Reforming Riordan

Ha! Tough? You want to talk toughness? Davis and his wartime consigliere, Garry South, regularly breakfast on hairy, little tough muffins like so many beer nuts. California doesn‘t need toughness. It needs greatness.

Time to clean house, Dick. Start with your campaign co-chair Clint Reilly. Truly one of the most unctuous, universally reviled elements in California backroom politics, Reilly is the genius who, when working for Kathleen Brown, squandered her 20-point lead and let Pete Wilson get re-elected (and Riordan’s only working with a 4- to 5-point margin). And the inept Reilly is working with Riordan only to identify future funding sources for what will inevitably be one more of his own failed bids to get elected mayor of San Francisco.

Then there‘s Riordan media consultant Don Sipple. Dubbed a ”moral cripple“ by columnist Arianna Huffington, Sipple is most famous for having cooked up the odiously xenophobic ”They Keep Coming“ TV spots for the pro--Proposition 187 jihad in 1994 (and for being accused of punching around some ex-wives). Can’t you just imagine the paint-peeling ads that Davis and South are mixing up that will hang that flopping albatross around Dick‘s neck?

Riordan should also can his ”policy adviser“ Joel Fox. An affable enough fellow, Fox is nevertheless a political dinosaur. An anti-tax fundamentalist, Fox is one of the godfathers of Prop. 13 and hasn’t had an original political idea since protesting the Stamp Act.

Let Riordan be Riordan. Or at least the Riordan he claims he wants to be. Help us retire Gray Davis to some investment house where he belongs. And for heaven‘s sake, Dick, give me someone else to vote for other than Talib Johnny Walker.