Cake Is High in Irony but Davis Isn’t Biting

Two men on a mission: the energy-blues brothers.

The brotherhood is strictly political. They are two Republican assemblymen who are burning the midnight filament as they work to hang the financial fallout from the energy crisis tightly around Gov. Gray Davis’ neck.

To mark the one-year anniversary of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s bankruptcy filing, Moorpark’s Tony Strickland and Northridge’s Keith Richman delivered a cake to the governor’s office. It was shaped like a lightbulb and frosted in gray icing--get it? Gray as in the governor, gray as in “dimouts.”

“Last year at the ‘State of the State,’” said Strickland, who co-commissioned the cake, the governor “promised there would be no bankruptcies, no bailouts and no rate increases--and we got all of them. Gray Davis might say, ‘Let them eat cake.’ He’s sort of like Marie Antoinette”--who, as historians have found, was indeed rather a free-spender but should be acquitted on the cake-quote rap.

The governor’s press secretary, Steve Maviglio, parried in keeping with the cake theme. Deregulation, signed into law under Davis’ predecessor, was “a half-baked idea brought to us by the Republicans.” Thus, perhaps the cake should be trundled off for chemical analysis. “There might be some secret Enron documents inside,” Maviglio added.

Other great pastry moments in history: In 1986, Reagan National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane led a secret mission to Tehran to trade weapons for U.S. hostages. As a goodwill gesture, he carried a Bible signed by Reagan and a key-shaped cake.

Bush Now a Friend of Bill (No, Not That Bill!)

The White House, which backed the wrong horse by supporting Dick Riordan in California’s Republican gubernatorial primary, is now kissing and making up.

Both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney held a 25-minute chinwag with nominee Bill Simon, the man one Bush player had called to suggest that he drop out. Just as significantly, Simon’s strategist, Sal Russo, met with Bush’s political tactician, Karl Rove.

By way of making up, Bush will be headlining two fund-raisers for Simon later this month to dump another $3 million or $4 million into a campaign fund that is rattling its few forlorn coins compared to Gray Davis’ well-stuffed piggy bank.

Simon also met with four Cabinet secretaries, which is more than can be said for the state’s Republican Party. Some of its loyalists are still miffed, feeling that the Bush folks have bigfooted California and snubbed them--the conservative forces that won the election for Simon.

They like to point out that Bush’s top-ops man in California, Gerald Parsky, has had his moments of friction with Simon, and that he told that other Times newspaper back in Gotham that Simon’s hopes of winning depend on adopting “the formula I describe” to open the door to GOP moderates.

Simon has said that the Cabinet secretaries will help him raise money. But while said secretaries have come to California at least 75 times since Bush was elected, only the agriculture secretary, who is a California native, has actually appeared at a state Republican Party event to raise money and morale.

California’s Republicans have always had a streak of “we’d rather be right than president,” which has sometimes thwarted Republican successes here. And there’s a sentiment afoot that Parsky--who would dearly love to haul California into Bush’s column after that million-vote loss to Al Gore--is pushing a “my-way-or-the-highway” technique to get the state party to knuckle under: no cooperation, no Cabinet members. Party on!

A Man for All Political Seasons

Got books?

This week is National Library Week, and for the 14th year, a retired small-town librarian from Maine makes news with her famous favorites list, the cherished reading material of the nation’s politicians and celebrities.

California’s movie figures from the geriatric to the juvenile answered Glenna Nowell’s e-mails. Bob Hope cited “Huckleberry Finn.” The 14-year-old actor Haley Joel Osment favored a Michael Crichton novel and the seminal Gettysburg account, “Killer Angels.”

For political pop psychologists, the choicest choice was Gov. Gray Davis. He e-mailed Nowell that he is reading “John Adams,” David McCullough’s biography of the second president. Davis’ all-time favorite book: Robert Bolt’s book about England’s sainted statesman, Sir Thomas More--”A Man for All Seasons.”

Campaign’s a Bust--and So Is Bank Account

First a political belly-flop, now a financial belly-up.

Garden Grove GOPster Jeff Chavez, nominated in March to stand up to the plate and take on Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez, then did the unthinkable: He quit the campaign.

Personal reasons, he said.

And now it appears he is walking away from more than just a life in politics. In a letter to vendors--people who supplied his short-lived campaign--Chavez told them he won’t be doing any more fund-raising to cover his $21,000 campaign debt. “Unfortunately, the result of this campaign is like that of a failed or bankrupt business as the campaign and candidate are now unable to pay any invoices for services rendered prior to March 6, 2002,” the letter said.

Happy income tax day, Mr. Chavez.

‘West Wing’ Flunks in Literature, Speech

The “Wednesday night presidency,” otherwise known as “The West Wing,” a TV program crafted here on the West Coast, enjoys a prosperous and learned following--which golden demographics backfired a bit after a recent episode, in which a White House aide was trying to get some presidential props for her high school English teacher.

In the course of this plot line, President Jed Bartlet, an erudite Nobel Prize winner (but not in literature), refers to the great epic “Beowulf” as a classic of Middle English.

Zounds! It’s in Old English, and didn’t the e-mails make that clear! Will there be a script with a Beowulf makeup test?

In the same episode, actor Martin Sheen, who plays the president, pronounced “cavalry”--as in the George Custer horseback cluster--as “Calvary”--as in the last sufferings of Jesus. At least it isn’t like Jimmy Carter, who spent four years, and not just one weekly hour of prime time, mispronouncing “nuclear” as “new-cue-lur.”

Aaron Sorkin, creator of this prime-time administration, responded, “Ic agan nic answaru”--in Old English, roughly: “no comment.”

Points Taken

* Gray Davis’ new appointee to the California Science Center in Los Angeles: Fabian R. Wesson, wife of Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson.

* Former GOP U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, the comedy sensation from Wyoming (not to be confused with that other Wyomingite, the strait-laced Dick Cheney) speaks May 1 at a lunch of the Orange County Forum in Irvine, then does an encore the next day at UC Irvine’s Center for the Study of Democracy.

* On L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn’s 2002 budget list of 50 “new and improved” park facilities in his city, No. 28 is the “Richard Alatoree Pool” in El Sereno, misspelling the name of the former council member who went off the deep end, having a fling with cocaine and dodging income taxes on money handed over to him by people who wanted to influence matters bigger than the name on a civic swimming pool.

* Who can follow the Iron Lady? Chapman University is casting about for a big-name replacement for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, now Baroness Thatcher, whose May 4 appearance at the university’s Global Citizen Gala was canceled after her series of small strokes three weeks ago.

* Terry Landreth, a longtime El Segundo resident disgusted with local politics, patched together the names of two City Council incumbents running for reelection to create a phantom write-in candidate, “Jelly Gaowell,” but Gaowell lost to the incumbents, collecting fewer than a dozen write-in votes in last week’s election.

You Can Quote Me

“We don’t feel that it is essential for students to know these documents.”

A representative of the California Federation of Teachers at a hearing about AB 1920, which would have required high school students to pass a competency test about such seminal national documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The quote was cited in a press release from the bill’s sponsor, Murrietta Republican Assemblyman Dennis Hollingsworth, who reports that the bill died in the Assembly’s Education Committee.

*

Parting Shot: Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson and Fresno Assemblywoman Sarah Reyes present recently retired Fresno State basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian with a ball signed by state lawmakers.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. This week’s contributors include Jean O. Pasco and Margaret Talev.