Carona Is Seeing the Downside of His Job

I don’t know that he ever did, but there probably were moments in the last couple of years when Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona contemplated the problems his law-enforcement colleague Tony Rackauckas was having over in the district attorney’s office -- grand jury investigations, underlings dumping on him, allegations of conflict of interest.

By contrast, Carona has had an amazingly smooth ride. As he watched Rackauckas, who came into office on a wave of goodwill then was forced to squirm under the spotlight, Carona might well have thought, “Hey, better him than me.”

Rackauckas was far from the first local official to battle bad press, in-house insurrections or the whiff of scandal. His predecessor in the D.A.’s office was Mike Capizzi, who ended his political career being eaten alive by the Republican Party regulars who once supported him. And Carona certainly remembers that Brad Gates, the man he followed in the Sheriff’s Department, fired one of his top assistants over a sex-harassment scandal.

But as those men wobbled, Carona danced. Now, it’s Carona’s turn for 15 minutes of the kind of fame you don’t want.

For a guy who has mostly made friends with all the right people in his six years in office, the next few weeks may set the course of Carona’s political future.

Right now, things are upside down for him. His campaign manager and close political ally, George Jaramillo, is under investigation by the grand jury and has drawn the attention of the FBI, which raided his office last week. Carona has fired Jaramillo, thereby severing one personal friendship that had frayed in recent months.

And while it’s far from clear what, if anything, Jaramillo may have done that’s illegal, even the hint of scandal taints Carona -- if only because he put much of his own credibility on the line as sheriff to get Jaramillo a high-ranking job in the department. The general tenor of the suspicions surrounding Jaramillo is that he used his job for his own ends. If so, it is fair to raise questions about Carona’s judgment in picking a friend for a key law-enforcement position.

Jaramillo has proclaimed his innocence but acknowledged that he and Carona are estranged. He has said, in so many words, that Carona has betrayed his loyalty.

That’s a long way from their relationship in 1998, when Carona -- the former county marshal chided as being a law-enforcement lightweight during the campaign -- won the sheriff’s race with Jaramillo helping call the shots as campaign manager.

A strange business, politics. If your enemies don’t bring you down, your friends might.

It’s now clear that Carona made that calculation last week when he fired Jaramillo. The two had increasingly bumped heads in recent months, Jaramillo said, but it’s obvious that Carona also concluded that Jaramillo had become politically radioactive.

The most recent media reports have raised questions about a lavish birthday party for Carona thrown by someone who wanted the department’s business. However this turns out, the sheriff is no longer dancing.

He’s built his reputation as a square-shooter and consensus builder, impressing county supervisors and state GOP regulars as someone who doesn’t steamroll his way to what he wants. He’s come across as a guy who enjoys the job and remained above the roughhousing and ugliness that seems to define politics these days.

If those images were once real, they’re being redefined now.

Like political powerhouses Rackauckas, Gates and Capizzi before him, Carona finally has been introduced to that side of public office that can sour you in a big hurry.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.