Time for a Turnover: Carona Should Go

I’ve written too many nice things about Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona to turn on him just yet. Nobody likes a fair-weather columnist.

But as Angel Manager Mike Scioscia said last week about one of his struggling pitchers, “Nobody’s rope is infinite.”

In other words, Scioscia sent the message that he won’t tolerate his pitcher’s foibles forever. Angel fans probably would agree -- if the pitcher can’t get it together, get him out of there and bring in someone else.

I wonder if Orange County voters pay the same kind of attention to their public officials.

Actually, I don’t wonder. I’m sure they don’t.

Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas is living proof of that. He was dogged with one controversy after another during his first term, including admonishments from a county grand jury and the state attorney general. And how did he do when up for reelection? He won in a landslide.

Was that because everyone who voted for him pored through the Rackauckas record? Doubtful.

Carona is even better situated. Unlike Rackauckas, lots of people do have a sense of him. They’ve seen him on TV in high-profile criminal cases and, by most accounts, they like what they’ve seen.

The question of the day, though, is whether they’ve looked past those TV moments and contemplated what it means that the sheriff’s hand-picked and former No. 2 man, George Jaramillo, faces criminal charges for things Carona says he knew nothing about.

We don’t hold CEOs responsible -- nor should we -- for misdeeds the night custodian might commit. We do deserve answers, though, when the corporate CEO’s most trusted lieutenants, say, cook the books. But what we typically get from such CEOs is what former Enron head Kenneth Lay has said in response to criminal charges against him: I didn’t know what was going on.

Jaramillo faces charges that, while Carona’s assistant sheriff, he improperly used his position in dealings with a local businessman. If true, he was doing it right under Carona’s nose.

Carona, who it must be underscored hasn’t been charged with anything, has denied knowing about Jaramillo’s alleged misdeeds. But even if that is true, there’s no escaping that he alone tapped Jaramillo for the No. 2 job. And if Jaramillo is cleared, Carona still has a problem because he’s made it clear by firing him that he thinks Jaramillo did something wrong.

Isn’t it obvious that a sheriff needs better radar than Carona showed?

This would mean much less if Carona hadn’t announced recently that he’ll run for a third term in 2006. That upends what he said when he first ran in 1998 and repeated in 2003: that he’d serve only two terms.

In a refreshingly honest analysis of his job, Carona said in a 2003 interview: “This office, there’s so much power given to whoever holds it. It needs to turn over so you don’t feel like you own the place.”

That’s especially insightful and a needed perspective from the sheriff, given that Rackauckas has also said he’ll run for a third term in 2006. He should be a shoo-in.

The near-certain scenario, then, is that both the district attorney and the sheriff will spend 12 years in office by the time their third terms end. For the two most powerful posts in county government and with the whiff of incestuous politics between the two offices already in the air, that’s four years too many.

At least one of them needs to go. Rackauckas won’t. Carona should.

It doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. It doesn’t mean he was a bad sheriff. But by his own logic, it’s the decision that makes sense for county government.

If not, our destiny is that Rackauckas and Carona soon will own the place.

And even if they were the two most responsible and intelligent public officials ever to come down the pike, that’d be giving them the keys and asking for trouble.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.