Tricky Dick Riordan was a loon. He did zilch for the CA GOP and expected them to hand him the 2002 Gubernatorial nomination on a silver platter. Bob Simon, Jr. fortunately put a stop to that nonsense, but sadly, his spectacular primary upset fizzled going into the fall.
You might remember that when the Recall effort began in earnest the following year, the party establishment and Ah-nold S. went hat in hand to Tricky Dick. Ah-nold was all set to support him 100% down the line until they met face to face and Ah-nold discovered that Dick had a very serious problem... he realized he was utterly senile and couldn’t run a legitimate campaign. With that, Ah-nold himself announced he’d run as a Riordan substitute (left-wing, of course), and you know the rest.
Sec of State Jones should have been the nominee for CA Governor in 2002.
I agree he was a nutcase when he identified himself as Republican and decided to run, IN THE PRIMARY, as a party reformer.
But, as a big city mayor, he was about as clean and as good as any city can hope for - the guy before him, Tom Bradley, was Coleman Young level corrupt - they had to force a newspaper to shut down because it was getting too close to exposing Bradley. Rudy, and like it or not, Bloomberg, are the only other decent big city mayors that I can think of.
I completely forgot about Dick Riordan until I read this ping.
Not much was missed.