Fishhook Baited for Jerry Brown?

Jerry Brown, you listening?

I just had former state Sen. Chuck Poochigian in here calling you out.

The Republican candidate for California attorney general, a onetime Fresno farm boy, swaggered into my office last week and said, in so many words, that he couldn’t think of anyone in the world less suited for the job of top cop than you.

Fickle, erratic, opportunistic, a hopeless softie. He called you all that and more. He even attacked you with your own words.

“He has said in the past that it was OK to be an anarchist,” Poochigian said, aghast at the very thought of such wifty, tie-dyed insurrection. “Well, do you know the definition of anarchy?”

Yes, I think I do. But I didn’t want to step on Poochigian’s momentum.

“It’s the absence of law,” he said with disgust.

Good lord, Jerry. Total lawlessness?

Sounds like the streets of Oakland under Mayor Brown’s watch, where the bodies are piling up faster than Poochigian’s press releases.

“Sadly, this week Oakland reached a grim milestone as the city recorded its 100th homicide,” Poochigian said in one such release.

But before the ink was dry, the tally was up to 102.

That’s “a 70% increase over the 60 murders recorded in all of 1999, Mayor Brown’s first year in office, with 3 1/2 months left in the year,” says the press release.

I guess this is what happens when you’re soft on crime, anti-death penalty and out to lunch. On that last point, here’s an observation from Poochigian campaign guru Ken Khachigian:

“His gut is on the Michael Moore, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda fringe of California politics. He’s always been there, and it was somewhat modified whenever he ran for election. He would veer to the middle a little bit to look halfway moderate, but every instinct of his is on the kooky left.”

Maybe so, but I’m going to confess something here:

I like Jerry Brown, flaws, flip-flops and all. He’s always been good for sideways thinking and more important, he’s good copy, as they say.

Can you imagine the fun we’d be in for with him and Gov. Schwarzenegger trading blows in Sacramento, one in a Hummer and the other in a used hybrid?

With Schwarzenegger carrying water for California’s corporate captains, and Brown gunning for them like Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer has in New York, we’d have a collision of two of the most entertaining political personalities in state history.

But can Jerry, even with all his name recognition in a majority Democratic state, just assume he’s a shoo-in?

Probably. He’s got some ammunition of his own. Let’s remember that Chuck once opposed a ban on .50-caliber sniper rifles.

Wait a minute. Did I say .50-caliber sniper rifles?

Are there elephants in Fresno?

Oh well, you can’t say we don’t have a distinct choice in this race. So can you blame me for wishing this was a closer contest than it really is?

Khachigian admits his guy, despite being a widely respected straight shooter in Sacramento, is looking at an uphill fight. But they’ve got a plan, and it goes something like this:

They take Khachigian’s fishhook theory of GOP campaigning in California, sending Poochigian out on a trail that begins in the northern Central Valley, drops south through the middle of the state all the way to San Diego, then curves east through the Imperial Valley and hooks victory in the Inland Empire, or something like that.

It’s turf where law-and-order Poochigian’s three-strikes speeches may rally the believers.

They’re also counting on a belly-flop by Phil Angelides, the Democratic challenger to Schwarzenegger. If he has no shot at winning, maybe the Democrats will just stay home in droves on election day or decide Jerry Brown has already done enough tilting at windmills and needs to go find honest work somewhere.

Khachigian, conveniently, had a few suggestions on that note.

“If the guy was running for poet laureate or head of the parks and recreation commission or ports commissioner in Long Beach, he’d be qualified. But the least likely job for him is attorney general. This is a guy who’s been against the will of the people on the central law-and-order issue in the whole rubric, and that’s the death penalty.”

That issue is a perfect example of a historic Brown weakness: He can talk a good game, but his spine turns to jelly now and then, as it has on capital punishment. He once said we ought to televise executions as a way to generate opposition to them, but given majority opinion in California, he’s practically wearing an executioner’s hood during the current campaign.

To wit, Point 4 on his statement of candidacy:

“To vigorously discharge all the responsibilities of the attorney general’s office to enforce California laws, including the death penalty.”

I put in a call to Brown’s campaign office, hoping to provoke Jerry into trading a few blows with Chuck.

Unfortunately, Brown didn’t get back to me. Maybe he thinks his current TV campaign is enough, with attacks on Poochigian for being too extreme for California on abortion rights, stem cell research and all the rest.

Too extreme? Poochigian asks.

He hands me a packet with a long list of tributes from Democratic legislators that read like entries in a high school yearbook.

“You really are the consummate gentlemen, the consummate legislator ... and I wish you well in all that you do, including in November,” said Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland).

You out there, Jerry? If you’re not too busy at the morgue, give me a call.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re Jerry Brown and he’s Chuck Poochigian. Don’t get too confident, though, or you may end up on the end of his fishhook.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez