The LA Times and others have been trying to get LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to say whether or not he’d be willing to go with Laura Chick’s much contested suggestion that the city’s gang intervention and prevention programs—and budget—be consolidated under the mayor’s office. But Antonio and his spokespeople have danced away from any kind of answer…..for a variety of political reasons. (Naturally.)

And so who finally got an answer out of AV as to whether he’d be willing to have LA’s gang efforts run out of his office?

Nope, it wasn’t the LA Times or the Daily News.

It was smart USC Annenberg grad student, Deborah Stokol.

Debbie isn’t my student. She’s in LA Citybeat news editor Alan Mittelstadt’s graduate journalism class.

The way she managed to snag an interview with Antonio was by showing up for the mayor’s regular once-a-week trip to City Hall on the metro.

It worked. You can read Debbie’s whole article after the jump, but here’s the section with the money quote:

Until now, the mayor has made equivocating noises regarding his true stance on the matter, saying he agreed with Chick but not indicating whether he really wanted the responsibility or not. But in between stepping off the bus and hopping onto the train, he announced he felt ready and willing to bear the burden of stopping gangs through the use of strict organization, financial investment and mentorship and rehabilitation programs.

“First of all, I support Controller Chick’s work,” he began. “I do think we need to consolidate and coordinate these programs, and I’m willing to accept the jurisdiction for these programs.”

Wooo-hooo! Brava Debbie for getting Antonio to actually say he’d was willing to let the gang programs live at his house.

Here’s the rest of Deborah Stokol’s story about her ride with the mayor:

Read the rest of this entry »

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No, I don’t mean the tragic spate of shootings that we’ve seen these past two weeks. I mean the escalating battles between City Controller Laura Chick, and City Councilman Tony Cardenas (and any number of other interested parties), about how the city ought to go about dealing with its gang problem—other than simply handing it to the cops. Again.

LA Times editorial writer Rob Greene had a good, unsigned editorial on the subject on Sunday, and Duke Helfand has a detailed follow-up in this morning’s paper.

I’m in the midst of a deadline so I’ll let the articles mostly speak for themselves.

The bottom line is, after two expensive studies (Chick’s the most recent), plus a slew of good national studies, we have enough information. Now we need some action.

But after a year of this nonsense, no one has managed to do anything but form more committees. Tony C.’s ad hoc committee on gangs has managed to form a sub committee that, in turn, managed to define what it meant by “gang intervention.”

That’s it. Seriously. In 11 months.

Plus we have Laura’s report, and Connie Rice’s report—both of which have value IF—and only if—we use them.

Sadly, the last I heard, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel said the Chick report—which recommended a gang department be formed under the aegis of the mayor’s office—-called for more committees.

Oh, yeah, we also have Jeff Carr the mayor’s gang czar, a nice, bright capable fellow who, to his credit, spends time in the various gang neighborhoods, and has gotten to know a lot of the players, but has no power. (Because the above persons are too busy fighting over it.) This means he’s sort of a committee unto himself.

Meanwhile the mayor’s MIA stumping 24/7 for Hillary in hopes of getting a cabinet position.

This needs to stop. All of it.

Kids are dying. The police can’t do it all, damn it. Grow up. Everybody pee on the various reports, if that makes you feel better. Then get on with it.

(More on all this as the days go by.)

photo of Homeboy Mural by Lucas Foglia

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Tuesday, the parents and teachers of three LAUSD high schools and some of the middle schools that feed into them, had the chance to vote on the issue of whether or not they wanted to be part of the “cluster” that would be under the future direction of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Out of the three highs schools, Roosevelt, Santee and Jordan, Santee and Roosevelt appear to have said yes to the plan, along with their middle schools. Jordan High School was still up in the air.

(Here’s the LA Times write up.)

But, although the vote seems to be going mostly the mayor’s way, one of the activist teachers involved told me that Antonio knocked the socks off exactly nobody with his grand vision when he came to speak at the three high schools. It’s not that people didn’t like his plan for the schools, said the teacher. “It’s that it wasn’t at all clear what his plan was.” Nevertheless, the teacher said, when it came time to vote the AGTBBTT factor kicked in: Anything’s Got to Be Better Than This.

The final vote tally should be available later today.

(photo by View Images)

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LA City Councilman, Bernard Parks has many good qualities. He’s very well liked by the South LA communities he represents, and makes a real effort to regularly get out among the ordinary people who elected him. He’s supportive of the various jobs programs around the city that help at risk young men and women with barriers to employment, and speaks eloquently in those programs’ behalf.

Plus, the man has has great cheekbones. (Okay, not one of the main traits one commonly demands of one’s Councilperson, but darned handy when he’s doing those requisite photo ops.)

BUT….and it’s a big but—Ex-LAPD-Chief-turned-Councilman Parks is near pathological in his behavior whenever the subject turns to LAPD’s present day Chief, Bill Bratton, or the Los Angeles Police Department, in general.

It’s as if Parks —normally a reasonable, intelligent, charming, savvy guy—-keeps an evil twin locked in his basement, a sort of menacing Creature of the Dark that is magically released to terrorize the local populace, whenever someone utters the fateful letters: L. A. P. D.

This Bad Bernie doppelganger had its most recent outing yesterday when Parks, who happens to be chairman of the Council’s budget committee, proposed that the money from city trash fee increases, that had been set aside to pay for hiring new LAPD Officers, be diverted to libraries and parks. Now I’m as much for supporting libraries and parks as the next person (actually, when it comes to libraries, probably more than the next person), but the rise in fees were sold specifically to Angelenos as a way to get more cops on the streets of a town that has one of the worst police-to-resident ratios of any big city in America.

The union—the Police Protective League-–was quite right this morning when it labeled the Parks-proposed move a bait and switch on Los Angeles homeowners who are, after all, the ones paying the increased fees, so their say-so ought to carry the day.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has threatened to veto any such proposal if the Council shows the bad sense to vote it through. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. (The issue is being discussed at the Council today.)

In the meantime, Bernie, seek therapy. I make that suggestion as a friend.

(Original, un-messed-with photo snatched from ViewImages.)

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…NOW IF ONLY THE ADULTS IN CHARGE WILL LISTEN.

Here’s the deal: A group of teenagers involved in a summer program at UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access spent most of June and July interviewing kids at some of the district’s most troubled high schools. Their aim was to find out why kids drop out, and what changes in the system might dissuade them from leaving.

Since the Los Angeles Unified School District is plagued with a dropout rate that hovers around fifty percent, this seemed like a worthy area of study.

The kids were directed in this project by the institutes’s head, Jeannie Oakes, an extremely smart woman who is also one of the state’s best known education researchers.

Oakes sent her new research teams-–all 10th and 11th graders—into East and South LA high schools like Locke, Roosevelt and Crenshaw, and told them to question students about what they believed was going wrong.

To better familiarize themselves with the stakes, the teams also studied the schools they visited before doing their field research. For example, about Roosevelt High School they learned, writes the Daily News….

…that 80 percent of nearly 2,000 ninth-graders surveyed four years ago said they had hopes of going on to college. Four years, later, only 39 of 100 students graduated. Even fewer were able to qualify for college.

The five teams presented their report on Friday to the mayor and his education advisors.

The common themes they found and the recommendations that resulted were as follows:

1. Hire more teachers “who care” and who relate individually to students.

2. Drastically reduce the number of kids in a classroom.

3. Stop promoting kids on to the next grade, when they’re failing the grade they’re in.

4. Make at least some class work relevant to the community life students see around them.

5. Understand that student safety—and the perception of safety-–is a huge factor when it comes to dropout causes. If kids don’t feel safe at school, or on their way to school, lots of students simply stop going.

As the LA Times noted:

The young researchers painted a grim picture of the downward spiral that often haunts dropouts: They said 80% of California’s prison population did not graduate from high school, a statistic that has appeared elsewhere in published reports. “You’re all sitting here listening to the research, but if you don’t do anything about it, then you’re part of the problem,” [15-year-old Carla] Hernandez, who researched Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles,

Smart kids.

Meanwhile the last I heard, the district’s big plan for combating drop out rates was to spend $8 million dollars on eighty “diploma project advisers” —whatever that means.

photo by Allen J. Schaben, LA Times

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Antonio Villaraigosa did not open the Contreras pool, but he definitely got the message, engaged in some fast footwork and announced today that……

….every day from tomorrow until September 3, vans will pick up kids (and accompanying adults) twice a day from the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex and shuttle them over to the Glassell Park pool or the Griffith Park Pool.

Okay, that works. A good compromise, actually.

See, Mr. Mayor, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Seriously, we cheer and applaud this move. Sometimes its the seemingly little things that let us know you’re paying attention to something other than…. well, you know.

Bottom line: we asked Antonio to be a hero. And, this time, while everyone else threw up their collective hands and said it was too hard, it cost too much money, the liability was too great, it couldn’t be accomplished that quickly….. he found a practical way to come through for the children of Los Angeles.

And he did it by the weekend—just like the community kids and their parents hoped he would.

Bravo.

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Object:Clinton’s man in California a pro at digging up dirt:/c/a/2007/05/12/MNGIMPQ12L1.DTL

Article:Clinton’s man in California a pro at digging up dirt:/c/a/2007/05/12/MNGIMPQ12L1.DTL

Article:Clinton’s man in California a pro at digging up dirt:/c/a/2007/05/12/MNGIMPQ12L1.DTL

Connoisseur of Dirt: Ace Smith

Ace Smith hung up on me twice this week. And I was trying to help him. I wanted to put to rest the theory that this master of opposition research and trusted Antonio adviser might have somehow inspired the rash of anti-Rocky stories that broke last month. We all know Rocky has plenty of enemies and a phone-book size list of others who wouldn’t mind embarrassing him. So I certainly don’t blame Ace when he dismisses as “speculative shit” my June 25 post on this topic, “The Antonio-Rocky Show: Winners, losers, but who’s the producer?”
All that aside, it would be nice if Ace could answer 10 simple questions so we could move on to refocusing the mayor’s attention on solving the city’s more pressing problems of failing schools, killer air pollution, lost and forlorn youth and our ever deepening problems with traffic and a skeletal public transportation system that moves too few people. We need a mayor who commands respect and admiration and gets action in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, not only in a Studio City bedroom. (Note to editorial writers at the L.A. Times: Send reinforcements, please. You’ve been silent now for 27 days since the mayor first announced the end of his marriage. Use your firepower and influence to restart the civic discourse on important themes, though you should implore the mayor to come clean on when his relationship started with First Lady wannabe Mirthala Salinas to see whether it helped the mayor win gushing coverage of his school takeover bill. Can you imagine the chorus of editorials if this were New York?)
And Ace, it’s not like I’m the only guy in town wondering whether trusted Antonio loyalists might be planting anti-Rocky stories to deflect attention from the mayor’s soap opera. Take a look at what Steve Lopez posted online the same day the Daily News’ Beth Barrett exposed secrets of the mayor’s love life.
Plus, there’s a deeper reason to wonder about the sources of the wave of Rocky stories. The heap of negative press about our city attorney prompted the L.A. Times to call for his resignation. It’s one thing if investigative reporters doing their jobs uncovered all of the questionable goings-on in Rocky’s shop and home as part of a full-blown, independent examination of that powerful office. Such inquiries are the heart and soul of a free press in America. But if Rocky’s rivals orchestrated the coverage behind-the-scenes, and Rocky is driven from office by a plot masterminded by nameless, faceless confidential sources with an axe to grind, that stinks.

It’s important for the public to know who wields power in this city, and who is trying to oust the city attorney. If for no other reason than to keep the newspaper and its reporters from being beholden to sources who gave them such a great batch of stories that did in an elected official. Down the line, will it lead to punches being pulled or otherwise dilute needed scrutiny if similiar tactics are employed during, say, a gubernatorial run by Antonio in 2010 or a mayoral re-election bid in two years? The public is best served when all the players and their roles are known and examined in the theater called City Hall. In other words, if the mayor, even indirectly, flings dirt, we want to know; if the mayor or anyone near him, helps bring down a political foe, the public must know. (Note to Rocky: Don’t consider this post a defense of your tenure.)

Before I get to the list of 10 questions, let me explain my history with Ace. He emailed me on June 25, the same day that the original post went up, and accused me of fabricating the line that I had tried to reach him for comment. I told him I’d called the mayor’s communication staff and left a message on a Sunday explaining the gist of my post and that I would like their help getting a response from Ace. I never heard back from the office or Ace. Ace called my response “one of the most embarrassingly weak explanations I have heard in the decades I have been doing this.” Hey, I can take criticism. I let Ace know I still wanted to interview him. But my emails and four phone calls over the next two days went unreturned. Finally, last Friday I emailed questions and gave him a deadline of 5 p.m. Monday to respond. I told him if he chose not to answer them, I would probably list the questions in my next post. Again, no response. On Tuesday afternoon, I called his cell phone to verify that he had received the questions and to see if he planned to answer them. “I don’t think I was dealt with honestly by you, so I have no intention.” He hung up. I waited five minutes before calling back. He lashed out at what he called my “bogus attempt” to get a comment from him for the original post. Come on, Ace, let’s move on. I pressed him to respond to the questions, but he wouldn’t. “I don’t think it’s right to publish speculative shit that you have no basis for.” He hung up.
Ace, the offer still stands. Anytime you’re willing to tell your side of things and address these 10 questions, call or email. I’ll even buy lunch—so long as the conversation’s on the record.

The 10 questions:

1. What role, if any, did you play in the dissemination of information that may have led to any of the recent news stories about Rocky and Michelle Delgadillo’s problems?

2. Did you participate in any discussions with the mayor and/or his staff about ways to handle the announcement of the breakup of the mayor’s marriage?

3. Did you discuss with the mayor or any of his staff members alerting the media to Rocky and his wife’s driving/business/babysitting problems?

4. How many times did you meet at City Hall with the mayor and/or his staff in June?

5. What was discussed at those meetings?

6. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci wrote a story about your role in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which ran May 12 under the headline, “Clinton’s man in California a pro at digging up dirt.” In the article, Garry South, a top Democrat strategist and a former adviser to Gov. Gray Davis, called you “the best op research guy in America on either side of the aisle. He digs under every rock.” Do you take issue with that characterization or anything else in the Chronicle story?

7. Share your reaction to this observation Marinucci makes about you in the article: “As with any successful political opposition researcher, most of Smith’s best work needs to arise anonymously with few — other than his clients — recognizing who found it.”

8. You ran Jerry Brown’s campaign last year when he faced Rocky Delgadillo in the Democratic primary. Did you know at that time about any of the disclosures that emerged in June about Rocky and his wife?

9. Would you like to share any other thoughts on this matter?

10. By the way, do you know of any other Los Angeles politicians, current or former, whose city-owned vehicles were driven by family members? Who?

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And while we’re on the subject of LAUSD and it’s….little problem…when it comes to giving up control of ANYTHING….EVER, with all the hug-hug, kiss-kiss going on between Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the newly-reconstituted, Reforms R Us school board, it was widely assumed that Antonio would be given control of a “cluster” of schools this fall. In fact, this past Thursday he said in an interview that, come September, he fully expected to be overseeing one of the city’s low-performing high schools and the middle and elementary schools that feed into it.

(FYI: that’s what everyone means when they say “cluster.” Although, more and more, the term when applied to the school board seems to call up…well….oh, never mind.)

Oooops. Seems not. On Friday, Sup/Admiral Brewer and LAUSD board Prez Marlene Cantor explained that, no, they couldn’t possibly fork over the cluster in 2007, that it would be at least 2008 before such a hand off could take place.

“There’s a process to this,” said Brewer, “and it’s about autonomy and choice, and one of the things about choice is you have to go in and work with the faculties and communities to convince them to partner with you…….” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Whatever.

According to Naush Boghossian at the Daily News (who is usually spot on with such matters), the mayor’s office has since been busy putting little smiley faces on the mess. (What the mayor really meant is we’d start the planning process in September. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Planning process is what we said all along.)

It’s not that we think the mayor’s got some magic bullet exactly. But the reality is, when and if he ever does get his cluster there will be tons of public and political of pressure on him to show marked improvement in the schools under his care, so it’s likely Antonio will be at least moderately innovative. And for the rest of us, it’s a clear case of ABTWWG—Anything’s Better Than What We’ve Got.

But, instead, it’s another delay, another excuse, another promise. And nothing new happens in LA schools. Again.

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I

Snubbing Devin’s memory: Legislators fail to learn the lessons of a 13-year-old’s fatal shooting by police.

Today we award Badges of Cowardice to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief Bill Bratton, and six key state lawmakers, for failing to stand up to California’s powerful police unions and take the first baby steps toward reopening police disciplinary records and proceedings that had been public since at least the 1970s.

Our L.A. leaders, along with the six-member Assembly Public Safety Committee, cowered in the face of cop bully-tactics and the secrecy lobby that brought down a modest bill to reopen public access to what had been an historically open process.

We give extra large, doublesided badges to the mayor and police chief because they are trying to have it both ways. They professed to be in favor of State Sen. Gloria Romero’s SB 1019, dubbed here the Anti-Secret Police bill, but they failed to show up at Tuesday’s committee meeting and fight for its survival.

Come on, guys, don’t you remember how adamant you seemed on the issue when an enraged community demanded answers after a secret police Board of Rights hearing exonerated the police officer who fatally shot 13-year-old Devin Brown? Look what Antonio and Bill told the L.A. Times’ Patrick McGreevy in January, when the issue was hot and the public demanded action.

“I am in support of change. I am very frustrated by [the current process],” Bratton said… “The public has no access to it. The media has no access to it. That’s crazy, absolutely crazy. We have nothing to hide in the Los Angeles Police Department.”
Hours later, Villaraigosa issued a concurring statement .
“The mayor would enthusiastically support legislation or other measures to open the board of rights process to the public,” the statement said. “Transparency … would benefit both the public and the officers facing disciplinary action.”

But that was six months ago. Will there be a similar outcry when the results of secret investigations into the MacArthur Park melee are released? Let’s hope the chief doesn’t black out the names of officers disciplined and withhold key details. And, if voters grow restless and the chief and mayor renew their calls for reform, will we take them seriously?

By the time the Anti-Secret Police bill made it to the committee, the unions watered down the bill to mollify cops and win the so-called support of Bill and Antonio. The bill even gave the police chief the power to withhold records if he deemed an officer’s safety would be put at risk.

The bill would merely allow local governments to vote on whether to restore public access to the same narrow category of police disciplinary records and proceedings that had been open in Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Bay Area for decades until the California Supreme Court closed the records in its intellectually dishonest and unintelligible decision last year, Copley Press v. Superior Court of San Diego. In that decision, the Supreme Court held that California’s statutes aimed at controlling the discovery of police personnel records in civil lawsuits prohibits the disclosure of records that arise from the officer’s administrative appeal to an oversight body such as a civil service commission. Police agencies, taking the decision one more step, said if the records were off-limits to the public, so must be the proceedings.

The bill failed to win a solitary vote in the Assembly Public Safety Committee after passing out of the Senate a few weeks ago. The Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPD’s cop labor union), a representative of Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona, and Assemblyman Jose Solorio, a Santa Ana Democrat and chairman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, all made the same bogus claim that the bill would have opened up personal information about police officers and their families to criminals and “endangered” the lives of officers and their families.

Antonio and Bill were nowhere to be seen in Sacramento Tuesday to counter this false alarm. If they had truly “supported” the bill, they would have flown to Sacramento and explained that this process has been open to the public for decades in Los Angeles without any reported endangerment of officer safety. If our leaders actually backed the bill, they would have explained that no information about an officer’s family is released in disciplinary records.

Rather, the Anti-Secret Police measure would have allowed local agencies to vote on whether to create a policy of public access to police officer disciplinary files – but only if the local agency had previously had open records and only in instances where an officer had filed an administrative appeal of their discipline with a local civil service commission or police board of rights. If the local agency adopted the access policy, then the only records available to the public would be the records filed with the civil service commission or police board of rights relating to the specific incident and discipline. Like why should that be such a big deal?

The unions built their propaganda campaign on lies and threats. Under the Anti-Secret Police bill, a police agency would not have been allowed to release a police officer’s entire personnel file, home address, or medical records. Nor would the bill allow a police agency to release all citizen complaints or internal affairs investigations. Rather, public access would have been allowed only after a police officer filed an administrative appeal of a particular disciplinary sanction with an oversight body.

One union leader, John Stites, sent an e-mail to intimidate Senate members before their vote on the measure, saying that police unions “adamantly oppose this legislation to the point that if it is passed we will move quickly to oppose any term-limit reform legislation publicly. There is no compromise on this. Ensure that it be understood that this will only be the beginning.” Romero denounced this “bully tactic” and the Senate approved the bill, 22-10 earlier this month.

Also receiving Badges of Cowardice are the members of the Public Safety Committee. These scared legislators wouldn’t even let the measure come up for a vote. They are:

Two Republicans: Joel Anderson of El Cajon and Greg Aghazarian, Stockton

Four Democrats: Chairman Jose Solorio of Santa Ana, Anthony J. Portantino of La Canada, Hector De La Torre of South Gate, Fiona Ma of San Francisco

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Betting on a knock-out: When Rocky falls, watch Antonio loyalists, Wendy and Jack, rise.

Was it just an odd coincidence that personal and political problems emerged at nearly the exact same moment this month for both Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, L.A.’s top two estranged leaders?
Unless you believe in the tooth fairy and expect your 401k to earn 45 percent this quarter, you probably shouldn’t believe that the past two weeks of political theater was an impromptu show. More likely, some of the best acts were scripted. The back-to-back crises even raise questions about whether the mayor’s office masterminded some of the Rocky scenes, adhering to the classic plot of punishing an adversary, rewarding allies and, by doing so, making City Hall a nicer place for the mayor, particularly if he sticks around for a full second term.

Like how could this be a mere coincidence? On Friday, June 8, the mayor sends out a press release announcing that his marriage is ending and that he’ll hold a press conference the following Monday. The next day, on Saturday, we read in the L.A. Times about the first transgression by Rocky’s wife: she got a traffic ticket in 2005 while driving her own car on a suspended license. Minor, but things got more serious in Tuesday’s paper. Along with coverage of the mayor’s say-nothing press conference, we learned that Rocky stuck taxpayers with the $1,222 repair bill for his city-owned SUV, damaged when his wife drove on a suspended license while he partied it up at the Democratic Convention in Boston three summers ago.

Sure, these two nuggets broke within days of Paris Hilton’s early release from jail on June 7, raising suspicions at the time that Rocky’s disgruntled staffers leaked word of wife Michelle’s misfortunes to embarrass the sanctimonious, hypocritical city attorney, who was getting his fix of media-face time by criticizing Sheriff to the Stars Lee Baca’s handling of the heiress. And that may be true. Rocky’s detractors could fill several courtrooms, and it’s quite possible that the mayor’s office, if it did act, did not act alone.

But look what happened when Rocky couldn’t figure out how to respond to the SUV accident story. For at least eight days, he refused to answer reporters’ questions about his wife’s use of the city-issued SUV. No new revelations about Rocky or his wife emerged during this silent period. What sheer brilliance. Flinging any new dirt would have been a waste and run the risk of taking pressure off Rocky to come clean about his mishandling of his wife’s minor accident. Finally, Rocky held a news conference on June 18, which he bungled by failing to give correct answers to simple questions. And guess what? Over the next four days, the negative stories about Rocky and his wife once again flowed, in timed doses that took on a sense of a preordained order, with the Daily News and Times breaking the same story on Michelle’s unpaid business fees in Saturday’s papers. By then, the hits seemed calculating and methodical, more than random shots fired by fed-up civil servants or fresh developments uncovered by diligent investigative reporters relying on shoe leather alone.

The take-down campaign ingeniously served up an array of misdeeds, as though designed to offer at least one sin to rankle even the most permissive Angeleno’s soul, from Michelle’s unauthorized use of the SUV, her bench warrant, the couple’s insurance problems, leaning on staffers for babysitting and household chores and the wife’s missing business license.

Is it too far-fetched to see in the anti-Rocky avalanche the inspiration of Ace Smith, the king of opposition research? This guy has a national reputation for carving up political enemies and now heads Hillary’s campaign in California. Ace was Jerry Brown’s campaign manager in the Attorney General’s race last year and was Antonio’s campaign manager in 2005 and remains a trusted adviser. Wouldn’t he likely have a file or two overflowing with documentation of the missteps and screwed-up judgment of Rocky and Michelle? He probably knows as much as anyone about the depths of Rocky’s political problems and had little reason to use much of the material during the lopsided campaign last year. (A message left for Ace at the mayor’s office Sunday went unreturned. In an email Monday night, Ace said he never got the message.)

But why go after Rocky now? Maybe it was simply an effort to distract reporters snooping around the mayor’s marital problems. Or, maybe it’s part of a bigger plot to bruise Rocky or push him from office to ensure the mayor’s top lieutenants inherit the City Attorney’s and City Controller’s offices in 2009. Or, maybe all of the above, and more.

It could be that an Antonio sympathizer leaked some of the stories, knowing that Rocky’s office harbors a roster of attorneys and other staffers with animosity toward the boss who would keep alive the attacks with their own contributions to the narrative of a doomed politician. I lost count, but weren’t there seven unnamed present and past employees who took on Rocky in Babysittergate?
Rocky’s political career is over, but how ugly will it get before he steps aside? One of the beneficiaries of Rocky’s early-release from City Hall could be Antonio’s top pal on the City Council — Jack Weiss, who plans to run for city attorney in 2009 when Rocky is termed out. Jack is facing a recall organized by residents of his Westside district upset with the sway that fat-cat developers have on their councilman. If Rocky resigned, the council could appoint Jack to fill his unexpired term as city attorney, sparing him the wrath of voters in his district as well as saving him the trouble of running for the job he covets. And Jack gets a bonus: in two years, he could run as an incumbent.
Councilwoman Wendy Greuel also stands to gain. She formally announced in May that she wants to run for city controller in 2009, when Laura Chick is termed out. Rocky, who is also termed out in 2009, is said to be considering a run for that office, too. Rocky’s political career likely ended this month, but if he’s forced to resign, Wendy becomes a shoo-in. Of course, the mayor wants one of his top loyalists to take over the city watchdog post. Can you imagine the heat and endless audits Rocky would bring against the mayor if Antonio hangs around for a second term? For Rocky, it would be get-even time with a mayor who has repeatedly upstaged him and humiliated him.

It’s also about as likely to happen as a Delgadillo presidency.

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