Author: John Wildermuth

John Perez said all the right things when he officially took over Monday as Assembly speaker. But it’s going to take more than banning legislators on the Assembly floor from taking text messages from lobbyists to fix California’s problems.

If you go by the speech Perez gave, he recognizes that Job One both for him and the Assembly is to get something, anything, done.

“When it is my turn to step down as Speaker and turn over the gavel, I intend to look back and say that we delivered,” the Los Angeles Democrat promised.

The good news for Perez is things have got to get better. For too long, the Assembly has been a hyper-partisan graveyard where budget legislation went to die.

If people are wondering why Meg Whitman, leading the GOP race for governor by 30 or 40 percentage points in the polls, would bother slamming Steve Poizner with a batch of attack ads, there’s a simple answer:

Why not?

In most California campaigns, money drives strategy, especially when it comes to the millions that are spent on a TV ad campaign. The bank balance determines when a campaign starts its advertising, where the ads run and how often voters are going to see them.

While a campaign team may want to go on the attack immediately, finances typically require them to hold off until they finish their run of ads introducing the candidate to the voters.

But with Whitman talking about putting $150 million of her own money into her run for governor, her campaign team is like the fat guy choosing desserts at the buffet: “I believe I’ll have them all.”

Well that cleared everything up.

Marty Wilson, a top aide to GOP Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina, denied he ever called Tom Campbell an anti-Semite, but he had no problem suggesting that the rival Senate candidate hobnobs with terrorists.

“Tom Campbell has a record that is decidedly anti-Israel and has some very questionable associations,” Wilson told reporters on a conference call Thursday. “The voters of California will decide whether he’s sympathetic to terrorism.”

Of course Team Fiorina will be doing all it can to help voters make that decision as the GOP Senate race goes nuclear.

The hastily called phone conference came after Bruce McPherson, former California secretary of state, told the Los Angeles Times that Wilson had urged him in a call not to support Campbell because “he’s an anti-Semite.”

Janice Hahn and Gavin Newsom already have scored a surprise political victory. They’ve convinced California newspapers to actually write about the lieutenant governor’s race.

Here’s hoping they enjoy it because the moment won’t last for long.

What you have here is Newsom, the San Francisco mayor, doing his very public Hamlet imitation: To run or not to run, that is the question.

In the other corner you have Hahn, the Los Angeles councilwoman, treating Newsom as if he’s the political equivalent of King Kong and her top job is to shoot him off the Empire State Building.

The fun started earlier this month when a San Francisco pollster released a survey that showed Newsom running well ahead of Hahn and Central Valley state Sen. Dean Florez in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.

Do you know that Meg Whitman wore a designer coat to a NASCAR race?

Or that Pete Wilson is a hypocrite on the question of tax returns?

What about the fact that Jerry Brown has worked to stymie job growth in California for 40 years?

Welcome to the political silly season, where no charge is too dumb to throw out and hope somebody writes about it.

This isn’t about the big stuff, the stories and charges that show up in the multi-million-dollar TV and radio ad campaigns. That stuff is vetted, focus-grouped and studied to a fare-thee-well before it ever makes the airwaves. Those are the hoped-for game-changers, stuff that can turn a campaign around, so they’re not taken lightly.

Ring the church bells and start the parade! The worst is over for the California economy!

And how do we know this? Simple. That’s what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Of course that “happy days are here again” chatter is going to leave the governor facing a major league sales job when it comes to convincing already-skeptical Democrats in the Legislature that they need to make even deeper cuts to California’s social services.

After all, who needs the grief – and nasty floor battles – a debate over those cuts is sure to bring when at least some of California’s current fiscal problems may simply go away if the Legislature waits long enough?

Meg Whitman is running a full-court press to force Steve Poizner out of the Republican race for governor, which shows just how concerned she is about an upcoming series of Democratic attack ads.

On Wednesday, for example, her campaign announced that Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo, the former minority leader, had dropped his endorsement of Poizner and was moving into the Whitman camp.

A trio of GOP legislators, state Sen. Mark Wyland of Escondido, Assemblyman Jim Nielsen of Yuba City and Assemblywoman Connie Conway of Tulare, also magically picked Wednesday as the day to urge Poizner to “do the right thing, step aside and join us in supporting Meg.”

Whitman even took what’s been a rare move for her by actually talking, however briefly, to a few California reporters this week.

“Democrats are worried about my candidacy,” she told KCBS radio in San Francisco.

If politics is an addiction, Gavin Newsom needs an intervention.

A few weeks after telling the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd that he was ready to finish his term as mayor of San Francisco and become “the clerk in a wine store,” Newsom was talking Tuesday about a run for lieutenant governor.

“I’m considering it,” he said in a City Hall news conference, admitting that a campaign for the office is a serious possibility.

This is the same Newsom who spent a year running for the Democratic nomination for governor, then dropped out last October, citing his responsibilities as a husband, father and mayor.

The decision was “made with the best intentions for my wife, my daughter, the residents of the city and county of San Francisco and California Democrats,” he said.

Maybe if someone could figure out how to turn a profit on political reform, it would have a better chance of making the ballot.

Backers of the effort to call a new state constitutional convention to update California’s creaky government machinery waved the white flag last week, admitting they couldn’t raise the cash to put their measures on the ballot.

“The money basically ran out,” said Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council, who came up with the convention plan. “I’m very sorry we had to call it quits.”

Wunderman and other convention backers remain convinced there’s a groundswell of support for wholesale reform of the state’s political system, but you couldn’t prove it by the campaign’s bank balance.