash register is because he sold his stake in several very profitable Taco Bell franchises last year.

Bush’s Real California Strategy

Across the street, in the FBI gym, he plays half-court ball in his spare moments, and in his fifth-floor digs at Justice, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft keeps the TV set tuned in low to the basketball playoffs.

No question that this high-ranking Bush Republican is paying close attention to one part of California: Ashcroft didn’t think much of the Trail Blazers’ Arvydas Sabonis’ ability to guard Shaquille O’Neal (he was right). The Lakers, he opines, “are going to be tough to beat.” In a rule that works for political runoffs or sports playoffs, the former Missouri senator said of the Lakers, “The only thing that can keep those guys from winning is themselves.”

Still No Free Lunch

Most of Congress was out of town last Monday, the day of that Rose Garden reception intended to make bipartisanship bloom among the buds.

But Rep. Bob Filner, a San Diego Democrat, did show. He shared a table with Commerce Secretary Don Evans, but Filner didn’t make much conversational headway on California’s energy crisis. Evans “didn’t want a dialogue. He said something like, ‘The whole thing is so stupid. The legislators ought to be put in jail.’ ” (Now that’s an energy policy!)

After lunch, Filner seized the day--OK, the minute--and lined up for a hurried word with the Prez. “You have to do something for California,” he urged. “The pricing is killing us. We’re being bled dry.”

Bush: “Well, y’all have to pay more for your electricity.”

Filner: “Mr. President, we’re already paying $3 million an hour, $70 million a day and $2 billion a month. We’re going bankrupt here.”

Then, says Filner, “he mumbled something I couldn’t understand and moved on to the next guy.”

Sound Bites

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg was in such a hurry to endorse her brother to succeed her in her old Los Angeles City Council seat (he lost) that her endorsement letter was signed “Jack Goldberg” . . . Now that Republican Jim Rogan, who lost his Glendale congressional seat last November, is in line to be nominated as undersecretary of Commerce for patents and trademarks, maybe he can start referring to himself as “Jim Rogan.”

Word Perfect

” . . . the economic equivalent to the World Wrestling Federation. The wrestlers follow a script and the referee, FERC, ensures it is entertaining. It is not real competition.”

State Sen. Steve Peace (D-El Cajon), on the 1996 California energy deregulation law and the role of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Times staff writers Faye Fiore, Eric Lichtblau, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Jean Pasco and Margaret Talev contributed to this column.