Angelides Campaign in Need of Star Power

I’m out here on the stump with Phil Angelides. You’ve heard of him, right?

We’re at Los Angeles Valley College, where the Democratic candidate for governor is telling a small room of students and area residents he’s going to beat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. Fortunately, I don’t gamble.

But I checked and there were more people in the cafeteria than there were watching Angelides, and this is a problem the man has had all along.

He seems to recognize that, which must explain why he made the desperate and idiotic decision to appear on the Adam Carolla radio show Thursday morning. Having criticized Gov. Schwarzenegger for inappropriate remarks about ethnicity and women, Angelides found himself on a show that makes inappropriate remarks about ethnicity and women.

His own daughter came in for some of the treatment, which brought a mild objection from Angelides. Bad move there. Had he stood up and cold-cocked the host, he might have won a few new fans, if not an invitation to Jay Leno’s late-night show.

But back to the Valley event. Sharon Ford said she had to drag her retired husband, Denly, off the couch and escort him across the street to see Angelides, even though Denly had already voted absentee for the Democrat.

Agi Kessler, first vice-chair of the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley, asked Angelides a softball question (why is his excellent record on the environment and healthcare distorted by the governor?) and thought he handled it well. But she admits there’s something lacking.

“I do believe Arnold’s media power is huge and he has a media machine behind him that is very, very savvy, which I don’t think Phil has,” Kessler said.

So how did it come to this? How did a Republican governor who was in his political grave early this year end up making his Democratic opponent look like a dead man walking?

That’s the question I took first to the Valley and then to a luncheon in Monterey Park, where Angelides spoke to a couple of hundred East Los Angeles business leaders.

Let’s review what we know about the hole the governor dug himself before his remarkable turnaround:

He promised to use his own money to campaign and then set fundraising records.

He promised to stop borrowing and then asked us to borrow unprecedented amounts.

He vowed to get special interests out of the game and then handed public policy over to the highest bidders.

He called for a spirit of bipartisanship and then resorted to schoolyard name-calling.

He bullied and belittled nurses, teachers and public safety workers in last November’s special election.

Stunning, but that’s not even all of it. Yet Schwarzenegger is on top with less than three weeks to go, and he’s pulled this off in a state with vastly more Democrats than Republicans.

Magic? Makeup? Is he that good? Is Angelides that bad?

Yeah, all of that. And more.

Let’s not forget that state Democratic leaders were in the emergency room when Arnold was fading fast. Instead of putting a boot to his neck and finishing him off, they applied the defibrillators that brought him back from the dead.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa were among those who buddied up with Arnold and for all intents and purposes tossed Angelides under the bus. They figured they could advance their own agenda -- as well as their own careers -- by aiding the governor’s miraculous reinvention as a centrist.

Angelides didn’t help himself in that bloody primary shootout with challenger Steve Westly. And it’s not as if he’s managed to avoid the sleaze factor his whole career. To name one example, he’s the self-congratulatory environmentalist who campaigned for coastal protection while grabbing $143,200 from developers who bulldozed the Dana Point headlands.

So there he was, limping along so noticeably that Democratic donors hid their checkbooks, and then Arnold delivered another blow. The governor used an unexpected tax revenue windfall to replace the education funding he’d stolen previously, knocking another wheel off the Angelides campaign wagon.

It’s been remarkable, one wag told me. Schwarzenegger has systematically “demotivated” Angelides supporters, and more important, their donors.

OK, understood.

But it’s not as if Angelides doesn’t have a vision (restoring California’s place as the land of milk and honey), a plan (cutting corporate tax loopholes, taxing the wealthy, dropping the cost of college and giving breaks to those who earn less than six figures) and a good California story (he’s the grandson of immigrant grandparents who spoke no English but worked their fingers to the bone, and he’s the millionaire son of a father who went to UC Berkeley when it was free).

And yet in the Valley, Angelides was trying to charge up supporters with the scintillating news that one poll had him down only seven points. He wisely failed to mention other polls, which have him in flames.

Angelides, by the way, is good in person if not on television. Unfortunately good isn’t good enough. He needs to be “wow,” because his opponent is larger than life.

“As a society, we’re all so star-struck,” said Kessler, who can’t believe the free pass Arnold’s supporters have given him for all his flip-flops. “Schwarzenegger uses language that appeals to a lot of people. It’s over-the-top ‘Terminator’ language, and I think people like that. It’s the way a lot of young people talk. I think that for many people, voting is a visceral thing rather than an intellectual exercise.”

There’s a reason this bugs Kessler.

“I come from Eastern Europe and to my family, being able to vote was so important, and to vote in an informed way. I wonder if people here are asleep at the wheel. Do they know the candidates and what they’re saying? Do they even know what the propositions are when they go into voting booths?”

She’s asking an awful lot of us, isn’t she?