Political Merry Prankster Pays Mysterious Visit to Riordan Turf

Trick or treat: Was that Bob Mulholland, the bad-boy political director of the California Democratic Party, nosing around in mayoral candidate Richard Riordan’s Sherman Oaks headquarters last Friday?

Yup, it sure was.

According to Kari Moran, a Riordan campaign press deputy, Mulholland--who helped bring the revealing issue of striptease to a U.S. Senate race last year--was found “poking around in boxes and looking through literature” in the Ventura Boulevard headquarters.

He left after Bob Burke, the Riordan campaign’s political director, recognized him and asked him to skedaddle.

“We tried to get a camera over so we could get a photo to verify his presence here,” Moran said. “But it was too late.” Apparently, Mulholland’s visit lasted only about three minutes. “It was a real stealth thing,” Moran said.

Hardly an espionage operation, sniffed Mulholland. “It was in broad daylight,” he said.

“I was just having fun with them,” Mulholland said in an interview from his Sacramento headquarters. “I knew if I dropped by they would spend a half-day wondering what I was up to.”

But the adventures of the irrepressible Mulholland, a political Merry Prankster, have not always been so innocent.

GOP Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn found that out last year, when Mulholland slipped into a Herschensohn campaign event to quiz the candidate about his visit to a Hollywood strip joint. It helped entangle the conservative candidate in a spider’s web of questions about his moral authority only four days before he faced Barbara Boxer at the polls. Boxer won.

Mulholland claimed the Riordan camp’s reaction to his visit proves a point. “It’s indicative of their paranoia,” he said. “You have to wonder what type of people can get paranoid about this kind of thing. They shouldn’t be in public office.”

But Moran said it was not so funny or innocent as Mulholland would like to make it out to be. After all, the state Democratic Party was under a temporary restraining order at the time not to involve itself in mayoral candidate Mike Woo’s campaign, she observed. The matter has been referred to the campaign’s attorneys.

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Wearing the blue trunks: Laura Chick enters the ring next week against incumbent Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus--with one foot tied behind her back.

In the April 20 primary, Chick physically out-hustled Picus, her former boss, on the campaign trail. Day after day, Chick marched across the 3rd District knocking on doors, meeting voters face-to-face.

It was a flesh-pressing exercise that, by most accounts, helped explain why Chick came in second with 29.5% of the vote. Chick earned the right to do battle against first-place finisher Picus, who got 36.7% of the vote, in the runoff election June 8.

But in the final two weeks leading up to the runoff, Chick, 48, has had to drop her ambitious precinct-walking regimen.

A painful foot injury has put her out of commission.

“Laura’s now making phone calls to reach voters,” said press deputy Jackie Brainard, who insists Chick has only been sidelined by doctor’s orders.

“Absolutely, on my mother’s soul, she wants to be out there, but can’t be,” Brainard said. “She misses it.” Chick has a congenital foot condition that makes her susceptible to such injuries, Brainard said.

For those who care for historical digressions: Chick can’t get too much sympathy as the Wounded Candidate.

Challenger Ruth Galanter was hospitalized for virtually the entire length of her 1987 runoff election fight against City Council President Pat Russell as she recovered from an intruder’s near-fatal knife assault.

For the record, Galanter won.

Speaking of history, Chick’s campaign strategist, Harvey Englander, is guilty of recycling old campaign gimmicks.

One of Englander’s latest mailers for Chick is entitled: “It’s Time to Change Joy Picus’ Record.”

The eye-catcher here is the pictorial representation of a long-playing record with songs like “Tax, Tax, Tax Tango,” “Ignore the Schools Blues” and the “I Keep Perk, Perk, Perking Along Polka.”

A small text block under each tune’s title, of course, criticizes some aspect of Picus’ legislative record.

Anyway, you get the idea. But then we got it in 1985, when Englander used the same theme for client Michael Woo as he ran against incumbent Peggy Stevenson.

“Hey, I’m entitled to rip off my own material,” Englander said when asked about his blast from the past. For the record, Woo won.

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Report cards: Little noticed in the mayoral hubbub is that the city’s preeminent tenants-advocacy group has handed out its report card on council candidates.

Flying to the top of the class among Valley candidates was Picus.

The 16-year incumbent, whose mother once managed an apartment house, got an A-, which is likely to help her among the 3rd District’s large tenant population.

Elderly Jewish tenants, in particular, have been among Picus’ most loyal backers over the years.

“Picus has generally supported all major rent control and tenants’ rights issues which have come before the City Council,” according to the report card by the Coalition for Economic Survival.

Meanwhile, 3rd District candidate Chick got a C; it was pointedly noted that Chick has been endorsed by the San Fernando Valley Board of Realtors, the renter’s equivalent of Simon Legree.

In the 7th District race, candidate Richard Alarcon, Mayor Tom Bradley’s former liaison to the Valley, got a C+ while candidate Lyle Hall, a former fire captain, got an F. Hall got dinged because he opposes the CES agenda almost across the board.

That agenda is clear: CES wants to: delete the vacancy decontrol provision in the city’s rent-control law that now allows landlords to hike the price of voluntarily vacated units to market levels; place rent controls on owners who lease multiple single-family homes, and provide city financial aid to tenants of federally subsidized rental units seeking to buy their apartments.