Rep. Lee Could Outdo Davis Just by Showing Up

The only member of Congress to vote against military retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks gets a hearing this evening from the Valley Democrats United group in Los Angeles, and will probably get some contributions too.

Oakland Democrat Barbara Lee’s minority-of-one vote has brought her death threats, but it also has brought her about twice as much in campaign contributions as she usually pulls in.

And it just earned her the Wayne Morse Integrity in Government Award, named for the late maverick Oregon senator.

Lee is a solid booking, which is more than the same Democratic group could say of Gov. Gray Davis.

On Earth Day, the group braved the heat and the Green Partiers to set up a booth at Lake Balboa to register voters and woo them to the Democratic side of the ballot.

A half-hour before Davis showed up, says a Valley Dem, his advance man told volunteers to “spread the word” that Davis was coming, and the group told the advance man to ask the gov to please stop by.

An excited knot of volunteers waited ... and waited. A half-hour later, after Davis made a speech “not 200 yards from our booth,” he sped off “without even a 30-second hello.”

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Political Workers Campaign for Back Pay

Muewhilestreles el dinero--show them the money.

Nearly two months after Yolanda Fuentes lost her Democratic primary campaign to choose a Democratic candidate in the San Fernando Valley’s 39th Assembly District, some of her campaign workers--students and workers, not party volunteers--are still waiting to be paid.

They’ve written letters--not only to Fuentes but to a couple of her supporters, Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla and Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Panorama City). And they’ve picketed Cardenas’ office, where Fuentes works as district director.

(Here’s the political food chain of this: Fuentes wanted to replace her boss, Cardenas, who is termed out and who lost his try at the L.A. City Council to Wendy Greuel. In turn, Fuentes was beaten in the primary by San Fernando Mayor Cindy Montanez. Now, back to our program....)

Joaquin Meneses says the 40 or so workers, who started walking precincts and working phone banks in January, have been paid something but are still owed more than $1,000 each, and they really, really need it. They’ve written and faxed letters, and they’ve tried to set up meetings, he says.

At one meeting that did come off, he says, “They told us they have no money. Yolanda said she had only $10,000 and was going to divide it accordingly. She said she didn’t know when she could pay the rest, six weeks or six months.”

Fuentes--who had the presence of mind to escape a carjacker as she left Cardenas’ office one night last summer--said, “I’m doing what I can to raise the money to pay the debt I have. I understand their frustration; I wasn’t aware of the financial debt until after the campaign.... I will honor those contracts.”

But exactly when, she can’t say--maybe six weeks, maybe three months.

Montanez raised more than twice as much money and got twice as many votes as Fuentes, and now, said Fuentes, “I do have some events planned trying to raise money from family and friends. Want to come?”

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No One Will Know What Parks Had to Say

Police reform was what departing Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks said he did well; the Police Commission begged to differ.

Earlier this month, in a set of interrogatories--that’s Q&A; to you and me--in a lawsuit against the city and the police, attorney Stephen Yagman asked Parks, “Set forth separately, distinctly, and fully, in descending order of importance to you, each thing that in your view needs to be undertaken to reform the LAPD.”

A deputy city attorney interjected: “Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence. Nothing needs to be undertaken to reform the LAPD.”

Whatever Parks might have wanted to answer is not on the record.

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Send in the Clones: Harry and Louise Redux

Remember Harry and Louise, the cranky TV-commercial couple you wouldn’t want to live next door to because they were always complaining about health-care coverage? The same ad firm that produced those spots to help sink the Clinton health-care package is bringing the couple back for an encore, for an ad campaign promoting “therapeutic” cloning for medical research.

The sponsor is CuresNow, a group founded by Hollywood figures whose daughters have juvenile diabetes, one of the diseases that some researchers think could benefit from human cloning study.

Janet Zucker is producer of the comedy “Rat Race.” Her husband, Jerry, who directed “Ghost” and produced “The Naked Gun,” directed the ads--as a counterpunch, she says, to spots “placed by the far right.” Lucy Fisher, a former vice chairwoman of Sony Entertainment (“Gladiator,” “Spy Game”) said, “How can we explain to our children that our government is now the greatest obstacle to a cure for their disease?”

An official at the National Right to Life Committee, which is running its own anti-cloning spots in several states, denounced the ads as a “brazen deception” and “these Hollywood manipulators know it.”

Word is that the same political ad firm will be handling the commercials for the secession movement to split the Valley from L.A., so watch for them--Harry vs. Louise.

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Congressional CPAs’ Plan Went Down PDQ

He doesn’t wear a blue leotard with a huge “A” on his chest, but Sherman Oaks’ Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman is a proud member of the accounting trade.

In a lawyer-larded Congress, Sherman is one of only four CPAs, and the only one on the House Financial Services Committee. His big on-camera moment came in a House debate on an accounting and corporate reform bill, when he put forth an amendment requiring the Big Five accounting firms--maybe soon to be the Big Four--to carry “malpractice insurance” against the sort of liability claims that Andersen now faces.

“A minimum amount of liability insurance is required in most states to register a car,” Sherman said. “A lot is riding on accountants auditing publicly traded companies. They too should have insurance.”

The amendment went down on a voice vote before the House passed a GOP-made bill that some Democrats say went too easy on the Big Five. All of the CPAs voted for the bill.

Of his bread-and-butter trade before he got to Congress in 1996, Sherman says, “Look, every profession has made mistakes. The Enron mistakes were massive.”

Also in a past life, Sherman was a member of the state Board of Equalization, making him an official tax collector, who ran for Congress with the line, “Send Brad to Washington or he may come visit you.” Nowadays, the balding legislator hands out combs with the suggestion, “You need them more than I do.”

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Points Taken

* Bill Clinton, who’s landed a Los Angeles consulting job with his pal and patron Ron Burkle, will make a trip to L.A. on May 9 for a black-tie dinner ($125 to $2,000) honoring longtime African Methodist Episcopal Bishop H.H. Brookins. The dinner chairman is the recently politically invigorated Magic Johnson.

* Term-limits season is here when local politics look good. Ex-Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle has held two fund-raisers on his old Sacramento turf to run for mayor of Anaheim, where his family ran a drapery biz for a quarter-century.

* A Salinas fund-raiser for a candidate for sheriff fed supporters 22 pounds of tri-tip beef and other food that was the property of Monterey County, according to a sheriff’s investigation. A campaign volunteer who was also the jail’s food administrator has resigned in the wake of Beef-Gate.

* The L.A. Central City Assn.’s “treasure of the city” awards went to, among others, the Dodgers, two Rays (Bradbury and Charles), and Cardinal Roger Mahony, who is slogging through the priest-molestation scandal and must feel more like sunken treasure.

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You Can Quote Me

“For California to pass a law to say, gee, you have to take a test to get your diploma but you don’t have to pass it, frankly will make our state a laughingstock.”

--Villa Park Republican Assemblyman Bill Campbell, speaking of legislation dismantling the state’s system for testing students, a part of which would have stopped requiring high school students to pass an exit exam before they can graduate. That bit was dropped.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Nick Anderson and Jean O. Pasco.