Dr. Frankenstein of California Politics Itches to Create Anew

Garry South, the man who turned the key in Gray Davis’ back and pointed him toward Sacramento, may soon be taking his act to presidential politics.

South, who recently returned from powwows in Washington, D.C., tells me he’s been approached by representatives of several Democratic candidates. He said he has made “no firm decisions yet,” but will do so “probably very soon.”

Now, then, is the time for all good Americans to ask a question of themselves:

Do we really want the guy who created Gray Davis to get anywhere near a presidential campaign?

Given today’s political climate and barring significant change, it’s going to take a miracle to beat President George W. Bush in the fall of 2004. And it’s not like anyone out there looks like the second coming of John F. Kennedy.

The Democratic candidates must be figuring that if South could get a cadaver like Davis elected -- not once, but twice -- there’s hope he can tap a pulse in one of them.

He didn’t go to them, South says. They came to him.

“I had actually decided against getting involved in primaries,” South said, “and then I changed my mind and met with some staffs.”

He was motivated in part by his dislike of Bush, and his belief that a candidate has an outside chance by going strong on national defense and homeland security while flogging the president over the economy.

South, who’s moving into a new house in Santa Monica, said he wouldn’t relocate to Washington and run the daily operation of a campaign. He’d travel occasionally, but stay in L.A. and serve as more of a long-distance consultant.

With the possibility of South moving on to bigger and better things, I began thinking about his legacy in California politics. If he’s going to get credit as the genius behind the success of Davis, he deserves at least a little blame for the governor’s failures, don’t you think?

You couldn’t take raw materials and create a more unlovable governor from scratch. Centrist to the point of spineless, Davis is now the subject of several recall efforts. His entire administration seems like one endless campaign for his own survival. And a gargantuan budget hole was dug on his watch, partly because Davis was too busy indulging his obsessive-compulsive fund-raising disorder.

For this, South gets called up to the Big Leagues?

South says Davis isn’t as bad as Californians think he is -- he’s a victim of fallout from the energy crisis and the bad economy. It doesn’t help, he added, that California voters are uninformed, tuned out, and respond to nothing but negative TV campaigns.

Here’s a thought: Maybe the reason they’re uninformed and tuned out is because they’ve been driven away by robotic candidates and cynical political advisors who always shoot for the lowest common denominator.

But back to the issue at hand, can a campaign consultant feel good about being the brains behind a guy who doesn’t stand for anything?

Some of South’s detractors think not.

“Garry South is Bobby Thompson,” one political consultant said, referring to the one-hit wonder whose 1951 homer lifted the Giants over the Dodgers. “He didn’t do anything before Gray Davis and he hasn’t done anything since.”

I guess you could say South banged a double off the wall last year when he orchestrated the ad campaign smearing former L.A. Mayor Dick Riordan in the Republican primary. But then, any lunkhead could have come up with such an obvious strategy. Torpedo Riordan, the more appealing GOP candidate, and that leaves Bill “Simple” Simon as the Davis opponent.

Wayne Johnson, a Republican consultant, said South deserves his due. Bashing Riordan wasn’t brilliant, he said, but it was bold.

“His job was to get Davis elected, and he succeeded,” said Johnson. “He understood his candidate’s weaknesses, one of which was that he had no strengths in the last election.”

Given this keen understanding of the governor’s shortcomings, you can understand why Davis wanted South to hold his hand a while longer, especially with recall campaigns underway. South has been more than just a campaign strategist, he’s been a close and trusted advisor, even if the advice was always the same: Get more money.

But South was ready to clear out and head for greater glory, which rubs one political consultant the wrong way.

“He’s a voracious self-promoter,” the consultant said of South.

“The one thing you’re responsible for is now the most unpopular governor in the history of mankind, and you want to take a walk and say it’s not my problem?”

I’d walk, too, if I were South, even if I ended up stuck with a presidential candidate who’s going nowhere. In fact, I’d run, just like a reckless driver might run from the scene of a horrible accident he’d caused.

“I ran his campaigns,” South said defensively, speaking of Davis. “Not his government.”

Fair enough. But what exactly was the difference?

*

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes .com.