A Serious Candidate Emerges From the Recall Muck

I thought we had seen just about everything in this endless summer of recall fun, but now here comes a twist no one could have expected.

Orange County businessman Peter Ueberroth, the newest soldier in the battle to save California, is going to try to run a substantive campaign for governor.

Is the man nuts?

“I’m going to give it a try, and I know it’s something of a longshot,” Ueberroth told me in a phone interview Friday afternoon.

The early signs are not promising. We spoke for roughly 15 minutes, and not only did Ueberroth fail to utter a single sound bite or prime-time slogan, but he apologized for not always finishing his sentences. He meanders and thinks out loud as he rambles through the complexities of one subject or another.

The man is doomed.

We’ve got the whole world tuning in to see how many times a candidate can say, “I’ll be back” and “Hasta la vista, baby,” in one election. When Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t performing, he and other candidates, including Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, are expected to chuck hammers at each other’s heads.

And now comes Republican Ueberroth -- who helped steer the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles to financial success and served as commissioner of major league baseball -- promising to run an issue-oriented campaign with a bipartisan team of advisors.

He told me he will not run any negative TV ads.

He will not beat opponents over the head.

He will not respond in kind to personal attacks against him.

And he will not waste time discussing anything but public policy.

Say a prayer for the man. Running a clean and meaningful campaign in the year of our Lord 2003 is a bold and dangerous gambit, if not a suicide mission, and there’s no telling whether Ueberroth or anyone else can pull it off.

He’s said to be something of a control freak, as are many successful businesspeople, and yet a political campaign can be a wild, untamable beast. Ueberroth could get hurt out there, and California voters may decide they’d rather send a muscleman to Sacramento than a businessman.

But having a dignified candidate talking issues, with decades of experience in public affairs to back it up, could change everything, even if a lot of voters are too young to remember who Ueberroth is.

Davis can no longer dismiss his opponents as unqualified flakes or right-wing kooks, and Schwarzenegger suddenly looks like even more of a Saturday morning cartoon character.

Here’s the question:

Given the expected brawl between those two cyborgs -- one of whom is promising to “pump up” Sacramento while the other vows to “terminate the Terminator” -- will anybody notice that a soft-spoken guy is off in the shadows, earnestly dissecting the nuts and bolts of state governance?

“They’re boring subjects,” Ueberroth said of the issues he plans to hammer, “but people better get it.” California, by his accounting, is in big trouble.

The focus will be almost exclusively on economic development, said Ueberroth spokesman Dan Schnur. Ueberroth will also talk about the state budget mess, education, transportation, health care and other subjects in need of emergency treatment. But job growth will get most of his attention.

Ueberroth says he became a serious student of California’s economy after being asked in 1992 to lead a bipartisan study in Sacramento. As he watched the budget meltdown and the partisan sniping this year, he decided to jump in, even though he was ambivalent about the Davis recall. That’s because he didn’t see anyone in the wings who might know what to do.

“As I watched this unfold, I realized that I’d been successful in the past in bringing Democrats and Republicans together. [Former Los Angeles] Mayor [Tom] Bradley was my partner -- I loved the man -- and it was his idea to do a private Olympics and we did it,” Ueberroth said.

“We wrestled and struggled and didn’t always agree, but we got it done, and that needs to be done now.... I don’t think a fistfight in Sacramento is going to do any good.”

Ueberroth didn’t want to talk political strategy, but it doesn’t take much computing to figure out what to expect in coming weeks. I’d look for Ueberroth to lie low for a while, at least until the Arnold tsunami begins to blow itself out and the fringe candidates spend their 15 minutes.

Then he will go where no candidate in recent memory has dared venture.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.