Hey, the legislative conference committee signed off on all five water bills Wednesday, but the Senate still didn’t do anything on the prison bill.
Is anyone listening out there? Hello? Hello?
Way back in the day, newspapers had a whole category of news that was dubbed DBI or “Dull, But Important.”
That included things like council meetings, planning and infrastructure concerns, budgets of all sorts and, yes, most of what comes out of the state capital every day.
The idea was that while readers might not care much about that stuff, it was important, dammit, and there was an obligation to put it in the paper with a screaming headline designed to convince people to pay attention.
Let’s call it the eat-your-vegetables style of journalism.
Then there’s that whole other group of stories that can be characterized as NRVIBBATF, or “Not Really Very Important But Boy Are They Fun.”
Hello, Assemblyman Mike Duvall.
Everyone loves a good sex scandal and when you can get a dash of hypocrisy thrown in – not to mention sound and video – so much the better.
KCAL-TV in Los Angeles broke the story Tuesday night, reporting how the very married Orange County Republican passed the down time at a committee hearing by regaling a fellow legislator with an, ahem, extremely explicit description of how he had spent the previous day with a female lobbyist.
Unluckily for the 54-year-old Duvall, former mayor of Yorba Linda, the microphone in front of him was still hot. By the time he finished chatting about his special friend’s “little eye-patch underwear,’’ how he was “getting into spanking her,” and his “hot” other girlfriend, he had both torpedoed his political career and guaranteed that the video of that July 8 hearing of the Assembly Appropriations Committee would move to the top of the California Channel charts (Hint: the good stuff is about 29 minutes in).
Duvall also was helpful enough to include sufficient information to identify Ms Eye-Patch as a lobbyist for Sempra Energy, which is convenient, given that Duvall is vice-chair of the Assembly Utilities Committee, which deals with legislation affecting the Southern California utility company.
At first, Duvall tried to tough it out, apologizing for his remarks in what “I believed to be a private conversation.” But after he was quickly stripped of both his GOP caucus and Assembly duties, he bowed to the inevitable and resigned, saying that his “inappropriate comments have become a major distraction.”
No kidding. Instead of working on the crush of bills that have to be dealt with before the session ends Friday, both Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, the GOP minority leader, found themselves at the center of a sleazy sideshow that instantly became just about the only topic of political conversation both inside and outside the Capitol.
And the fun isn’t over. Not only will the Assembly Ethics Committee take a look at Duvall’s actions, but a variety of progressive groups also are calling on Attorney General Jerry Brown to open a criminal investigation.
Duvall’s very public record as an anti-gay marriage, family values conservative is raising even more hoots from Democrats and gay rights activists and bloggers. It’s a political gift that will keep on giving.
Then, of course, there were the media efforts to describe Duvall’s comments in a way that wouldn’t get them shut down. The comments were “salacious” and “locker room bragging,” according to the Sacramento Bee, The Los Angeles Times called them “explicit,” “graphic” and “uninhibited” while The Associated Press limited itself to “racy.” For anyone reading the unexpurgated version of the remarks, the words “crude,” “gross” and “unbelievably sophomoric” probably come to mind.
Legislators can hope that Duvall’s story is a one-day wonder that will disappear now that he has hopped a plane back to Orange County and obscurity, but that’s not likely. Sex sells and if it was a great story today, it will probably be just as good tomorrow. And maybe the day after.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.