2 Find the Way From the Capitol to City Hall

The political road from Sacramento to Los Angeles is littered with the broken ambitions of former state legislators who tried, and failed, to make the leap between the Capitol and City Hall.

Former state Sens. Tom Hayden and David Roberti and former Assemblymen Scott Wildman and Carl Washington all launched campaigns for different seats on the City Council in 2001. All four lost.

That same year former state Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and state Controller Kathleen Connell ran for mayor of Los Angeles. Both lost.

Last year, Assemblyman Tony Cardenas ran for City Council. He lost.

Now, however, it appears the Sacramento jinx has been broken.

Although former Assembly members Rod Wright and Paula Boland both came up short in their contests for council seats Tuesday, Cardenas and Villaraigosa won their council elections in convincing fashion.

“The cycle has been broken in terms of Assembly members getting elected to city office,” said Miguel Contreras, head of the County Federation of Labor.

But Contreras said Cardenas and Villaraigosa may have found a key to breaking the so-called “curse of Sacramento.” The key, said Contreras, is giving voters a chance to get to know the candidates. “I guess the secret is that you have to try twice.”

The Politicians and the Indicted Professor

Former California congressman and Republican Senate candidate Tom Campbell is among several legislators who once received campaign donations from a controversial Palestinian professor who has since been indicted for alleged ties to Islamic Jihad.

The professor, Sami Al-Arian, also attended a White House meeting in June 2001 about Muslim matters. Campbell said that, in 1998, he and a number of co-sponsors introduced a bill to end the use of secret evidence against some jailed foreign-born men.

Campbell said a woman married to one of the men contacted him at the recommendation of constituents; she is the sister of the accused professor, who later contributed $1,300 to Campbell.

The bill ended up as an effort to make the same point by cutting the Justice Department’s budget by the amount it cost to keep the foreign men in jail.

“I said, ‘If you vote for this,” Campbell said, “you are sending as strong a signal as you can that no one should be put in jail on the basis of evidence they have not seen.’ ” The bill passed in the House but failed in the Senate.

After Campbell lost his bid for the U.S. Senate in 2000, the bill was reintroduced by Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr and Michigan Democratic Rep. David Bonior, but the matter was dropped after the Sept. 11 attacks and neither congressman remains in office.

From 1998 to 2000, records show, Al-Arian and his wife, Nahla, gave $7,700 to three Democratic and two Republican members of Congress.

Sour Simon Gives Business the Business

Republican businessman Bill Simon took some responsibility in a recent speech for his loss to Gray Davis in the November election for governor, but he also parceled out blame to many others, including some traditional GOP allies.

“I do regret some of the amateurish mistakes made in our campaign -- and as the candidate the responsibility for those mistakes rests with me,” Simon said in remarks posted on his Web site.

He blamed the media, which he said did not thoroughly cover the campaign, including 89 major policy speeches he made. “The media virtually ignored them, choosing instead to wallow in polls, personalities and campaign tactics,” he said.

Simon also put much of the blame on business, a traditional ally of the Republican Party.

“During the campaign last fall, an estimated 94% of the members of the Business Roundtable and the California Chamber gave money to Gray Davis, while 6% contributed to me,” Simon said. “This took place despite the fact that the Chamber of Commerce themselves characterizes 17 bills which Davis signed as job killers.”

He said Davis’ record “was known to these courageous members of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce.”

The criticism of California business has divided GOP leaders.

Shawn Steel, the former state Republican chairman, has been attacking the business groups for giving money to Democrats. But other state GOP leaders see that kind of criticism as counterproductive for the party. At the state Republican convention last month, they managed to kill a resolution that would have condemned the business groups for donating money to Democrats.

Inspector Schmitz Asked to Investigate

The Pentagon’s inspector general has been asked by three senators to investigate allegations that the Air Force Academy disciplined as many as 18 female cadets who reported being sexually harassed.

The inspector general is Joseph Schmitz, who himself went to the U.S. Naval Academy. His father was the late former Orange County congressman John Schmitz, a family-values John Birch Society stalwart who was later revealed to have had two children out of wedlock by a former student.

The late congressman’s daughter, former teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, was sentenced to prison in another notorious case for having sex with a sixth-grade student, by whom she has had two children.

Points Taken

* The latest whine-and-geez party to protest France’s opposition to war with Iraq was held in front of the French Consulate on Wilshire. A group of Republican activists dumped bottles of Bordeaux in the gutter as a boycott of all things Francaise. The California Young Americans for Freedom organized the event, held with the UCLA Bruin Republicans and the New York YAF chapter, which held its own dump-athon in front of the French Consulate in New York City.

* State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) had an idea for erasing California’s budget deficit, and he put it in writing recently to President Bush. “Dear Mr. President,” he wrote. “I read that you are working on giving up to $30 billion in cash and loans to Turkey in order to use that country as a staging area for a war against Iraq. Given the state of the economy and the state’s budget deficit, I am sure California would be willing to consider serving as a staging area, too, if we can get the same terms as Turkey, roughly $5 billion cash and the rest in loans and loan guarantees. Peace & friendship, John Burton.”

* A figure who became a hero to many in Orange County has been named by President Bush to be acting secretary of the Navy. Hansford T. “H.T.” Johnson, as the Navy’s assistant secretary for installations and the environment, was key in reaching an agreement with Irvine to sell land at the sprawling former El Toro Marine base for development while keeping the rest for parkland and sports fields.

You Can Quote Me

“The Bush administration EPA, that radical environmental force, is the one that is suing us. We should really ask ourselves why we should be fighting to the right of them.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti, noting with disbelief that the council is being challenged in court by the Republican administration’s Environmental Protection Agency for not doing enough to clean up Santa Monica Bay.

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Jean O. Pasco and Michael Finnegan contributed to this column. Columnist Patt Morrison is off.