Eat yer heart out, Woodstein!

MY LIFE is about to change. I do not know if there will be Pulitzers, or movies in which I am played by Robert Redford, or parties at the L.A. Press Club where they serve those little lamb chop hors d’oeuvres. Or the tiny quiches. The tiny quiches will be fine too.

I have a political scoop. I got it when I wandered into a boring executive committee meeting at the state GOP convention last weekend at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel. My years of reporting led me there when I noticed that this was the only meeting serving lunch.

I was picking at a salad, bored out of my mind, when I overheard the speaker mention how horrible it would be if the media ever got into a meeting like this. That’s when I knew to start taking notes.

Basically, state party officials have discovered that if they can get registered Republicans who are low-propensity voters -- ones who go to the polls 30% to 70% of the time -- to declare to the state that they are “permanent absentee voters,” they’re a whole lot more likely to vote by mail.

A test run in Butte County in the Central Valley showed that permanent absentees will vote 90% of the time. I figure it will be even higher in the rest of the state, where there are things to do on a Tuesday.

The party is going to spend a lot of their Arnold Schwarzenegger-raised money convincing these 700,000 Republicans that voting from their own home is even more pleasurable than the thrill of returning to a high school gymnasium. Each of these people will be contacted 10 times -- by mail, phone or e-mail -- until they drop their ballots in the mailbox or get so annoyed that they become Democrats.

Having surreptitiously copied down this information, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Do I put on a hat and call it in to my editor from a pay phone? Do I blog it? Do I offer to suppress it in exchange for a promise from the governor to announce something important in this column? Something having to do with me getting seven figures to write “Twins 2”?

Luckily for me, there was a seminar Saturday morning at 9:30 called “The ABCs of Political Reporting.” Such is my commitment to investigative journalism that I woke up on time.

It only took me 10 minutes or so to figure out that everyone else in the room was a county treasurer, and that the “political reporting” they were talking about had to do with telling the Federal Election Commission about financial contributions. In my defense, it is surprising just how much political reporters look like county treasurers.

Leaving the seminar, my political instincts led me to a room where they were handing out chocolates. Labeled Operation Sleeping Giant, the space had been converted into a giant GOP phone bank, one of 48 in the state and 10 in Los Angeles. This was where I could see my scoop in action, watching staffers convert voters into permanent absenteers. And eat free chocolate.

Better yet, I discovered that reporters weren’t allowed in there either. So I immediately offered to man a phone and was handed a stack of names and phone numbers of San Fernando Valley GOP members and instructed to scare up volunteers.

The Republicans I was able to reach all had a lot in common, in that they were incredibly old. One gentleman in Sherman Oaks told me that he couldn’t volunteer because his time is spent taking care of his grandchildren, which I found hard to believe because they were probably in their late 40s. Still, he was happy to chat because there aren’t many Republicans to talk to in his neighborhood. When I asked if the neighbors had ever toilet-papered his house for his beliefs, he said no. “I belong to the NRA, and they know that too.” We bonded in a way that men can only do when talking about scaring Democrats with lethal force.

I asked him what kind of guns he kept in the house, and he said that they were antiques from the Civil War. “They haven’t been fired in 140 years, but [the neighbors] don’t know that,” he said. Sherman Oaks liberals, we agreed, sure are stupid about firearms.

I wasn’t able to get a single volunteer, while right in front of me Tony Strickland, the GOP candidate for state controller, was signing up talent like mad, charming people by telling them about his campaign. And to my surprise, none of them asked him the most obvious question. “Hardly anyone asks what a controller does,” Strickland told me. “People feel embarrassed that they don’t know.” I laughed in a way that implied I wasn’t one of those people.

Worse yet, Schwarzenegger came into the room, made a few calls and got every single person to volunteer. He’s famous and charming and positive and very tan and, despite his Austrianness, very Californian. He’s the kind of guy who, even if you wouldn’t go out and vote for him, you’d at least mail a letter saying you would.

I felt bad that my reporting skills were about to take his entire campaign down. It’s an ugly profession I’ve gotten myself into.