Flynt is serious about recall 'circus'

upi via bloomberg no url | 8/14/3

[NativeNewYorker]

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Larry Flynt, the pornographer who is among the best known of the candidates in California's gubernatorial recall election, expects to be included in candidate debates -- but he isn't yet committed to spending a substantial amount of money on his campaign. In an election that is drawing both praise as an exercise in democracy and ridicule as a cross between "Survivor" and "The Gong Show," it is difficult to say whether the publisher of "Hustler" is an entirely serious candidate. He is one of the few who has offered a specific plan to balance California's budget, but his image as a leading player in the pornography industry is sufficient -- for many voters -- to render him unfit for any public office, let alone governor.
No candidate so far comes close to rivaling the love affair that action star Arnold Schwarzegger is enjoying with California voters. A Time magazine poll conducted between Aug. 4-6 showed Schwarzenegger leading all contenders with support from 25 percent of those polled. Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante came in second with 15 percent, followed by the two leading conservatives in the race -- State Sen. Tom McClintock (9 percent) and businessman Bill Simon (7 percent). Simon was the Republican candidate in 2002 when Gray Davis was re-elected to a second term as governor. In the Time poll, Flynt tied with author-pundit Arianna Huffington and former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth -- with each candidate polling 4 percent. The way Flynt sees it, if there are debates it will be hard for sponsors to keep him from sharing the stage.
"That's what my political advisers tell me," said Flynt in an interview with United Press International.
He declined to name his advisers, but said they are seasoned professionals who have handled campaigns for governor and U.S. senator, as well as ballot initiatives. Flynt was frank about his reasons for not identifying the political pros who are advising him.
"Sometimes it's not always in your best interest to be associated with Larry Flynt," he said.
Flynt -- who briefly experienced a religious conversion several years ago but did not contemplate getting out of the porn business -- said he has no "delusions" about winning the Oct. 7 recall election. "I just have some very important points as part of my platform to balance the budget, and I just felt that I was the only person who would be willing to take it head on," he said.
Flynt, whose holdings include several casinos, said he would balance the budget by expanding gambling in the state to allow slot machines for private casinos. "The tax revenue itself would not be enough, but you could take this to Wall Street and float a bond issue and balance the budget that way," he said. The 61-year-old publisher, whose story was at the center of the Oscar-nominated 1996 movie "The People Vs. Larry Flynt," claimed he is the only candidate with a specific plan to solve California's money troubles. "They don't have answers," he said. "And the right answers are not politically popular."
For example, as Latinos increasingly gain political power in Califorinia, no politician with statewide aspirations would likely adopt Flynt's position on the contentious immigration issue.
"You know, a huge drain on California's economy is the illegal immigrants," he said. "We need to close the borders. The people that are here should be allowed to stay, but then we should close the border and send in the National Guard." He also called, as he has in the past, for an end to the war on drugs. "For the past two decades we've spent billions to warehouse prisoners -- 75 percent of them are there for nonviolent drug offenses," he said. "We should spend more on intervention, and less on incarceration." Even as Flynt calls for more relaxed policies on social issues, the U.S. Justice Department is taking new steps to prosecute pornography, with recent indictments of Los Angeles-based adult filmmakers. Flynt said the material in that case is raunchier than the kind of pornography he has built his empire upon.
"We deal in plain old vanilla sex at my company," he said. "Some of those people are pretty far out -- a lot of humiliation, degradation, bondage, things of that nature."
He said he expects the Justice Department might well have his kind of porography in its sights eventually. But for now, he said, juries seem inclined to feel that what people do in the privacy of their own homes is not the government's business.
"My attorney is trying a case in Nashville, where the jury is all women, with an average age of 56," he said. "They acquitted his client on some really rough stuff -- rougher than we distribute."
Flynt expects the recall election will lose its circus atmosphere in a few weeks, as candidates drop out for lack of money. That's not a problem for Flynt, but he still has to decide whether to spend a significant amount of his fortune on the race.
"In the next 10 days we're going to be doing some substantial polling, and based on the result of those polls, if I've got any kind of shot of winning, we're going to jump in with both feet with major media buys and some serious campaigning," he said. "But I'm not going to pour money down a dark hole." What will it take to convince Flynt to go for it? "The information given to me, if you can get between 15 percent and 18 percent of the vote you've got a good chance of winning," he said. Meantime, Flynt figures this might be the last time California will have an electoral spectacle such as the recall election is providing. "You better believe that the Legislature will fix it in the next session so that this doesn't happen again," he said. "The recall will still be here but there will be a lot of restrictions on it." Flynt's solution: require candidates to put up serious "earnest money" if they want a seat at the recall election table. "If you just had to put up $50,000 or $100,000," he said, "that would have eliminated a lot of people."
But wouldn't that also deny a lot of people the opportunity to participate in the political process?
"Yeah, but every time there's a recall there shouldn't be a circus like this," said Flynt. "I'm not saying you should exclude people from the process, but you have to have an orderly transition."

[Keyes2000mt]

Shame that only Flynt is willing to address the huge illegal problem on the border.