Theoretically, of course. The theory seldom is validated in practice, however. Typically, one candidate emerges from the pack and most of the rest become single-digit also-rans.

Nava is running for the Democratic nomination for attorney general next year in a field that at the moment includes includes six contenders: Nava, fellow Assembly members Ted Lieu and Alberto Torrico, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and Chris Kelly, a former policy adviser in the Clinton White House who later served as chief privacy officer for Facebook.

The charismatic Harris, who co-chaired President Barack Obama's California campaign, is the favorite. Kelly is the wild card.

From Nava's perspective, the better Kelly performs the better. If the political newcomer has a chance to tap into any segment of the Democratic primary electorate, it is the netroots progessives who might otherwise be attracted to Harris, if for no other reason than her Obama connections.

Late last week, Kelly sent a signal that he may become an intriguing wild card. He announced the hiring of veteran Democratic strategist Katie Merrill as his campaign director. Merrill has worked on a number of high-profile campaigns, and her hiring signals that Kelly hopes to wage a serious campaign.

If nothing else, it makes the 25 percent scenario a stronger possibility.

Association members, who spent most of 2009 loudly criticizing legislative decisions to cut spending on public schools, have decided that no lawmaker is worthy of their annual "Legislator of the Year" award. They decided not to give out the award this year.

In a statement issued this after, President-elect Frank Pugh had this to say: "For crying out loud, schools have been cut by $2,100 per student. We'd be nuts to present this award to anybody in a year when the cuts are going to have detrimental effects on an entire generation of students. We just have to draw the line somewhere."

The analysis by Michael Coleman reports that only two of five cities that sought to establish citywide sales taxes were successful -- San Mateo and Gustine, a small city in Merced County. In addition to Measure A in Ventura, sales tax proposals failed in San Carlos and Salinas.

School districts seeking parcel tax increases fared much better; 7 of 11 passed. Of the winners, six were in San Francisco Bay Area counties. Culver City in Los Angeles County was the only Southern California district to succeed.

Rather than give a traditional speech, he cited a list of the top 25 "whoppers" that candidates for state office in California typically tell. Many of them relate directly to positions other candidates for governor have taken, but Campbell pointedly decided not to name names. The list warrants wider dissemination, so here goes:

"A 'whopper' is a statement that the person making it knows is not true, but it's useful in a campaign. Here are the 25 worst whoppers I've heard...

1. The budget will be balanced if only the wealthy pay their fair share.
2. Cut taxes and government revenue will automatically rise. (The logical corollary is that government will generate most revenue at a tax rate of zero.)
3. You can balance the state budget by eliminating 'waste, fraud, and abuse.'
4. You can balance the state budget by a 'top down' review to get rid of hundreds of state programs.
5. You can balance the budget if you 'run the state like a business.'
6. You can balance the budget by firing thousands of state workers.
7. We can solve California's water shortage if only farms would use drip irrigation.
8. We can solve California's water shortage if only Southern Californians would stop watering their lawns, and washing their 3rd and 4th cars.
9. We don't need to build new dams -- the system we completed 48 years ago is more than adequate today.
10. All our country's petroleum needs can be met by offshore drilling.
11. No source of energy is worse than nuclear.
12. Global warming is all made up.
13. Stopping global warming is more important to the 3rd world than clean water, child immunization, or anti-malaria treated mosquito nets.
14. You can't trust companies to stop producing greenhouse gases without monitoring every smokestack.
15. A new health care plan to cover everyone won't add a dime to the deficit.
16. One Republican Senator makes a bill bipartisan.
17. Thank God for Mississippi, because otherwise, California would be dead last in per pupil education funding. (Actually, we're 26th.)
18. California can cut funding to education without worsening results.
19. It's OK to have more than 30 students in a class, because children really don't learn better in smaller classes.
20. There's no such thing as a bad teacher -- that's why we haven't fired any.
21. You can fix education if you only allow corporal punishment back in the classroom.
22. The government can print 3 trillion dollars in new money without causing inflation.
23. The Wall Street melt-down was caused by paying greedy CEO's too much.
24. There's nothing wrong with Wall Street that more federal regulation can't fix.
25. You can raise 7 million dollars without really deciding to run for governor!"

The filing comes two days after a group called Repair California filed a ballot initiative that would call a citizens' convention to revise the state constitution. In addition, lawmakers have already placed on the June ballot a measure that implent a top-two, open primary, in which any voter could vote for any candidate of any party in primary elections and the top two vote-getters would advance to the general election.

The first of the California Forward proposals would make several changes in the budget process, including:
-- Allow lawmakers to pass a budget, but not tax increases, with a majority vote instead of the existing two-thirds majority requirement.
-- Force a two-thirds majority whenever lawmakers consider raising fees to replace tax revenue. This is targeted at a proposal legislative Democrats pushed last year that would have had the effect of raising taxes by majority vote by abolishing the gas tax and replacing the revenue with a majority-vote "highway users' fee" on gasoline.
-- Require legislators and the governor to develop a two-year financing plan.
-- Require lawmakers to specify how they are going to pay for any significant program expansions or tax cuts, by naming either what programs would be cut or enacting a tax increase to pay for their actions.

The second deals with local government finance. Among its provisions are:
-- An assurance that revenues from any taxes or fees levied by local governments would stay at the local level and not be diverted by the state.
-- A provision that allows local agencies to work together to develop countywide action plans. If they do so, the local board of supervisors could place on a countywide ballot a 1 cent sales tax increase and the revenue would be divided among local government agencies.

The language of the official message is a generic political diatribe about the shortcomings of the Legislature. But there is a coded message in there as well. Since this blog is hosted by family newspaper, here's what I'll say about the message: The first paragaph is four lines, and the first letter of the first line is "F." The second paragraph is three lines, and the first letter is "Y." The code can be broken by reading vertically down the left side of the page, the first letter of every line.

The veto came several days after Ammiano walked out of a San Francisco Democratic fund-raiser at which Schwarzenegger had shown up unexpectedly, a guest of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who brought the governor from another event that was taking place in the same hotel. Schwarzenegger was loudly booed, and Ammiano walked out as the governor spoke, suggesting that Schwarzenegger kiss him on the body part last seen leaving the door.

Although voters overwhelmingly rejected a "clean money" scheme for financing campaigns for all statewide offices in 2006, this measure has been surgically crafted to draw public support. The key is that nearly all the money to finance the campaigns will come from a new fee to be imposed on a group of folks that voters generally hold in contempt: lobbyists and the interest groups that pay them.

It also targets an office that voters rightly believe should be free from partisan influence; the secretary of state, after all, is the state's chief elections officer, the person who must certify that all votes are properly counted and that election results accurately reflect the voters' will.

The telephone poll of 800 likely primary voters, conducted Oct. 11-15 by Lake Research Partners, shows 63 percent support, 22 percent opposition and 16 percent undecided. Further, it shows support across party lines: 65 percent of Democrats and independents, 59 percent of Republicans.

To qualify for public financing, candidates would have to agree to strict spending limits and not accept any private contributions. To qualify, a candidate would first have to $5 contributions from 7,500 people; that money would serve only to certify the legitimacy of the candidate, as the revenue would ultimately be put into the public financing pot.

How do Californians feel about that? It depends on which direction a runaway convention would run, according to a new Field Poll on the issue.

When pollsters asked California voters whether they thought the convention "should be limited to matters relating to the way government operates rather than including social issues such as same-sex marriage," a solid 59 percent said the convention should be limitied.

But when they asked whether the convention should stray into issues involving illegal immigation, a plurality of voters said that would be a good idea (48 percent to 42 percent).

It's something to keep in mind as Californians consider the merits of a convention. The last time the state held such a convention, in 1879, the new constitution included several anti-Chinese immigrant provisions, such as barring those of Chinese ancestry from owning property.

At a daylong conference on reform issues in Sacramento yesterday, Prof. Amy Bridges of UC San Diego, who has extensively studied the constitutional conventions of Western states, said that social and religious issues have always found a way into the discussions. "You probably can't get away from it," she said. "It will come up."

It identifies 13 such Assembly districts, and two of them include portions of Ventura County. One is the 37th District, which will be an open seat because incumbent Audra Strickland, R-Moorpark, is termed out. Strickland herself was targeted by Democrats in 2008, and was re-elected by just a 4 percentage-point margin. The other is the 38th District, where incumbent Republican Cameron Smyth of Santa Clarita will be seeking his third term in the district that includes much of Simi Valley. Smyth's re-election margin in 2008 was 10 percentage points.

These things change, depending on the strengths of each party's candidates and other dynamics as the campaigns evolve. But coming out of the box, it appears that there could be some political action in store in Ventura County a year from now.

It said that one of Whitman's first acts after being hired in February 1998 was that she "replaced the lawn chairs with corporate cubicles."

Four years ago, in a profile on then-Democratic gubernatorial nominee Steve Westly, also an early eBay executive, I had paraphrased what Westly told me about one of his first acts when he was hired in 1997 as vice president of business development: "to order the office lawn chairs replaced with traditional furniture."

How could Whitman have scrapped the lawn chairs in '98 if Westly jettisoned them in '97?

To get to the bottom of this, I consulted the bible on eBay history and mythology, Adam Cohen's book "The Perfect Store." Cohen puts the year of the lawn chairs' demise at 1997, but credits neither Westly nor Whitman. "(Founder Pierre) Omidyar and (president Jeffrey) Skoll decided that the time had come to replace the beach chairs and assembled desks with real furniture."

That's why it was stunning to read in Brown's San Francisco Chronicle column yesterday about an initiative to legalize marijuana use in California that he "doesn't see any organized opposition to legal pot on the horizon."

Brown is probably spot-on in his assessment that voters are way ahead of politicians on this issue, and that it's far more likely that such a change would happen at the ballot box than in the Legislature. But, c'mon, no opposition?

What about the beer, wine and liquor industries?

These are people who know a little something about how sales can take off after a legal prohibition is lifted on a substance that is widely sold through underground markets.

Legal pot would create huge competition to the alcohol industry, and you can bet Seagram & Sons and the Miller Brewing Co. have already conducted plenty of research that tells them just how much market share they would lose to legal pot in the nation's largest consumer market.

If this inititiatve were to qualify for the ballot, you can bet they'd be opposed, plenty organized and well financed.

Last weekend, Hewitt resigned his position as vice chairman of the organization's state federation after the group decided to endorse Steve Poizner for governor rather than Hewitt's preferred candidate, Meg Whitman. It had been just a little more than a month ago that Hewitt was elected to the state position, at the statewide convention held in Simi Valley.

Then, on Wednesday, some members who were disenchanted with Hewitt's leadership called for an election to replace him as chairman of the Ventura County organization. Numerous sources tell me that the meeting was quite contentious as well as confusing because: a) there was uncertaintly over the rules for conducting an election and b) because the county GOP Central Committee was also meeting at the Ventura County Republican headquarters building in Thousand Oaks, the Young Republicans were forced to move their proceedings into the parking lot.

In the end, no election was held.

The Peace Officers Research Association of California is a prized endorsement, especially among Democrats, because although the union often gives its endorsements based on bread-and-butter labor issues its endorsement can be sold to voters as an indication of a candidate's law-and-order credentials.

Intriguingly, PORAC earlier this year took the unusual step of entering into the politics of an issue unrelated to either union matters or law enforcement. It came out in favor of the Tranquillon Ridge offshore drilling project sought by the Plains Exploration & Production Co.

Both PORAC and PXP are clients of the same Sacramento lobbying firm, Aaron Read & Associates.

It does make one wonder whether Ventura County Assemblyman Pedro Nava, also a candidate for the Democratic attorney general nomination, had much of a chance of getting PORAC's backing, given his status as the Legislature's most outspoken critic of the T-Ridge project.

Torrico also voted against the T-Ridge proposal when it was defeated in the Assembly in July. But it was Nava who led the charge to defeat the project sought by Read's client.

In yet another connection, Read also represents the proposed Clearwater Port LNG project. It might be noted that Nava's wife, Susan Jordan, took a lead role in defeating a previous LNG proposal off the Ventura County coast, the BHP Billiton project that was turned down by the State Lands Commission in 2007.

Still, the lack of news value in the event also said something about Schwarzenegger's emerging lame-duck status on the same day that the 2010 gubernatorial campaign was more or less officially christened -- the day when former eBay CEO Meg Whitman officially declared her candidacy and launched a statewide introductory radio commercial.

Of local note, state Sen. Tony Strickland of Moorpark accompanied Whitman at her announcement in Fullerton. He is one of a half-dozen statewide co-chairs of her campaign, among a group that also includes former GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon.

On the next rung down the ladder, the 18 campaign co-chairs, is one other Ventura County Republican, from the same family: Assemblywoman Audra Strickland.

He was one of just 18 Assembly members to vote against a bill, strongly supported by organized labor, that would have allowed a proposed NFL football stadium project in the City of Industry to move forward without being subjected to review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Organized labor, of course, is a very important constituency when one is seeking the Democratic nomination for a statewide office. Nava's vote on the stadium bill certainly won't help him gain labor support for his attorney general campaign.

When I asked him about the vote today, Nava invoked the memory of his paternal grandfather, who at one time had been an elected city official in Monterry, Mexico.

Nava told the story of the time his grandfather was seriously ill and unable to attend a meeting at which a vote was taken on whether to raise bus fares in the city. After the vote ended in a 2-2 tie, some powerful city leaders approached his grandfather and beseeched him to cast a tie-breaking vote. He told them he'd take a look at it after he recovered from his illness.

After he recovered, Nava's grandfather looked at the proposal, decided it would place too great a burden on poor people, and voted against the fare increase. In short order, he was fired from his job and, when he sought re-election, was accused of being a Communist and defeated.

"How can I not honor that?" Nava asked.

The bill, by the way, stalled today in the Senate, where President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg asked the parties to try one more time to mediate their differences. He promised the Senate would reconsider the matter late this month if no agreement is reached.