Ah, politics. The clash of ideas, the roar of the crowds and the whining of the candidates.
There’s nothing like calling a press conference and tossing out some angry accusations to brighten a slow news day and maybe grab some free publicity.
And if nothing comes of the charges, hey, at least the name gets spelled right.
For years, the accepted way to end one of those table-pounding news conferences was to hand out a copy of a letter that was being sent to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, demanding that the other side stop its terrible and illegal TV ad/fund-raising letter/hidden arrangement/dirty trick/mean talk.
There was absolutely no down side to that letter, either, since the FPPC was typically so far behind in its watchdog duties that the election would be over long before anyone even looked at the letter, much less took action.
But times have changed since Roman Porter took over as the executive director of the campaign cops. Now the FPPC deals with the complaints in time for them to become an embarrassment to the campaign that filed them.
Last month, for example, Meg Whitman charged that a union-backed group running nasty radio ads against her was illegally – and secretly – linked to Jerry Brown, who’s going to be the Democratic candidate for governor.
Two weeks back, her campaign team waved that FPPC letter again, this time charging that Brown’s call for union groups and the Democratic Party to attack Whitman proved that evil doings were afoot.
Ah, no. “There was insufficient evidence in the complaint, and continues to be insufficient evidence … to support this allegation,” Adrianne Korchmaros, an FPPC consultant, said in a letter to the Whitman campaign.
Then there was Janice Hahn’s complaint that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was illegally taking money for his run for lieutenant governor from people who already had given him big to his crashed-and-burned campaign for governor.
Nice try. The lieutenant governor’s contest is a new race, so the money clock is reset to zero, which means Newsom hasn’t violated any rules, Porter said in a letter to Hahn’s people.
Hahn, the Los Angeles councilwoman who’s running against Newsom for the Democratic nomination, should have seen this one coming. Porter said the same thing to reporters the day she filed her complaint.
Not all the complaints end up in the circular file. In 2008, for example, Democratic Assemblyman Mark Leno filed an FPPC complain against state Sen. Carole Migden, charging that she had illegally transferred money from a previous campaign into her re-election effort and had mishandled nearly $400,000 in campaign credit card charges.
Migden eventually agreed to pay a $350,000 fine to settle the FPPC complaint. Leno used the issue to thump Migden in the Democratic primary and take her Senate seat.
But even in a winning case like Leno’s, the FPPC complaints from campaigns often are born more of politics than any abiding concern for the principles of good government.
Earlier this week, for example, supporters of the Prop. 11 redistricting reform initiative passed in 2008 filed an FPPC complaint charging that Los Angeles Rep. Howard Berman and his brother, political consultant Michael Berman, were the people secretly behind the effort to qualify an initiative to repeal Prop. 11.
The Bermans denied everything. But whatever the FPPC finally decides, the Prop. 11 folks got their headline and a reminder to the voters that there’s still a fight going on.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.