Shooting the star

Faces of Fred: Is Assemblyman Fred Keeley “[Gray] Davis’ sycophant” or someone with an unparalleled “dedication to public life for the sake of public service"? The respected legislator was slapped with each diametrically opposed label last week in a telling fluke of timing.

Just as Keeley’s cartooned mug was hitting the streets as California Journal‘s “legislator of the year,” a new scandal seized the Capitol: renegade Assemblyman Dean Florez got stripped of his chairmanship of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee by Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, who then named Keeley to the post.

Wesson claimed the punitive action was about Florez being absent during a key floor vote, but nobody was buying it. Clearly, this was about the aggressive investigation Florez led into the Oracle scandal, which embarrassed the Democrat governor by highlighting the close connection between campaign donations and government action.

Keeley has always been a loyal Democrat, a fixer who has solved more than a few problems created by the administration, so the story went that Florez was the bold truth-teller and Keeley became the “sycophant” and “an apologist for the administration,” as different Sacramento Bee writers dubbed him on separate days.

It was a plausible storyline that had a kernel of truth to it, but the reality of this scandal is far more complex than the Bee would have you believe, and the true picture of Keeley is probably much closer to the Capitol Journal’s portrayal of the man as “what a legislator ought to be.”

But before Bites talks about Keeley, a truly decent man who’s been slobbered over in this column before, let’s talk about what a legislator ought not to be: more about self-interest than public interest, arrogant, grandstanding, difficult for both friends and enemies to deal with.

This describes Dean Florez to a T. There are few people in the Capitol with anything nice to say about the Democrat from Shafter, except maybe for Republicans who cheered his over-the-top investigation of the Oracle scandal, and even they grumbled about his autocratic tendencies during the hearings.

Sure, in the wake of these high-profile hearings, it wasn’t exactly a shrewd political move by Wesson to dump Florez, making him a martyr of sorts. But the speaker showed even worse judgment by naming Florez to the post in the first place, replacing none other than Keeley.

Florez is certainly more aggressive than Keeley, particularly in attacking the Davis administration, where the termed-out Keeley is openly hoping to land a job. Yet those connected to JLAC know that “Fred will do what has to be done,” as one insider told Bites.

Even the Oracle hearings would probably have yielded the same facts and outcome under Keeley, but perhaps without being capped by statements of outraged condemnation and a long anti-Davis hit piece Florez penned for the Bee’s Sunday Forum, just two days before the Wesson action.

The fact is, Keeley has won the respect of people on both sides of the aisle because of his intelligence and his integrity. Sure, Florez got sacked because of party politics, pure and simple. But that crass act needn’t tarnish one of the brightest stars in the Capitol.

Deep freeze: Speaking of politics, the press and bad timing, it appears that the job-seekers rag Capitol Weekly has had its bread and butter taken away by the Davis administration for highlighting that Davis’ vaunted “hiring freeze” was little more than a political gimmick.

Within days of running the headline “State Government Employment Reaches Record Level of 234,505 Employees"—which kinda makes a mockery of the hiring freeze Davis announced last year—the paper got word that the state was pulling all its job listing advertising.

Davis flaks deny the Capitol Weekly was being punished, saying this was all just routine cost-cutting to deal with the budget crisis. It’s just a coincidence. Ya know, kinda like the timing of that $25,000 check from Oracle.

There certainly are a lot of unsettling coincidences with these guys.