Author: John Wildermuth

Well, that was an endorsement.

Former President Bill Clinton was at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, giving an effusive blessing to Lt. Gov. John Garamendi’s run for Congress.

Clinton gave a long and personal salute to Garamendi, citing his years of work on health care and the environment.

“We need people in Congress like John Garamendi has been, not just in this campaign, but all his life,” Clinton said.

The former president’s ode to Garamendi stood in contrast to the rather more perfunctory public endorsement he gave to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in Los Angeles Monday.

Gavin Newsom’s day in the sun with former President Bill Clinton today in Los Angeles needs to be a turning point in the San Francisco mayor’s run for governor.

Sure, the June Democratic primary is still eight months away and about the only people paying any attention at all to the 2010 race are either running in it or writing about it.

But Attorney General Jerry Brown is working to build a look of inevitability around his purposeful non-campaign and Newsom has to do something quick to convince the opinion-makers inside and outside the party that he’s the real deal, a guy who realistically could be California’s next governor.

What he needs is an event, something that can grab public attention, swing his dismal poll numbers and convince Brown that he actually has to come out and play if he wants to win next June.

Enter Bill Clinton.

Break out another chicken suit. The campaign silly season has moved over to include the Democrats.

No sooner had Attorney General Jerry Brown announced he was opening an account to collect money for a likely run for governor than San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the other guy in the Democratic primary, was out with a plan for 11 debates, one in each of the state’s media markets – Hello, Eureka – starting, well, right now.

“Now that there are two candidates for governor, we owe the Democratic voters of California an opportunity to compare our visions and platforms side-by-side,’’ Newsom said in a press release.

Nice idea. Nice try. Never happen.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger got the all-clear last week from the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission on an ethics charge that has been hanging over his head since 2005.

It could have been worse. Last year, former Gov. Gray Davis was fined $4,950 by the FPPC for failing to report contributions to his 2003 recall campaign.

It only took four years to close Schwarzenegger’s case, which involved a financial agreement the former bodybuilder had with the publisher of some muscle magazines. That’s compared to five years for Davis, so there’s improvement, of a sort. But with more 2005 cases still in the pipeline, justice still isn’t necessarily swift at the state’s ethics watchdog agency.

Roman Porter, the FPPC’s executive director, doesn’t deny there’s a problem but insists things are getting better.

Attorney General Jerry Brown has quietly moved into the governor’s race, but don’t expect him to be opening any storefront campaign offices or hanging up the “Jerry for Governor” banners anytime soon.

While Brown hasn’t made any official announcement yet, the secretary of state’s office now lists him as a candidate for governor, which means he can start collecting money in governor’s-race-sized chunks.

The move comes on the heels of a new poll showing Brown with solid leads over all three Republican candidates for governor, former San Jose Rep. Tom Campbell, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. The same Rasmussen Poll, taken last week, showed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, so far the lone announced Democratic candidate, trailing all three Republicans in head-to-head match-ups.

For more than a year, the only question about Brown’s plans has been when he’d announce for governor, not if he was going to. At the state Democratic convention in March 2008, Brown already was dropping broad hints that he was planning to run for governor, the same office he held from 1975 to 1983 as the boy wonder of the political world.

To quote Yogi Berra, it was déjà vu all over again at the state GOP convention this weekend as the three candidates for governor insisted that the only problem facing California’s Republican Party is that it just hasn’t been conservative enough.

Never mind that the Democrats’ registration edge in the state is 44 percent to 31 percent and growing. Or that recent polls show that the increasing number of decline-to-state voters tends to identify with Democrats and, more importantly, vote like them. Or even that the distinctly liberal Barack Obama steamrolled the ever-so-conservative John McCain in California last November, 61 percent to 37 percent.

Nope, an even tougher conservative line is the key to victory in November 2010 and the candidates for governor were willing to play “Can You Top This?” in effort to show who’s the most conservative of them all.

“Don’t let people come in here and tell you that we need to reposition the Republican Party,” state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said in his speech to the convention Saturday. “And don’t let people come in here and tell you that we need to re-establish the Republican Party at the center. That is wrong, that is nonsense.”

When a campaign starts warning that “The only poll that counts is the one on election day,” political writers know that means the numbers are bad and getting worse.

So when a spokesman for Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said Thursday that the Republican primary for governor “is not going to be a fund-raising battle,’’ it’s a pretty good bet that the money race is not going well.

For Poizner, that’s an understatement. Since June 30, Poizner has reported receiving just two – as in one, two – contributions of more than $5,000, the amount that has to be immediately reported to California’s secretary of state.

The $50,000 he received is not only orders of magnitude less than the $2.5 million former eBay CEO Meg Whitman took in, but it’s also half as much as former Rep. Tom Campbell, typically the fiscal caboose in the governor’s race, collected over the same period.

Are you ready for Carlyfornia?

If you love Sen. Barbara Boxer’s “Fighting for You” slogan (Boxer. Fighting. Get it?) or the ever-popular “Boxer” shorts (available for $9 a pair on her campaign website), what’s not to like about Republican Carly Fiorina’s attempt to revise the English language in the name of campaign-speak?

Of course, as the rather strange website just put up by the Senate hopeful puts it, “It’s Carly vs. Boxer. Coming Soon?”

Question mark aside, the barebones, placeholder website is a real step toward an actual, no-fooling Senate campaign and may be designed to answer recent questions both here and elsewhere about just how serious the former Hewlett-Packard CEO is about challenging Boxer.

The timing of the website launch also isn’t an accident, coming just days before this weekend’s state GOP convention in Indian Wells.

Anyone interested in the potential problems of a part-time Legislature should take a look at the bust of former San Francisco Mayor John Shelley, just inside the main entrance at City Hall.

The words carved into the stone call Shelley “A True Representative of the People,” and list his single term as mayor from 1964-68, his seven terms in Congress and his service in the state Senate from 1939 to 1946.

Since those were the years of a part-time Legislature, it also lists his full-time job as president of the San Francisco Labor Council from 1937 to 1948. After he left the Legislature, Shelley was president of the California State Federation of Labor until he was elected to Congress.

So you have a state legislator who at the same time was drawing a full-time salary as one of California’s most powerful labor leaders.

Anyone see the potential for conflict there?