In the GOP, a Sit-Down, Stand-Up Debate

The dithering over the shape of the table at the Vietnam War peace talks seemed to drag on as long as the talks themselves. Tuesday night’s debate among the three GOP candidates for governor was assuming those proportions:

Do they stand (favored by tall candidates like Bill Jones)? Do they sit (favored by Richard Riordan, who can be inclined to walk as he talks)?

The agreement: They will sit at the first debate, on Tuesday night. They will stand for the second debate. And for the third, they drew straws, and it’ll be chairs all around. But considering the gobs of money being spent on campaigns, lying down Roman-fashion and being fed grapes is not outside the realm of reason. The next stumbling block: Would those be union grapes, or nonunion grapes?

In Condit’s Saga, Ceres Is Both City and Symbol

On the home-front hustings, the nation’s cover-boy congressman, Gary Condit, likes to identify himself as the local boy: “I’m Gary Condit. I’m from Ceres.”

Now, Condit is the Democrat whose political career began 30 years ago on the Ceres City Council; there’s a chance it could end in this year’s election, where voters will hear yet again about his dicey relationship with Chandra Levy.

She was the young intern who disappeared from her Washington, D.C., apartment and has been the object of a vast search led by her grieving mother.

And Ceres is a town of about 33,000 in California’s Central Valley.

Ceres is also the name of the ancient Romans’ goddess of agriculture. According to legend (which the Romans swiped from the Greeks), Ceres’ daughter was stolen into hell by the god of the underworld. The girl’s anguished mother roamed the world searching for her child.

In the myth, Ceres laid perpetual winter on the land until her daughter was restored to her for part of the year, which is the way the ancients explained fertile and fallow seasons. In life, Chandra Levy has not yet been found, and her mother has organized a support group of others with missing relatives.

Insurance Money Makes a Face: Quackenbush’s

To commemorate a degree of cupidity rare even in politics, the name and face of discredited former state Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush have been bestowed upon the “Quack-O-Meter,” a device to track the insurance industry’s contributions to candidates for Quackenbush’s old job.

Assembled by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, the Quack-O-Meter’s mission works like this: The more moola a candidate gets from insurance folks, the more of Quackenbush’s mug is revealed.

By mid-January, candidates Tom Umberg--for years Orange County’s only Democrat in Sacramento--and John Garamendi--who turned down some insurance contributions a dozen years ago as the state’s first elected insurance commissioner--had zero dough from insurance outfits.

Fellow Democrat Tom Calderon has raised about half his money, roughly $800,000, from insurance sources, so the watchdog group filled his picture in about halfway.

Political junkies will remember that Calderon’s brother Charles, a former state senator, got smacked with an $18,000 fine last month for breaking clean-campaign laws; among other indulgences, he used campaign money to rent a limo for the premiere of the movie “Liar, Liar.”

Last word on the Quackster is that he and his wife are still in Hawaii, where she is campaigning against the state’s required one- to four-month quarantine on dogs and cats coming over from the mainland.

Reardon’s for Riordan, but Confusion Still Rules

The Riordan gubernatorial campaign was taken to the woodshed in this space for careless misspellings in its campaign communications--verbs and proper names, including, shockingly, Nancy “Reardon,” as in the candidate’s wife. Ah, but there IS a “Nancy Reardon” in the Riordan camp, a Pasadena woman married to a man named Chuck, not a Brentwood woman married to a man named Dick.

But the same week this news was conveyed, so too was a press release referring to Riordan’s taking part in a “distinguised speaker series” at the Richard Nixon Library, which had to correct its own gaffe, noting that it would be Bill SIMON, not Bill JONES, speaking at the library.

On the Move With Pelosi and Other Californians

On her first day as the House of Representatives’ minority whip, Nancy Pelosi was 3,000 miles away from the House floor, in her San Francisco field office.

Her staff was spiffing up the old whip’s third-floor Capitol suite. Pelosi’s boss, Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, and the Republican who cracks the whip on the entire House of Representatives, Speaker Dennis Hastert, were cooking up a formal ceremony for her for Feb. 6 in Statuary Hall.

The whip job--counting heads and keeping the Democratic ranks together--makes Pelosi the highest-ranking woman in the history of Congress. She debuted her new title on Thursday, speaking to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League’s annual dinner marking the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion.

Some of her fellow Californians, the ones with the R behind their names, were nudging their own way to power. Three would like to replace a Utah Republican as head of the House Resources Committee, ground zero for debates on environmentalism and property rights.

Curiously, all three of them--Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley, Ken Calvert of Riverside and Richard Pombo of Tracy--are on the conservative end of the land-use argument, while a senior committee member who wants the job, New Jersey’s H. James Saxton, is more sympathetic to environmentalists.

Pombo (whose name means “pigeon” in Portuguese) once published a book arguing for private property rights, using as its title “This Land Is Our Land,” a pinch and a twist on Woody Guthrie’s song, which takes rather a different stand.

A Supervisor Confesses His Political Polygamy

He’s spent a quarter-century and then some on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, but the work still gets him giddy. After John Flynn’s colleagues chose him as board chairman for 2002, his thank-you speech got a little out of hand.

First, as his executive aide Elizabeth Montijo hauled his paperwork to his new front-and-center seat, the thoroughly married Flynn gabbled, “Elizabeth is like a second wife to me.” The audience tittered.

“Please don’t print that,” he implored reporters. “My wife has been looking for an excuse to leave me for a long time.” The crowd laughed again at that, and Flynn took one more cut.

Looking toward the clergyman who had given the morning’s invocation, he added, “That’s why I invited the priest here today.”

Who’s for Whom

Some recent endorsements:

* Gray Davis: Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the California Labor Federation and the California Faculty Assn.

* Bill Jones: MAPA, the Mexican American Political Assn.

* Richard Riordan: Lincoln Club of Northern California

* Bill Simon: COPS, the California Organization of Police and Sheriffs

Points Taken

* Not the best advance work was in evidence when Bill Jones’ aides set up a podium in front of a Culver City liquor-grocery store to hold a news conference about lottery troubles, without anyone having informed the grocery store owners about it.

* When the chronically late Gray Davis was tardy for a school-testing news conference at a Sacramento elementary school, an aide vamped for time by leading the children in a game of “Simon Says,” as in “Simon says, I can’t wait to see the governor,” to which the kids responded, “Simon says, I hope he gets here soon,” which for Davis, he did--only half an hour late.

* John Stites, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s sergeant running against his boss, Lee Baca, headlined a news release faulting Baca for not showing up at a candidates’ debate, “What is the difference between scandal-plagued Gary Condit and scandal-plagued Lee Baca? At least Gary Condit honors the voters by attending debates.”

* The Rev. Lou Sheldon, an Orange County uber-conservative, showed up at a Bill Simon-Rudy Giuliani fund-raiser, where he was asked about shelling out $1,000 to see a former mayor who supports abortion rights, left his wife during an affair and moved in with a gay couple. Said Sheldon, “The issue in California is infrastructure, it’s electricity, it’s water.”

* Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo was named “New Democrat of the Week”--yes, week--by the national Democratic Leadership Council.

* Bill Conrad, a GOP candidate for Condit’s congressional seat, sent out an e-mail telling supporters to vote for him in a newspaper Web site poll, the “Merced Sun-Star pole.”

You Can Quote Me

“He was a switch-hitter; I mean that in the best sense. I know it can have several different meanings.”

--Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was asked whether Bill Simon handled mostly civil or criminal cases when he worked for Giuliani in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York in the 1980s. Giuliani was in California stumping for Simon.

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Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Nick Anderson, Mark Z. Barabak, Dan Morain, Jean O. Pasco, Nicholas Riccardi and Margaret Talev.