Riordan Does Stand-Up Act When Not Stumping

Richard Riordan was making his way through a bustling lunchtime crowd at a barbecue joint in San Luis Obispo when a man called out: “Hey--as long as you get Gray Davis out of office, we’ll be happy.”

The Republican candidate for governor responded with a joke about the starched and blow-dried Democrat he hopes to toss out of office.

“I’m going to outlaw hairspray,” Riordan said. “That’ll make him move out of California.”

It sounded spontaneous, but Riordan was actually testing the line for a new stand-up comedy routine, which, as it turns out, is taking up a good part of his time and energy on the last weekend before the GOP primary. On Friday, Riordan flew here, to the least Republican part of California, for a two-night gig with a troupe of friends at San Francisco State University.

“I promised to do this a year ago,” Riordan said. “I’m living up to my promise.”

True to form, the most unorthodox candidate in the fiercely contested primary is concluding his campaign in the most unorthodox of ways.

Just a few weeks ago, the former Los Angeles mayor was treating the primary as little more than a nuisance on the way to his inevitable November showdown with Davis. His standard response to jabs from GOP rivals was simply to laugh, and as late as mid-January, he was still planning to take a four-day ski trip to Idaho two weeks before the election.

But with conservative rival Bill Simon Jr. surging in the polls and threatening to capture the GOP nomination on Tuesday, Riordan is struggling to adjust to a radically changed political landscape.

His own advisors warn that his campaign is in deep trouble. His wave of new television ads bashing Simon reflect their fear that Riordan’s candidacy could founder Tuesday.

Yet at a tense juncture when many candidates would cancel personal obligations and focus entirely on the race, Riordan is sticking with his comedy act. His campaign scheduled his weekend around his two performances with Don Knotts and other less well-known Hollywood comedians in the “Yarmy’s Army” troupe. The shows will raise money for San Francisco State’s athletics department. Today, Riordan plans two campaign stops, both in the Bay Area.

Pollster Arnold Steinberg, a former Riordan advisor, said the candidate was wasting valuable time writing gag lines, rehearsing and performing in the shows and campaigning far from his Southern California base--just when voters finally are tuned into the race. Riordan’s campaign managers, he said, “don’t seem to have the professionalism to control the candidate and to say no.”

“If there was a campaign plan, it shouldn’t include this, and if it does, it’s the wrong plan,” Steinberg said. “In a campaign, the candidate is not in charge; the campaign is in charge.”

Candidates typically clear their personal calendars in the final stage of a race. That enables the political professionals running their campaigns to deploy them wherever they can best meet late-shifting strategic needs. In a state as vast as California, where television is the crucial means of reaching voters, candidates also typically race to several media markets a day to maximize their exposure on the local news. Ideally, the news coverage--which is much harder to attract in earlier stages of the race--complements the message of the campaign’s television ads.

Riordan, though, has kept a remarkably light public schedule during the final weeks of his campaign. Aside from Sacramento, the last time he stumped in the Central Valley--a Republican stronghold--was a trip to Fresno 31 days ago.

On Wednesday, Riordan’s only public event was a press conference in Huntington Beach. On Thursday, the only event was a lunchtime visit to an outdoor shopping plaza in San Luis Obispo. His campaign barred television crews from covering his speech that evening at a fund-raiser in Burlingame near San Francisco.

On Sunday--two days before the election--Riordan again plans just one public event, at the end of his early morning bike ride along the Los Angeles Marathon route.

It’s not that Riordan is not working hard. He hosted other fund-raisers this week in Sacramento, Santa Barbara and Newport Beach. He and his wife, Nancy Daly Riordan, got their pictures taken with hundreds of donors. He has spent hours on the phone doing radio interviews. He has flown around the state seeking newspaper endorsements from editorial boards. And on some days, he has had as many as three public events. On Monday, he plans campaign stops in at least four regions of California.

“We’re doing plenty,” Riordan said. “I’ve been around the state every day now, and I’ll be doing some over the weekend.”

On the stump, Riordan has fine-tuned his message to appeal to Republicans who, according to polls, are turning to his more conservative rivals--Simon and, to a lesser extent, Secretary of State Bill Jones. Riordan has focused more and more on his support for the death penalty and a ban on bilingual education.

“I believe that every child has to learn to read, write and think in English,” he said in a KABC-AM radio interview.

Riordan has weaned himself from the habit of telling Republican crowds they should respect people regardless of their sexual orientation. But he voices no regrets for focusing on his support for abortion rights and other moderate views that irk many conservative Republicans, saying he wanted “to be the same person in the primary and in the final.”

And every day, he blames his plunge in popularity on the governor’s $8-million worth of anti-Riordan ads.

“Gray Davis has done something that’s historic,” Riordan told nearly 300 supporters at his “pre-primary victory” dinner Thursday in Burlingame. “He has run a campaign to hijack the Republican Party.”

Notably absent on the campaign trail are the vast majority of the 208 elected officials who have endorsed Riordan--often a sign of dimming confidence in a candidate’s prospects for success. Not one elected official showed up at Riordan’s event in Huntington Beach on Wednesday, in the heart of Republican-heavy Orange County.

At the Burlingame dinner, Katie Boyd, Riordan’s Northern California finance chairwoman, could not find any elected officials other than state Assemblyman Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria).

“There are some who are aspiring to run,” she said.

Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), who campaigned with Riordan Friday in Hollywood, said many of the candidate’s other supporters were tied up “just doing other things,” many of them in Washington and Sacramento. Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs), he said, wanted to stump with Riordan on Monday, but had a “dinner in Palm Springs that she just could not miss.”

Riordan advisors denied elected officials were avoiding appearances with him and insisted he was keeping a rigorous campaign schedule.

“The more people see him, the more they like him,” campaign political director Kevin Spillane said. But on the eve of his comedy routine in San Francisco, the gaffe-prone candidate acknowledged he would need to watch how he uses his wit--and confessed to ambivalence about the hairspray joke.

“I promised my wife I would tell no jokes about Gray Davis,” Riordan said. “Like jokes about his hair.”