A Down-to-Earth Perspective on Jet-Set Officials

Look! Up in the smog! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the leaders of California!

The sheriff of Los Angeles County, Lee Baca, lets it slip that he’s bought a $2.4-million, 10-seat turboprop plane, at the very moment when the business of sheriffing is so sunk in debt that it can’t even pay for the red ink to sign the check.

And a week before that news came the other news: the governor of California, Gray Davis, was about to thumb $80,000 a month off the state’s bankroll to lease an even snazzier $9-million jet, on the advice of the head of the CHP.

“It’s my job to keep him alive,” the CHP chief said; California’s chief executive must not be shot out of the skies by terrorists.

And incidentally, that 80K would be going to a very major Gray Davis supporter, as in $upporter.

So let’s review: Just as some of the nation’s airlines are starting their abrupt descent into bankruptcy, just as President Bush sends eight of his cabinet members down the jetway and into aisle seats to show Americans it’s safe to fly again, the governor of California was told to join the jet set.

And just at the moment the sheriff’s budget is redefining “bottomless pit,” running $25 million to the bad, not counting the $27 million it owes to people it kept in jail when it shouldn’t have, the sheriff decides to replace his old county airplane with an even bigger one.

The most prestigious toy in the power broker’s box is the personal aircraft.

Mayor Sam Yorty breezily ‘coptered from City Hall to the San Fernando Valley; in the 1973 election, Tom Bradley hammered Yorty as being oblivious to traffic problems because he flew right over them.

Mayor Bradley would come in for his share of punches for his peregrinations, but those were mostly on commercial jets, sharing dry-roasted nuts with the hoipolloi.

Roger Mahony, licensed pilot and Roman Catholic cardinal, flew himself around his vast archdiocese for a couple of years, at the controls of a jet helicopter paid for chiefly by his chief parishioner, the future mayor, Richard Riordan.

Since Jerry Brown, California’s governors have carried boarding passes along with the rest of us. Brown’s father, though, happily spun the propellers of his Convair, “Grizzly,” all over the state, and Ronald Reagan leased a small jet, a practice the junior Brown put a swift and thrifty end to.

But to get elected, the private plane is an indispensable tool of campaigns that carom across six cities in a day’s time.

And size matters: The smaller the campaign plane, the limper the candidate’s prospects are perceived to be, which is why Air Force One is worth at least 20 electoral votes.

As mortifying as it must be for politicians to fly commercial--all those voters lining up behind the beverage cart for a chance to complain about something--they ought to keep in mind that private plane crashes have offed more politicians than terrorists have: The first, New York congressman Thaddeus C. Sweet, was killed in 1928, the year after Charles Lindbergh soloed the Atlantic.

At least two other congressmen, a U.S. senator and two governors have died in small-plane crashes.

The only elected commercial aviation casualty who comes to mind is the Georgia congressman aboard a Korean Air flight shot down by the Soviets by mistake in 1983.

After Sept. 11, someone must have whispered in Davis’ ear that only nine governors, himself among them, don’t fly about in private jets, and here was an opportunity to whittle that number down to eight.

Gray Davis’ odds--of survival and of reelection--are better in seat 8B.

The CHP chief backed down from the plan with a face-saving remark about commercial airlines being “safe again,” but I suspect it was California’s first lady, Sharon Davis, who leaned on her husband to give up the jet notion.

Sharon Ryer was a flight attendant on PSA, and one day in 1979, when her flight was held to await some uppity pol, she stood impatiently in the jet door and then scolded the bigwig for keeping everybody waiting.

It was Gov. Jerry Brown’s chief of staff, Gray Davis. Four years later, she married him.

It’s too late for “buyer’s remorse” on the Baca plane, but maybe we the people can salvage a little something out of this. I’m thinking of a contest for the best in-flight announcements aboard Air Sheriff . . . something along the lines of, “In the event that term limits are overturned, campaign contribution envelopes will drop from the ceiling.”

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