Clone Bill Jones

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting copious unasked-for advice on the sort of person he should appoint to succeed the disgraced Kevin Shelley as secretary of state: Pick an old pro who could do the job for a couple of years and then bow out. Pick a sharp young Republican who could use it as a steppingstone to statewide elected office. Pick an up-and-coming Republican Latino. Or a nonpartisan chosen purely for being good at overseeing elections (the main job of the California secretary of state). The flood of advice is a measure of the strangeness of the job itself.

If the state’s term-limits law didn’t appear to prohibit former GOP Secretary of State Bill Jones from being reappointed, his name would be on everyone’s tongue. Once elected, he suppressed his partisan instincts and did the job like a good-government geek, exactly the kind of person Shelley wasn’t.

The mentioners in Sacramento have brought up former Republican state Sens. Bruce McPherson of Santa Cruz and Ross Johnson of Irvine. They both have a reputation for fairness and would be unlikely to seek to stay in the office, and thus would be more palatable to legislative Democrats.

Schwarzenegger would face a fight should he try to replace Democrat Shelley with a Republican politician who would run for reelection. Former Gov. George Deukmejian learned this lesson in 1987 when he nominated a firebrand Republican congressman, Dan Lungren, as state treasurer when Democratic leader Jesse Unruh died in office. Schwarzenegger could probably force his choice through the Democratic-controlled Legislature, but he has bigger fights pending and might not relish another.

If Schwarzenegger were to follow a completely different track, he could look for a professional election-wrangler. We would suggest the skilled Los Angeles County registrar of voters, Conny McCormack, a proven administrator as well as an expert on voting methods and machines.

Voters might take a moment to think about this downside of term limits, which kicked out the near-ideal Jones from a job that brought him praise and satisfaction. It’s enough to turn the mind to human cloning.