These dudes are good and bad
for Hillary

Aside from raising millions of dollars, one of the hardest things about running for president of the United States must be figuring out how your reputation will be helped or hindered by the people who appear on stage with you.

When Hillary Clinton showed up in Commerce last week to announce her economic stimulus package, we couldn’t help but do a bit of analysis for her.

There she stood with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Plus 10 points.

Antonio, of course, is a big boost for the New York senator and drives up her popularity in the Latino community. He’s been a good soldier, venturing to faraway Iowa and New Hampshire in his quest to help land a Democrat in the White House who will reward big cities and deserving public transportation projects. His support has nothing to do with trying to earn a position in a Clinton cabinet. Shame on you people who question the motives of the city’s No. 1 public servant. He’s not about to give up the glory of solving L.A.’s transit, housing and job ills and become a small fish jockeying for care and feeding among the minnows that swarm the Swamps of the Beltway.

Accompanying Hillary to the middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, where card parlors rank as the most meaningful contribution to culture, was Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez. Minus 10 points.

Unless Hillary needed some free wine or travel information about the top hotels and shopping meccas of South America and Europe, she should have aced King Fabian from her entourage. True, he just might survive the Feb. 5 election, when voters decide the fate of Proposition 93: the Fabian Nuñez Preservation Act. Written in a confusing way so as to appear to be a tightening of term-limits, the measure actually will allow Fabian and his closest pals in the Legislature to stick around for at least another term. This stinks to high heaven so much so that Gov. Steroids used to be against it. Just this week, he flip-flopped and now supports the measure; it’s part of his cozying up to his enablers in the statehouse so they do what he wants them to do.

The venue for Hillary’s visit, the training institute affiliated with the powerful union that runs the Department of Water and Power – the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers – couldn’t have been worse. Minus 20 points.

Labor’s a great and powerful ally, so don’t get us wrong, but she would do better to steer clear of the one that pumped $300,000 into Antonio’s campaign with an unrelenting quid-pro-quo demand for astronomical raises that reached 30 percent. Make sure you double-check the locks on the White House at night. These people have a way of getting what they want. The union already gets millions of dollars from the DWP for mysterious safety and training institutes, which they contend are not subject to public scrutiny. We’d love to see reports showing how the money is spent.

As it turns out, Hillary could have spent her time more wisely by engaging in a woman-to-woman chat with County Fed boss Maria Elena Durazo. Just this week, the labor chief broke with Antonio and endorsed Barack Obama.

Does anyone think the Antonio-County Fed alliance will be damaged by her endorsement of Obama?

“Not at all,” says Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “Both of them are longtime political pros who understand how to deal with relationships. Antonio especially, having been on the council and in the legislature as well as mayor, he has many allies who have endorsed opponents. It’s also strategic; obviously Villaraigosa wants Clinton to win, but with Maria Elena and Eric Garcetti endorsing Obama... in a sense it’s like spreading the risk.”

Oh, come on, you don’t really believe they’re trying to split their losses, do you? “There’s an implicit understanding that it might be a good thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even spoke about it beforehand, that she let him know. Not that she was asking permission, but just so he wouldn’t be surprised.”

Guerra knows what it’s like to be opposed by Durazo. A registered lobbyist, the firm he founded in 1992, Guerra and Associates, faced off against Durazo and the unions in a fight over a hospital expansion in the San Fernando Valley. City Ethics Commission records show his firm was paid $45,000 in the last quarter of 2007 by Providence Holy Cross Medical Center. His firm reported $186,725 income in 2007.

Reminded of those battles against Durazo, Guerra shared a keen sense of her power.

“Oh, I would consider her the most powerful Latina in the state of California. And beyond being a Latina, she’s also one of the most powerful individuals in Los Angeles County. Formally she represents labor, but informally, she represents the future of Latinas, and they see so much in her. Her passion makes her much more powerful, because it makes her so authentic. Her formal roles, combined with her background - as a Latina, as the daughter of immigrants - give her tremendous power.”

With all that power on Obama’s side, maybe Hillary has something to worry about. Then again, Durazo lost the

hospital battle.

Celebrity justice in Ventura County

Our own Sheriff Lee Baca, who knows it’s wrong to bend the rules for celebrities, might want to call his counterpart in Ventura County and tell him to cough up more details about the fatal crash involving Roger Avary.

The co-writer of the film “Pulp

Fiction” crashed his Mercedes in Ojai, killing one of his passengers and ejecting Avary’s wife, Gretchen, who remains in the hospital.

Avary was booked on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter and felony drunken driving. But sheriff’s officials refuse to reveal what they allege Avary’s blood-alcohol level to have been at the time of the accident. They say they can withhold it because the accident remains under investigation.

They should be less star struck and pay more attention to the state’s public records laws.

Talk ain’t good enough

For 16 years, Richard Katz, represented the San Fernando Valley in the state Assembly, including as chair of the transportation committee. He had some nutty ideas about turning flood-control channels into freeways. Somehow it made sense to him because the concrete was already there. But now he’s a board member on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where he’s honed his reputation as someone who cuts through bullshit with humor and intelligence.

Katz served on the “What Next?” panel in the closing hour of last Thursday’s transportation conference, organized by Subway to the Sea advocate Denny Zane, the ex-mayor of Santa Monica.

“I remember when we first started talking about this and thinking, ‘Oh, here’s Denny with another one of his ideas. But you’ve built it as a grassroots coalition, which is bottom up and are organizing things in the right way. It’s going to have to come from there in order to build the political support to move forward.”

Katz, looking out at the hundred or so people remaining in the meeting room at the downtown cathedral, said: “The real charge coming out of this has got to be that everyone in the room take responsibility for helping to build this organization. Whether it’s this November or the November after or the November after, you’ re not going to pass something without a much broader coalition. You’ve laid incredible groundwork for that. So one of the keys is not to make the mistake others have made in the past and keep an action-oriented agenda in place.”

In Los Angeles, where most people still drive alone to work, mass transportation sometimes plays only an indirect role in the life of the metropolis. Says Katz: “I’m only half kidding when I say that in L.A., everybody supports mass transit. I support it so Denny uses it to get out of my way on the freeway.”

How does Cardinal Cooley sound?

We’re happy that L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley got a fat raise of $55,000 and now brings home $292,300.

Now he should show the public that he deserves it.

Would you please start, Steve, by announcing the status of your office’s investigation into pedophile protector Cardinal Roger Mahony and whether he may have committed obstruction of justice or any other crime in his mishandling of the hundreds of molestation cases brought to his attention over the decades?

And, if you’re looking for a way to deflect the public’s attention from that huge raise you just got, go ahead and reveal how much money your office burned up so far on the Mahony and related investigations.

Heck, add up what you’ve spent and what the Diocese has spent fighting you at every turn, and we probably have a couple billion dollars — enough

money for a pretty decent homeless shelter, or even your very own subway line.

To show just how closely we see the fates of these religious and political leaders intertwined, we’ll call it the Cardinal Cooley Center or the Cool Mahony Line.

Greg Katz contributed reporting to this column. Send insults or ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com