enemy

To understand political consultant Clinton Reilly–the hard-charging, number-crunching, message-honing, score-evening, candidate-firing, vitriol-spewing millionaire who is running Democrat Kathleen Brown’s campaign for governor–the autumn of 1993 is a good place to start.

One year before Election Day, Reilly was looking for work. Fresh from Los Angeles, where he had helped Richard Riordan beat the odds and become mayor, the San Francisco-based strategist had no major California clients. The problem was, in partisan races at least, he worked almost exclusively for Democrats, and the Democrats at the top of the ticket–Kathleen Brown and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein–had already hired their campaign teams.

Shut out, Reilly then did what no other political player in California would dare to do–he met with Joe Shumate, a top adviser to Gov. Pete Wilson, and discussed if he could play a role in reelecting the state’s top Republican. Weeks later, he talked to Congressman Michael Huffington about managing his campaign for Feinstein’s seat. Reilly had consorted with the Republican enemy. In his business, that just isn’t done. “It’s like the Hatfields and McCoys,” says Wilson’s campaign manager, George Gorton. “You switch sides, and neither side trusts you.” Then, Reilly switched sides again. Last March, a few months after talking to Wilson’s forces, he stepped in to rescue Brown’s floundering campaign.

It was the kind of maneuver that has made Reilly one of California’s most feared and envied political consultants–and one of the most brilliant. If you don’t believe it, just ask him. To hear Reilly talk, he is to other consultants what L’Oreal is to Prell–the one candidates hire because they’re worth it. He’s the big gun, the closer, the one you call when money is no object. And Reilly lives up to his own hype just often enough to make it seem true.

In more than two decades, Reilly has run winning campaigns for some of California’s best-known politicians, including Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Tony Coehlo, Bill Honig, Robert Matsui, Nancy Pelosi and David Roberti. He has helped elect the current mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even his sharpest critics say Reilly knows the California electorate–where it lives, how it thinks, why it votes–as well as any political operative in the state. Reilly knows how to reach people, and that’s what politicians pay him handsomely to do. The 47-year-old son of a Bay Area milkman wears Italian suits, drives a lipstick-red Jaguar and lives just down the street from Robin Williams in a three-story Seacliff home that looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge.

More powerful than many candidates he’s helped elect, more influential than most Democratic party officials, Reilly epitomizes the modern campaign consultant. His loyalty lies not with his party but with himself, and his egotism is legendary. So is his paranoia. He is “Nixonian,” says one colleague. “Queeg-like,” says another. State Sen. Quentin Kopp, a former client, refers to him fondly as “Satan.”

In what is essentially an anonymous profession, Reilly has a knack for attracting attention, and not all of it flattering. In 1988, he managed–and lost–what remains the most expensive political campaign in state history, the insurance industry’s $63.8 million effort to beat back reform. (Reilly’s firm netted at least $6 million). In 1989, after working for months on Feinstein’s gubernatorial campaign, he noisily fired the candidate, faxing a press release to the media that claimed she lacked the gumption to become governor. (They haven’t spoken since.)

Last year, Reilly went to the San Francisco Examiner for a talk with Publisher William R. Hearst and Executive Editor Phil Bronstein. Reilly left on a stretcher with a broken ankle that required nine screws and a metal plate to fix. Though subsequent litigation never established whether Bronstein or Reilly was the aggressor, it did reveal that Reilly injects testosterone, a tidbit that only enhanced his fearsome reputation. (According to Reilly, his doctor prescribes the injections to correct a hormone imbalance.)

“When the opponent knows you have (him) on your side, a chill goes up their spine,” says San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan. “He’s certainly better to have inside the tent than outside.”

Now, Reilly faces his toughest test. Can he reinvigorate Kathleen Brown’s once promising campaign and propel her to victory? If he succeeds in electing the first woman governor of California, one thing is sure. Nothing will stand in the way of Clint Reilly. Except, perhaps, himself.

Reilly is holding court in the restored San Francisco warehouse that houses the Clinton Reilly Group. He sits in a conference room at one end of a long, sleek table. As always, he wears an expensive suit–today, it’s navy blue–a starched white shirt, a designer tie and patterned socks. The ovals of his wire-rimmed glasses are perched high on his pale, prominent nose. Unsmiling, he fiddles with an Evian bottle cap and crosses and uncrosses his legs.

Nine members of Kathleen Brown’s campaign staff sit around the table, and judging by the accumulation of empty coffee cups, they’ve been there for hours. The question at hand: how to energize the electorate–”to turn it on,” says Reilly, “so it votes.” The answer sounds simple: Demonize Pete Wilson. “Why is PW a bum?” asks the hand-scrawled heading atop a big sheet of paper. The answers are taped to the walls. “California in decline . . . . Never done what he’s said he’d do . . . . He’s a blank . . . . 12 years asleep at the wheel . . . . He’s a hypocrite.”

After half a day’s brainstorming, however, something is still missing. Reilly summons a female assistant who hurries off, returning a moment later with a folder stuffed with mailers from previous Reilly campaigns. He picks out a lustrous Riordan-for-mayor brochure. “The declining city,” he says, displaying a glossy four-color photograph of graffiti-scarred Los Angeles streets. “Everybody sees it. It’s not a core issue, it’s a symbolic issue. Then, you’ve got crime,” he says, pointing to another slick image: a gloved hand, aiming a revolver directly at the camera. What the Brown campaign lacks, Reilly says, are visual cues that show voters why California needs a change.

“That’s one of our problems. It’s the worst recession since the Great Depression. But how do you portray a middle-class Depression?” he asks, thinking aloud. “It’s not bread lines. It’s a whole new image for the ‘90s. And we need to capture that. We need to show people how four more years of Wilson will hurt them.” This is the Reilly trademark, distilling a race down to a few stark ideas. Political consultants like to boast of their ability to identify the themes that underlie a given election, but what sets Reilly apart is his capacity to condense those themes in evocative, elegantly produced television ads and mailers.

“The guy’s a genius,” Riordan says. “He’s weird. But he’s a genius.”

To bring home the threat of crime during the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral race, Reilly created a mailer about rape in Hollywood, the district that Riordan’s opponent, City Councilman Mike Woo, had represented for years. The text of the ad was mostly statistics. But its frightening series of photos caught the eye: a young woman, her face out of focus, with a spreading stain of red that looked alarmingly like blood. “Mike Woo,” said the punch line. “A Record on Crime That Could Kill You.”

Other consultants specialize–in mail, in television, in polling, in campaign management. Reilly prides himself on running a full-service firm, which he has deliberately modeled on a commercial advertising agency. He even went so far as to locate the Clinton Reilly Group in San Francisco’s ad district. It is, he says, a “real company” that makes a profit by meeting his clients’ every need, from speech writing to graphic design. Other consultants may ride the peaks and valleys of the campaign cycle by downsizing during the off-season. Reilly employs as many as 15 people regardless. Which, of course, costs money.

“He always talks about overhead,” says Dick Pabich, a Democratic political consultant. “We joke about his middle name: Clint ‘Overhead’ Reilly. You can’t have a 10-minute conversation without it coming up.” Not coincidentally, Reilly tends to work with deep-pocketed candidates. “His talent is he is able to convince his clients that they have to spend a lot of money,” says Ron Smith, a Republican political consultant. “I hope that comes off as a compliment.”

What do candidates get in return? His formidable ability to target key voters–a discipline known as “narrowcasting.” Using a computer-generated breakdown of the electorate, Reilly identifies groups of like-minded voters (white Democratic women who voted in five of the last six elections, for example). Then, he fills their mailboxes with custom-made Reilly brochures that dovetail with pointed Reilly television commercials. “(You don’t) talk vanilla to people who want chocolate or strawberry or rocky road,” he says.

Most important, Reilly’s clients get Reilly himself: a shrewd but unforgiving perfectionist, a relentless taskmaster who, during a campaign, rarely sleeps. “He is a nocturnal animal,” says Jack Davis, a San Francisco consultant. “He does his best work in the darkness.” There are many tales of his 3 a.m. telephone calls, and until about a year and one-half ago, he did not own a wrist watch. “He didn’t want to know what time it was,” says his younger brother, Kevin. “It was a way to extend his day and give it that little bit more that he could give it.”

When talking about the campaigns he has run, Reilly has a habit of referring to “the candidates I’ve elected,” speaking in a shorthand that strips the candidates themselves of any credit. The message is clear: Reilly is not merely an employee but a partner. Politicians aren’t the only ones with something to lose. Reilly’s reputation also is on the line.

“When it’s all over, you can’t give excuses for why you didn’t win,” says Reilly, sitting on an oversized couch in his cream-colored living room. Freshly cut roses sit in a vase, and the housekeeper has left a neat stack of logs in the fireplace, which Reilly has lit. “You basically have to live with the result for the rest of your career, for the rest of your life. So pretty soon, you start to say (to candidates), ‘Hey, look! If you don’t have the money, you’re not going to win, so get the money!’ You start saying to campaign workers, ‘Hey look, this isn’t a trial run here.’ ” He pauses. “They don’t like it sometimes. And they don’t like you.”

This take-no-prisoners behavior has taken its toll on Reilly. It has isolated him; few people call him a friend. “People either hate him and despise him or hate him and admire him,” says one former Reilly employee who puts himself in the latter group. “We used to refer to his mansion as Xanadu. The implication was that he was wandering around talking to the pictures.”

“ ‘Why do they walk away from me?’ ” Tony Coehlo, the former congressman from Merced, remembers Reilly lamenting. “ ‘I’ve helped them win and now they’re attacking me? Why?’ He gets hurt, really hurt, when people turn against him.”

Instead of dissuading clients, Reilly’s obsessiveness only adds to his allure. “You have to understand how much these people want to be elected. They’re people who want it so bad,” says one former Reilly employee. “They hire Clint because they know he has a monster in him, and that’s what they think they need to win.”

At Christmastime, 1969, Bess and Joe Reilly received a letter from the eldest of their 10 children. Clinton Thomas Reilly was 22 years old–the right age, he wrote, to tell his parents “thanks.” But the seven-page letter contained more than gratitude. It revealed the aspirations of a driven idealist who yearned to “drain myself in the service of others.”

“I am a restless man and cannot settle for least best,” Reilly wrote in careful script on lined notebook paper. “There is a strange will for perfection–not in detail but in vision–which threads my action during the day and often keeps me awake at night. . . .”

Reilly had recently left the seminary, ending nine years of study, and had decided to work in politics. “Where would I be now if your entire lives had been dedicated to the pursuit of money?” he asked his parents. “Would I be in a graduate school of business somewhere, waiting to become an executive trainee for a large corporation? What a dull–unexciting life that would be–and what a barren future that would hold.

“I am also aware that little can be done without money. Since I am primarily a doer, I plan to make enough of it to stay alive. My meager talents are worth plenty to someone! And I promise to make him pay!”

Reilly was born in Oakland in 1947, and he says he was drawn to politics even as a child. In the fifth grade, he was elected class president under the banner “Take a Hint, Vote for Clint”–a slogan crafted by his campaign manager and younger sister, Jill. Years older than their other siblings, Clint and Jill were inseparable, best friends, and when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of 11, “it was like a bullet that hit you and didn’t hit me. I had a feeling of a certain responsibility that came to me.”

Reilly’s mother, a recent convert to Catholicism, was raising her children in the Church. As Jill fought her illness, her faith became more intense. “She wanted to be a nun,” her mother says, and soon after Jill’s death, Clint announced his desire to enter the seminary. The Reilly family moved to a new home in the working-class city of San Leandro, and when Clint was 14, he went to live at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Mountain View. Pursuing the priesthood, he earned his college degree in philosophy and under the supervision of his favorite professor, the Rev. Eugene J. Boyle, he got his first taste of social activism.

In 1968, while in college, Reilly led a group of seminarians in producing a local version of the Kerner Commission report, the analysis of racial tensions that was written in the wake of the 1967 summer riots. The resulting 577-page “Little Kerner Report” concluded that white San Franciscans were “sleeping through a revolution.” (Mayor Joseph Alioto scoffed, calling the report “the product of 21-year-old students who have been secluded in their seminary and not in contact with the objective facts.”) A year later, Reilly left the seminary just three and one-half years shy of taking his vows. After a brief stint working for Planned Parenthood, he threw himself into politics.

“I think initially, intuitively, I wanted to get involved in politics because that was a place where you could improve people’s lives and make the biggest impact on the direction of the world,” says Reilly. “It was a pure motivation.”

In 1974, Reilly urged Father Boyle, well known as a liberal activist, to run for the state Assembly against another Democrat, John Francis Foran. “Loyal to the People,” was the slogan Reilly devised for Boyle, and the underdog candidate was gaining ground by the day. Then, at the last minute, Foran sent out a campaign mailer that showed a photograph of what was purported to be Boyle’s residence: a building that looked like a cross between the White House and “The Beverly Hillbillies” mansion. “Why doesn’t Father Boyle practice what he preaches?” the mailer asked. In truth, the building was the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Nobody lived there. Still, the hit piece succeeded. Boyle lost by a few hundred votes, and Reilly’s days as a political ingenue were over.

“That was a real turning point for Clint,” says John Thiella, a State Board of Equalization staffer who worked with Reilly on several campaigns during the ‘70s and ‘80s. “(Afterward), he understood that it wasn’t just the right ideology and goodness that led to success. You had to do some harsh things to win.”

Reilly puts it differently: “I learned the power of money.”

He certainly wasn’t making any. For most of the ‘70s, Reilly estimates that his campaign work earned him only a few thousand dollars a year. To make a living, he opened a high-class junk shop that sold traffic lights, milk cans, apple crates, Mao buttons–anything that would bring in cash. Reilly’s break came in 1979 when he ran San Francisco Supervisor Quentin Kopp’s campaign for mayor, forcing heavily favored incumbent Dianne Feinstein into a runoff. Kopp lost, but Reilly was on the map.

By his own admission, Reilly was drinking heavily during this period. “He was a Remy Martin kind of guy,” says his friend Jack Davis. In the middle of the Kopp campaign, Reilly was arrested for drunk driving and resisting arrest, according to police records. Then, while he was running the 1980 reelection campaign of then-Van Nuys Congressman Jim Corman, a Democrat, something happened between him and a girlfriend that would haunt him for years.

“Did you ever hit (your girlfriend)? Did you ever grab (her) in anger? Did you cause injury to (her)?”–lawyers for the San Francisco Examiner would pepper Reilly with these questions 13 years later, in response to the lawsuit he filed after his ankle injury. During legal proceedings, Reilly’s lawyer advised him not to answer. Still, by the time the newspaper settled–paying Reilly somewhere between $400,000 and $900,000–the alleged incident with his former girlfriend had become part of the Reilly lore. As the San Jose Mercury News put it: “Is . . . Clint Reilly a testosterone-crazed, woman-beating bully . . . ?”

“I just don’t feel it’s fair to ask me to answer that question,” he says, grimacing as he paces his office at Kathleen Brown’s headquarters. “I have acknowledged that I had a drinking problem, and that I also had problems coping with the pressures of the work. I stopped drinking in 1981 and sought counseling and even continue today to see the counselor that I saw back then. A number of things I did were destructive. And I felt it was real important for me to sort of look at myself and my behavior and make significant changes.”

Reilly insists that he had gotten ahold of himself by the time he opened his firm in 1982. With more than 30 campaigns behind him, it was time to make money. “I began to say to myself, ‘Well, gee, somebody who gets a job for $125,000 as a result of what I do and who may have that job for life. Because of his own good efforts but also what I did for him, he’s earned a ton of money, he’s gotten a lot of personal psychic rewards, he’s gotten to be a famous person. Now why in the heck should I do this for 2,000 bucks a month?”

He started demanding more money and getting it–at least six figures a campaign. Still, some candidates flinched. In 1982, after Reilly orchestrated a decisive primary victory for Barbara Boxer in her first congressional race, Boxer fired him for exceeding her campaign budget and leaving her in debt. “It’s very expensive to have a manager like Clint,” she said at the time. It could also be maddening. In the midst of the campaign, Reilly demanded that Boxer mortgage her house to raise more cash. When she refused, he went to her husband, who told Reilly to get out of his office. (Boxer refused to comment on the incident, saying it was “personal.”)

But Reilly was getting to be known as a winner. In the early years, he had lost business because he was not part of the San Francisco political machines of then-Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy or Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. By the mid-’80s, though, Reilly’s nonalignment had become an asset. Plenty of candidates sought his services, and he was free to work for whomever he wished. Soon, his behavior made some wonder if there was anything he wouldn’t do.

There was the way he conducted the 1988 insurance initiative campaign, spending what many people think was an obscene amount of money–and making a fair bit himself. (Afterward, he says, “I basically didn’t have to work a day in my life for the rest of my life.”) There was the way he publicly ditched Feinstein in 1989. (“That was bad judgment, a humbling experience for an arrogant man. But I’ll tell you what it did. It got Dianne off her ass.”) And there was the way, in 1990, he sought to work on behalf of a pro-development ballot measure in San Francisco. When the developers hired a rival consultant, Reilly turned around and spent $150,000 of his own money to defeat it. (“I think the message was adequately communicated.”)

Reilly had come to understand that money was more than merely a way “to stay alive,” as he’d written his parents in 1969. Money was the enduring currency of power. Money bought freedom–to be generous, perhaps, or to even old scores. And money commanded one of the things Reilly most craved: respect. No longer the idealistic 22-year-old, compelled to serve others, Reilly wanted to be appreciated, and experience had shown him that people appreciated what they paid for. He had learned this lesson, but he resented those who had taught him.

“In many ways, I see him as a high-priced call girl,” says Calvin Welch, a community activist in San Francisco whom many describe as Reilly’s Father-confessor. “On the one hand he greatly luxuriates in charging people top dollar and spending an incredible amount of money and having that reputation, which means he will only go after certain kinds of candidates. On the other hand, he despises those people for thinking they can buy Clint Reilly.”

Kathleen Brown sat down with Clint Reilly for the first time last March. Attorney Bill Wardlaw, a Brown adviser who had worked closely with Reilly on the Riordan campaign, hosted the afternoon session in his West Los Angeles office. Immediately, Brown says, she was struck by Reilly’s sophisticated analysis of California politics. Although the meeting had been arranged less than 24 hours before, Reilly had sketched out a formula for victory–”He diagnosed my campaign better than anyone had in a year and a half,” she says.

As darkness fell, Brown saw something else. “After about 2 1/2 hours, the lights went out–the building had closed down,” Brown remembers. “He kept right on going–(talking about) the Inland Empire margin of victory. We continued our conversation in semi-darkness. It was unusual.” Impressed by his intensity, Brown offered Reilly the job of campaign chairman. “He is a warrior. A commando. There’s nothing that comes across the transom that unnerves him or distracts him from the focus of this campaign.”

Reilly’s arrival unnerved some of Brown’s campaign staff, however. Within days of Brown’s decision, campaign manager Teresa Vilmain, policy director Roy Behr and media consultant Jim Margolis all resigned–opting to “make the tough decision now,” Margolis said in a statement, “rather than face difficulties later.” Reilly got what he wanted: complete control.

Reilly appeared to be just what Brown needed. Known for little more than her lineage, she lacked the very thing Reilly’s candidates are known for–a sharply defined image. But along with his expertise, Reilly brought his reputation as a walking cluster bomb. One woman fund-raiser who had worked for Brown for three years quit the campaign without even meeting him because of what she had heard. Other staffers had heard the stories, too. There were so many, they were impossible to avoid.

Among the things people claim to have seen Reilly do over the years: comment on the size of a woman’s breasts in front of a roomful of male colleagues; inform a male employee that he wanted “to vomit” at the sight of him; reduce men and women staffers to tears; throw paper clips; punch a wall repeatedly next to an employee’s head; pound a chair up and down; break a glass ashtray by slamming it on a table; knock the telephone receiver out of a woman’s hand while she was talking; chase an employee down a street.

“That’s one that does have a kernel of truth to it,” Reilly says of the last example. According to two sources, in the midst of a 1986 supervisorial race, Reilly became so upset at mistakes made by a staffer named Laurie R. Glenn that he pursued her, shouting, out of his office and into the streets of San Francisco in the middle of the night. Reilly says that he can’t recall precisely what occurred. “I wasn’t chasing her down the street,” he says. “I think, actually, she was chasing me.” (Glenn declined to comment.)

Reilly hates the subject of his temper, even though he often brings it up himself. When asked to explain it, he is by turns irate, contemptuous and remorseful. He concedes that he can be out of control sometimes and unnecessarily hurtful, though “much, much less than legend would have it.” That kind of anger “there’s no excuse for,” he says. “I feel badly about it.” During a campaign, though, Reilly says he uses anger strategically. Candidates “are not hiring me because they want me to get along with everybody. They’re hiring me because they want to win. The campaign is a war, you know?” And rage is a tactical weapon.

“We human beings on many levels are motivated by our desire to look good in front of our colleagues, and (by) the fear of shame,” he says, explaining why he has humiliated staffers in the presence of others. “I want it to be a public experience (so) that you know that everyone in the whole organization is going to know that you f- – -ed up.”

Reilly isn’t entirely wrong. He may have trouble getting along with people, but in the most fundamental sense, he understands them. He has pondered their motivations for years–as a seminarian, as a philosophy student, as a campaigner, as a boss. He has made a fortune by identifying and appealing to voters’ hopes and fears. He is a professional manipulator. That, say several former colleagues, is what makes him so cruel.

“The man possesses a superhuman ability to zero in on your emotional or psychological vulnerability. Clint’s weapon is words, and I’ve never seen anybody who can hit you so on the mark,” says one former employee who echoed the descriptions of dozens of others. Reilly often seems “loopy” and “out there,” this person says, but when he cuts into you, he does so with surgical precision. “That Jesuit training was really something he paid attention to. That priestly kind of power over you is there. It’s not just about a boss telling you you didn’t get enough widgets done. It’s about a priest making a fundamental comment about (your) character.”

As Reilly excoriates others, Calvin Welch says, he also flays himself. “He is a guy at war with himself. There’s the seminarian. There’s the hard-boiled campaigner. And then there’s what you could call the friend. Sometimes they don’t fit together. He is basically troubled by doubts as to whether or not he made the right decisions in his life.”

In 1991, those doubts made Reilly quit campaigning. He was exhausted, he said, and disillusioned. “In my experience, most politicians are not up to the task,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in announcing his retirement. But few people thought he would stay out of the game for long. Politics had made him a man about town in San Francisco–a staple of Herb Caen’s column, he escorted beautiful women to expensive restaurants and hosted extravagant parties at his home. As many had predicted, he was back at work within months, joining Frank Jordan’s long-shot campaign for mayor. He had decided to reconcile himself, he now says, to “certain realities of the business that will never change: the wear and tear, the continuous, the seven days a week, 16 hours a day, day after day after day.”

There are obvious payoffs–his museum quality art collection, his private beach, his up-close view of the Golden Gate Bridge. But they come at a price. Reilly says he doesn’t have to justify his temper, his wealth, his work. Still, he never stops doing so. “Look, you know . . . I am who I am and I am what I am and I’m proud of what I am,” he says. “I enjoy what I do. It’s exciting. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun. But it’s also very difficult. It’s tiring. It’s emotionally draining. It’s sometimes frustrating. It’s full of tension. . . . Sometimes, one doesn’t have total serenity about everything that you do. But, in general, I, you know . . . I am not at peace. I’m at a relative state of happiness, with a lot of tension in there as well.”

The San Francisco fund-raiser was going marvelously. The ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel was packed with nearly 1,000 Kathleen Brown supporters who had paid at least $500 a plate. “Here Comes the Sun,” blared from the loudspeaker as Brown and Vice President Al Gore entered the room and began working their way through a crowd that included several other Reilly clients. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was seated at the head table. State Sen. Milton Marks and former Supt. of Schools Bill Honig were a few tables away. Reilly’s girlfriend–a Riordan staffer named Janet Koewler–also was there, sitting at his side. But Reilly’s gaze rarely settled on anyone but Brown and her special guest.

Reilly is running the race of his life. If Brown ousts Gov. Pete Wilson, she will instantly become the most prominent woman in American politics, and Reilly could be catapulted into the national fray as well. “Clint wants to elect a President,” says one observer. Already, there is speculation that if Brown wins, Reilly’s old friend Tony Coehlo, now at the Democratic National Committee, may try to land him a job on President Clinton’s reelection campaign.

But that’s a big if. Reilly has yet to arrest Brown’s slide. Although he has brought discipline to the Brown campaign, her lead–which had hit a high of 23 points in May, 1993–is now a distant memory. The Los Angeles Times poll in mid-September had Brown behind by nine points among likely voters. With the election five weeks away, Kathleen Brown is still struggling with the problem that has vexed her from the start: explaining to voters why she is an alternative to Pete Wilson, why she should be California’s next leader.

Reilly insists that the 1994 election is about effectiveness. He says he’s convinced that if the campaign can connect Wilson to the decline of California, voters will turn to Brown. Thus, most of the 30 different television ads he has created for Brown do little more than attack Wilson. But you can’t beat something with nothing, and for all of Reilly’s efforts, Brown’s political identity remains almost as unfocused today as when she hired him.

Still, Brown remains optimistic, saying Reilly, whom she’s paid more than $690,000 in commissions and fees so far, is worth the price. “All the polls last year were not realistic assessments of what the race was going to be about. I knew that,” she said in late August. Because of Reilly, “we are right where I needed to be–in a neck-and-neck race with an incumbent governor who will be defeated in November.”

Not everyone is so sure. “(Reilly) is the best opener I’ve ever seen. He can handicap a race, he can analyze the electorate, figure out what votes are needed where. He’s almost worth his fee for that alone,” says longtime confidant, Calvin Welch. “He never gets crazy at the beginning because he has it all figured out. But when things don’t unfold the way they’re supposed to–the candidate wears the wrong dress, some bozo doesn’t get the third mailer out to the left-handed Lithuanians — But his great weakness is his end game. That’s when he loses it. .”

Clint Reilly hasn’t lost it so far. He hasn’t thrown anything, hasn’t reduced a staffer to tears. But he continues to flog himself. He hasn’t taken a day off since he joined the Brown campaign (he has been known to chide staffers who have). He sees his girlfriend infrequently. On their one-year anniversary in June, she gave him a frame to hold a picture of the two of them. Today, it sits empty–there’s been no time to pose for a photo.

“This is the most important race for governor anywhere in the country,” Vice President Gore told the audience at Brown’s fund-raiser. Reilly’s girlfriend gave his hand a squeeze. “This is a bus,” Gore continued, “we cannot and will not allow to stall.” Reilly probably couldn’t have said it any better himself.

THE CLIENTS

“He is a warrior. A commando. Nothing unnerves him.”

STATE TREASURER KATHLEEN BROWN

(1994 gubernatorial race)

“The guy’s a genius. He’s weird. But he’s a genius.”

LOS ANGELES MAYOR RICHARD RIORDAN

(1993 mayoral race)

“When opponents know you have (him), a chill goes up their spine.”

SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR FRANK JORDAN

(1991 mayoral race)

“It’s very expensive to have a manager like Clint.”

SENATOR BARBARA BOXER

(1982 congressional race)

“He gets hurt, really hurt, when people turn against him.”

FORMER CONGRESSMAN TONY COELHO

(1982, ‘84, ’86 congressional races)

She and Reilly have not spoken in five years.

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN

(1983 mayoral race)

A spacecraft equipped with two robotic arms, developed by Northrop Grumman, is set to be launched today. The company plans to establish an entire fleet of these Mission Robotic Vehicles (MRVs), ostensibly to offer a commercial service to refuel and repair satellites in orbit. However, the question has been raised about whether the MRV could also be used to attack enemy assets in space. The U.S. Space Force has said publicly that it is pursuing offensive space-based capabilities, primarily to help protect friendly satellites from growing threats.

Whether the MRV, or a derivative thereof, could be employed in an offensive role explicitly came up during a quarterly Northrop Grumman earnings call this morning. The company does not appear to have ruled out the possibility.

“As part of our satellite servicing portfolio, we’ve developed the first commercial robotic spacecraft capable of repairing, relocating, and servicing satellites in geosynchronous orbit via two robotic arms,” Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden had highlighted in her introductory remarks at the start of the call. “It can also install life extension jetpacks onto other satellites for government or commercial customers, prolonging their useful life for up to eight years.”

Next Generation of Satellite Servicing Products: Mission Robotic Vehicle and Mission Extension Pods

“The spacecraft is known as the Mission Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, and our first MRV is scheduled to launch later today, weather permitting,” she added.

“You probably can’t provide quantitative terms here, but just from a qualitative perspective, what’s the potential market for an offensive version of that spacecraft that could be used to disable adversary satellites?” Scott Mikus, Director for Aerospace, Defense and Space Research at Melius Research, asked later on during the call.

“So I appreciate the question. I will leave it up to the U.S. government to decide how that capability might fulfill mission objectives that they have in that regard,” CEO Warden said in response. “But certainly, it’s our objective to offer our clients options for technology deployment, and for them to determine policy for when and how they might deploy that technology.”

To take a step back, if all goes to plan, a SpaceX Falcon 9 space launch rocket carrying the MRV will blast off from Cape Canaveral sometime in a four-hour window starting at 5:15 PM ET today. The rocket will also carry three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs), which are the “life extension jetpacks” that Warden mentioned.

As noted, the MRV has two robotic arms that allow it to place the MEPs onto other satellites in orbit, as well as perform other tasks. The arms are part of what is formally called the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) payload. The RSGS system was developed through a program led by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in cooperation with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). It is worth noting here that RSGS is the product of U.S. government work in this vein stretching back decades. There have also been other similar developments elsewhere globally, including in China and Russia, as we will come back to later on.

Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) Concept Video

The MRV’s upcoming mission will include rendezvousing with satellites belonging to Australian firm Optus and SES in Luxembourg and attaching MEPs to them, according to a report from Spaceflight Now. Both of these companies are commercial telecommunications providers.

Northrop Grumman’s fact sheet on the MRV says the spacecraft is capable of performing an array of on-orbit inspection and servicing missions beyond refueling via the MEPs. The robotic vehicle can also be used to ‘tow’ satellites from one position to another and help clear debris. All of this requires the ability to maneuver very closely with other target objects in space. This, in turn, brings us to the question of the MRV potentially offering an offensive anti-satellite capability.

For years, TWZ has highlighted how robotic arms on spacecraft are an inherently dual-use capability that could be used to launch attacks in space. In general, arms like this could be used to damage or destroy key systems on adversary satellites, such as optics or solar panels, or to just pull them out of orbit. In the latter case, the target could be towed into a degrading orbit where, if control could not be reestablished, it would re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and be destroyed.

The U.S. military itself has repeatedly pointed to adversary satellites with robotic arms as one of many potential threats to its own space-based capabilities.

“We’re basically responding to a warfighting domain where our adversaries have already put interceptors in space, and we want to make sure that we rebalance that in terms of deterrence,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top officer, said at a roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) annual Warfare Symposium in February. Saltzman was responding to a direct question from our Howard Altman.

“Interceptors by definition refer to a handful of well-acknowledged capabilities that other countries have, like ground and air-launched anti-satellite missiles or capabilities like the SJ-21 [the Chinese Shi Jian 21 satellite], which has a grappling arm,” a Space Force spokesperson also told TWZ at that time when asked for clarification about the “interceptors in space” Saltzman had mentioned.

Long March-3B launches Shijian-21

‘Inspector satellites’ that could have dual-use purposes have been a hot topic of discussion for years now, with Russian developments drawing particular attention. A ‘killer satellite’ with close maneuvering capability could employ a variety of means beyond robotic arms to try to disable, damage, or even destroy a target in space. This could include electronic warfare jammers, directed energy weapons, chemical sprays, and small projectiles. The space-based inspector could itself be used as a kinetic kill vehicle and deliberately smashed into the target.

Close inspection of other satellites in space also provides opportunities to gather intelligence about their capabilities and monitor their activities. U.S. satellites, as well as those belonging to Russia and other countries, have been observed doing just this over the years. Some commercial satellite imagery firms are even now offering space-based situational awareness as a service.

As underscored by DARPA and NRL’s work on RSGS payload, the U.S. military already has a clear interest in the MRV spacecraft’s core capabilities. On-orbit refueling, in particular, is seen as offering vital freedom of maneuver to help safeguard friendly satellites from attack. Right now, ‘running and hiding’ is the most immediate option available for responding to threats, but doing so requires satellites to burn precision fuel, eating into their operational lifespan.

The Space Force also has an entire unit dedicated to a still-evolving “orbital warfare” mission set that has defensive and offensive elements.

“Protecting and defending satellites can’t simply be done by protect and defend. You can’t run away from a bully forever. Sometimes you got to turn around and punch,” Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, head of U.S. Space Force Combat Forces Command (CFC), said at another roundtable at the AFA Warfare Symposium in February. “So protect and defend, although necessary, is insufficient to deliver space control. We also need, as part of our joint force, the ability to attack.”

Gagnon cited China’s massively expanding space-based capabilities as a key driver behind this viewpoint. He’s also mentioned plans for Space Delta 9, the formation tasked with orbital warfare, to begin exploring new offensive and defensive tactics using an experimental satellite.

“This prototype will be operated by my Orbital Warfare Delta. This is the only Orbital Warfare Delta in the United States government. Their job will be working on their maneuvers, which is one of the seven joint functions of warfighting, so that they can deliver offensive and defensive capabilities that are precise and not imprecise,” he explained. “They’re going to work on driving that spacecraft in a way that we couldn’t drive spacecraft before.”

The scale and scope of demands to protect U.S. satellites in orbit is only set to grow significantly in the coming years, fueled further now by the Golden Dome initiative. Golden Dome is a multi-faceted effort aimed at delivering a hugely expanded national missile defense architecture. A core element of the plan as it stands now is space-based anti-missile interceptors, which will be supported by large, distributed sensor and communications satellite constellations. In a report released in May, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessed that 7,800 interceptors in orbit could be needed to make the concept work.

As already noted, the U.S. military has a clear interest in the on-orbit refueling and servicing capabilities that Northrop Grumman’s MRV spacecraft is designed to provide now. This could also be key to protecting and sustaining elements of Golden Dome, as well as other critical new space-based sensor and other satellite constellations.

The scheduled launch of the first MRV spacecraft today is a very important milestone all around, and one that might open the door to a very different kind of ‘armed’ space-based capability.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Cut to a seedy alley behind a Chinese restaurant in Rome: A dozen mobsters menace a slight young man who suddenly pulls out a pair of nunchucks. He swings the traditional stick-and-chain weapons and makes quick work of his enemies, who fall one by one, groaning in pain.

The comedic, legendary action scene is from the 1972 film “The Way of the Dragon,” written, directed and starring Bruce Lee. The martial arts star was a trailblazer, allowing Asian Americans to see themselves represented in a strong, positive light on-screen.

And now he has secured a place in California history, becoming the first Chinese American in state history to have a day designated in his honor.

Lee was born in 1940 in San Francisco. His mother was of European descent and his father was a Cantonese opera star who was on tour in the city, affording his son birthright citizenship.

Lee grew up in Hong Kong, where he followed his father’s path as a performer, acting in more than a dozen films as a child and studying the close-quarters southern Chinese martial art Wing Chun.

On May 17, 1959, an 18-year-old Lee returned to San Francisco and eventually made his way to Hollywood. He went on to influence an industry that was at the time bereft of Asian American talent, and helped to popularize the genre of martial arts films and ignite Western interest in Hong Kong action cinema.

In recognition of his contributions, state Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill designating May 17 as “Bruce Lee Day” in California. The bill, signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, encourages schools and communities to honor Lee’s life and cultural impact.

Haney has described Lee as a “symbol of pride, resilience and possibility for generations who rarely saw themselves reflected with strength and dignity.”

Lee, who saw himself not only as an actor but also as a poet and philosopher, encountered repeated barriers. Up for the main role in the 1970s television series “Kung Fu,” for example, he was rejected in favor of white actor David Carradine.

In 2020, filmmaker Bao Nguyen sought to show how Lee dispelled anti-Asian sentiment and long-held stereotypes of emasculated Asian men in his ESPN documentary “Be Water.”

“The Asian male was the face of the enemy to many Americans,” Nguyen told The Times in 2020. “It was this vicious cycle of society reflecting media and culture, and media and culture reflecting society. There had to be some kind of intervention there and Bruce, in a way, was that intervention. He was the hero that we hadn’t seen before.”

Lee learned much about the systemic oppression that Black Americans faced from his first student, Jesse Glover, who had been a victim of police brutality.

And scholars have pointed out that, although his films had far-from-perfect politics, they touched on themes of fighting oppression. The 1971 movie “The Big Boss” showed Lee battling alongside laborers. “Fist of Fury” saw him opposing Japanese colonialism and discrimination.

Lee died young in 1973, at age 32 — before he was able to witness the full extent of his stardom. He died just one month before the release of “Enter the Dragon,” which was a box-office sensation and is considered a masterpiece of martial arts filmmaking.

TOY STORY 5

(PG) 102 minutes

★★★★☆

IT’S more than 30 years since the first Toy Story film changed the way we look at the contents of an old toy box.

And it might seem that after four films — and a pretty dire Buzz Lightyear spin-off in 2022 — that the story of toys could have been packed up and put in the loft for ever.

But, no. There’s always room for another play.

And Woody, Buzz and their motley crew realise there’s a new enemy sucking the imagination out of their beloved children’s minds: Technology.

The film focuses on good old rootin’-tootin’ Cowgirl Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack), who is favoured by her owner, Bonnie.

DULCIE PEARCE

Disclosure Day is punctured with plot holes and one-dimensional characters

DULCIE PEARCE

There’s plenty in silly, fun Masters Of The Universe to entertain the family

The kid loves nothing more than playing games where Jessie and Buzz Lightyear get hitched.

Sadly, the neighbourhood kids don’t want to join in with Bonnie. In fact, they laugh at her suggestions.

When Jessie goes on a mission to persuade them otherwise, she watches as they all sit staring at devices, like little zombies.

“That’s not playing!” she exclaims. “They’re not even looking up.”

In a misguided act of kindness, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (Greta Lee) — a kid-friendly tablet that she can use to “connect” with other children. And, as you can imagine, this does the opposite.

Bonnie becomes addicted to the screen, while shunning her toys, losing her imagination and getting cyber-bullied by the girls in her class.

So, it becomes Jessie and the crew’s job to get her away from the screen and the misery it brings. Which, as any parent will know, is a near impossible task.

There is also another story running alongside it involving a shipment of new Buzz Lightyears trying to find their way to a star.

At the same time, Woody has to be brought into the pack as he’s living on the outside with the rebellious Bo Peep.

The brilliant dynamic between competitive pals Woody and Buzz is hugely missed here — as is Randy Newman’s superb theme tune, You’ve Got A Friend In Me.

This time, Taylor Swift’s original song, I Knew It, I Knew You, is played at the credits.

And Jessie’s relentless energy also becomes a little grating.

However, it’s great to see the gang back together on the big screen, and this outing has enough entertainment and imagination to make sure you won’t check your phone throughout.

EFFI O BLAENAU

(15) 90mins

★★★★★

THIS hard-hitting drama is adapted from Gary Owen’s one-woman play Iphigenia In Splott, which transforms his doomed Greek tragedy character into a working-class woman.

Effi (Leisa Gwenllian) has a bleak life, spending her days drinking vodka from a mug with her mates and eating Pot Noodles in a grim house in the Welsh valleys.

Her joy comes from club nights in Llandudno, where she meets handsome soldier Lee (Tom Rhys Harries) and the pair have a passionate one-night stand.

After he ghosts her, Effi discovers she’s pregnant.

But in the poorly maintained hospital in the poverty-stricken area, an NHS maternity care horror story then changes her life forever.

This Welsh-language film is a breathtaking work by director Marc Evans.

It strikes the perfect balance of grit and heart to make the subject matter compelling.

Gwenllian’s performance as the unpredictable and broken Effi is a masterclass in how to make an initially unlikeable character be- come someone you want to throw your arms around and care for.

FAMILIAR TOUCH

(12) 90mins

★★★☆☆

IN her debut feature film, director Sarah Friedland brings to life a moving story about a woman with dementia who is placed in a retirement community.

We meet clever, stylish Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) as she’s making a delicious meal with immaculate precision. Yet at one point, she pops a piece of toast on to the dish-drying rack.

Her son then arrives – whose name she needs a reminder of – and she wonders about his profession and acts as though they may be on a date.

But he is there to take her to an assisted-living home.

Ruth has significant short-term memory loss, though she can still reel off the recipes with precision.

She enters with little protest, apart from telling the carer, in front of her son, that she never wanted children.

Chalfant’s performance is brilliant and has none of the clichés of the elderly.

Ruth is still a sassy, flirty woman who really knows her own mind even though it is betraying her.

This gentle film has a slow pace and the long, silent scenes often ask a lot of the audience – and there’s no rush in unravelling the story.

But its subtle characterisation makes it compelling and somehow uplifting.

TOY STORY 5

(PG) 102 minutes

★★★★☆

IT’S been over 30 years since Disney’s Pixar changed the way we all look at the contents of an old toy box forever, with the creation of 1995’s Toy Story.

And it might seem that after four films – and a pretty dire Buzz Lightyear spin-off in 2022 – that the story of toys might have been packed up and put in the loft forever.

But, no. There’s always room for another play.

And Woody, Buzz and their motley crew realise there’s a new enemy sucking the imagination out of their beloved children’s minds: technology.

This film focuses on rootin’-tootin’ Cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), who is favoured by her owner, Bonnie.

DULCIE PEARCE

Disclosure Day is punctured with plot holes and one-dimensional characters

DULCIE PEARCE

There’s plenty in silly, fun Masters Of The Universe to entertain the family

The kid loves nothing more than playing games where Jessie and Buzz Lightyear get hitched.

Sadly, the neighbourhood kids don’t want to join in with Bonnie. In fact, they laugh at her suggestions.

And when Jessie goes on a mission to persuade them otherwise, she watches as they all sit staring at devices, like little zombies.

“That’s not playing!” she exclaims. “They’re not even looking up.” In a misguided act of kindness, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (Greta Lee) – a kid-friendly tablet that she can ‘connect’ with other children on.

And, as you can imagine, this does the opposite – making Bonnie addicted to the screen – while shunning her toys, losing her imagination and becoming gently cyber-bullied by the girls in her class.

So, it becomes Jessie and the crew’s job to get her away from the screen and the misery it brings. Which, as any parent will know, is a near impossible task.

There is also another story running alongside it involving a shipment of new Buzz Lightyears trying to find their way to a star.

Also, Woody has to be brought into the pack as he’s still living on the outside with the rebellious Bo Peep.

These multiple storylines make Toy Story 5 disjointed in places, and while plenty of fresh ideas are shown, it keeps repeating the idea of kids growing out of playing with toys.

The brilliant dynamic between the competitive pals Woody and Buzz is missed – as is Randy Newman’s superb theme tune You’ve Got a Friend in Me (this time Taylor Swift’s original song “I Knew It, I Knew You” is played at the credits).

And Jessie’s relentless energy becomes a little grating.

However, it’s great to see the gang back on the big screen – and it has enough entertainment, imagination and heart to make sure you won’t check your phone throughout.

Toy Story 5 is out on Friday.

As soon as enough votes were counted to officially knock Tom Steyer out of the California governor’s race, the anti-billionaire schadenfreude kicked in.

Social media and legacy media, conservative and liberal, all seemed to have a rare melding of the minds, delivering endless variations of, “How dare he try to buy elected office! We showed him.”

“I hope you received the message from California that a power-hungry communist billionaire cannot buy the state!” wrote one detractor on social media. “How much money did you waste spamming Californians? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars you wasted?”

“What a waste,” screamed a New York Times headline, slamming Steyer for not donating that money directly to building houses or funding Planned Parenthood — one-off actions that prop up broken systems instead of changing them.

I get it.

In an age when income inequality is reaching serf-lord levels, hating the rich seems easy and reasonable. You could take several zeros off the $200 million Steyer spent on his campaign and it would still be more than most of us make in a lifetime. That’s a rage-inducing reality for many, if not most of us, for whom pairing a full tank of gas with a restaurant dinner seems like careless luxury these days.

I’m not here to defend the nine-zeroes class. But maybe we should take a beat and make sure our outrage is working for us, not against us. While Steyer has spent the last few months advocating for universal healthcare, better pay and protections for workers, and putting curbs on out-of-control corporations from the energy sector to AI, other billionaires have spent that time actively undermining democracy and our financial system. Heck, some even seem to be undermining humanity. Why aren’t we raging at them?

Take, for example, a certain billionaire who seemingly would prefer to be a trillionaire: Elon Musk.

Last week, his SpaceX held an IPO in which somehow the rules of Wall Street meant to protect small investors and pension plans were set aside to his benefit. Like it or not, if you hold a public pension or a 401(k) in America that uses index funds (which most do) you will likely be an investor in his unproven and possibly risky business. I’m sure that will work out fine.

Or consider the hundreds of millions of dollars right-wing AI and surveillance-company billionaires, some Californians, are dumping into political races across the country right now to ensure that their dangerous and unpredictable technologies are not regulated, or regulated in largely meaningless ways. It’s a situation so dire that one wealthy insider last week warned in his own op-ed that if his former colleagues are successful, “It could concentrate economic power in ways that would make the Gilded Age look quaint.”

Then there’s our president, king of self-enrichment, whose wealth has skyrocketed to more than $6 billion during his time in office. Much of that moola is in opaque cryptocurrency holdings, an industry he has championed as his fortunes in it have increased.

But don’t think Trump is in it only for himself: He’s enriching his family, too.

His daughter Ivanka recently made her own “eat cake” headlines over an alleged $1.5-billion project that would convert an uninhabited Albanian island into a luxury resort. The Albanians are so mad, they’ve been protesting in the streets for nearly two weeks. Meanwhile, her brothers have coat-tailed off their dad’s crypto-ventures to make their own fortunes, as other investors suffered losses.

Those are our individual billionaires, never mind the corporations, who can dump as much money as they want into our politics thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizen’s United decision. In 2025, the oil and gas industry in California, led by Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Assn., spent about $34 million on lobbying. Not to be outdone, the Golden State’s water and electricity interests, including PG&E, spent about $35 million to bend politics to their will.

But sure, hate the goofy guy in the vintage Nikes pointing all this out.

“I’m proud of the enemies we made,” Steyer said in his concession. “In this race, those corporations revealed that they see a government that puts working people first as an existential threat — even when proposed by a billionaire. By spending $55 million — the most ever against a single candidate in a California primary — they showed the lengths they would go to in order to protect a status quo that only serves them and their profits.”

I don’t like the amount of money in our political system either, but the truth is, it’s there. And worse, the majority of those who have it seem intent on diminishing the political and economic power of those who don’t.

We are increasingly moving toward a country where the well-being of the majority of people will depend on the largesse of the few — Silicon Valley’s tech industry now talks about a universal basic income as a great boon for the coming mass unemployment they are creating.

But is existence off a charity-pittance really what we want for ourselves and our children? Do we really want these ultra-wealthy overlords to use their money unchecked to make decisions that will shape our future, diminish our rights and ultimately leave us without the power to fight back?

If Steyer wants to use his money to join this battle to keep power by the people and for the people, then the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Like it or not, us average worker bees need money to fight money. In this age when animus eats discernment like the rich eat caviar, the luxury we really can’t afford is hating the good guys just because it’s easy — even if they’re billionaires.

Reporting from Washington — Most of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters in California say they expect that come November, Hillary Clinton will be elected president — and, by and large, they’re OK with that.

While both Democratic camps prepare for a final battle in the state’s June 7 primary, the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times statewide poll found that just over half of Sanders’ supporters said they expected Clinton to be the next president. About a third of Sanders’ backers said they expected the Vermont senator to emerge the winner, and 12% said they thought Donald Trump would prevail.

Close to 8 in 10 Sanders supporters said in the survey that they would vote for Clinton in a race against Trump, although many said they would do so reluctantly.

Those findings show the reality underlying the still-heated rhetoric of the Democratic primaries: By contrast with the civil war that divides Republicans, Democrats in the country’s largest state have begun to coalesce behind their front-runner.

In the primary race, Clinton holds a modest lead over Sanders, 45% to 37%, among all Democrats and independent voters eligible to vote. Her lead is slightly larger, 47% to 36%, among those most likely to vote. Either way, that’s a significant problem for Sanders.

The poll was conducted before Sanders’ sweep of three Western states — Alaska, Hawaii and Washington — on Saturday, but those victories don’t change the electoral math much. Sanders would need not just a win in California, but something close to a landslide to overcome Clinton’s large lead in delegates before the party’s nominating convention in July.

Something else hasn’t changed: If there’s one blemish in the picture for Clinton, it’s the persistently high percentage of voters who have an unfavorable image of her, 45% in the new poll.

Clinton’s image in heavily Democratic California is more positive than it is in more Republican parts of the country; 52% of the state’s surveyed voters see her favorably. She fares far better than Trump, her most likely opponent in November, who is viewed negatively by almost three-fourths of California voters.

A Democratic voter at a Washington state caucus on Saturday. In the California primary race, Hillary Clinton holds a modest lead over Bernie Sanders, 45% to 37%, among all Democrats and independent voters eligible to vote.

(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

But her image with the public lags significantly behind other leading Democrats. That includes President Obama, whose popularity has risen, both statewide and nationally, in recent weeks. He is now seen favorably by 65% of the state’s voters, the highest level since early in his tenure. Gov. Jerry Brown is viewed favorably by 57%. Both men are viewed negatively by about one-third of voters.

The large share of voters who have a negative view of her does not put Clinton in danger of losing California in a general election: She would defeat any of the Republican candidates handily in the state, which has formed the cornerstone of Democratic victories nationally ever since her husband’s win in 1992. Against Trump, in particular, Clinton would win overwhelmingly, the poll indicated, carrying the state 59% to 28%.

But the negative impressions of so many Californians point toward the deeper problem she faces in the country and also to the likely tone of the fall campaign. A Clinton-Trump race, more than any other in recent decades, would feature two candidates who would start the campaign with large parts of the electorate deeply disenchanted with them. Given that, each side is likely to try to focus voters’ attention on the other’s flaws.

“Clinton’s challenge is not one of persuasion, it’s one of motivation,” said Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. “She’s not going to get Sanders supporters to fall in love with her,” he added, but “the other way to motivate your base is to frighten them about the alternative. Against Donald Trump, that should be very doable.”

That’s certainly the case for Gretta Whalen, a 32-year-old freelance writer and communications consultant from Los Angeles, who leans toward Sanders. Clinton, she said, “has been around for so long, and we know so much about her, and not all of it is positive.” Sanders, by contrast, seems attractive, and his ideas feel new, even if “some of them are very pie in the sky and would be very difficult to get the rest of the country on board with.”

But, she added, as she paused from feeding her newborn son, the contest is different “now that we’re looking at a likely race against Donald Trump.” She and her friends, most of whom back Sanders, “are all so shocked that we’re in this place where Donald Trump is a serious contender for president,” she said. Compared with past elections, this campaign “feels a little more surreal.”

“I was much more excited about Bernie” earlier in the campaign season, she added. “We love him as a candidate. We also recognize that he’s not the most realistic winner.”

Just under 1 in 4 voters in the state have a negative image of both of the likely contestants. That group would hold its nose and side with Clinton over Trump, 38% to 23%, with a significant share of them saying they would not vote at all, the poll found.

Sercan Ersoy, a 33-year-old substitute teacher in Oakland, has much more negative feelings about Clinton than does Whalen. A former member of the Green Party who changed his registration in order to vote for Sanders in the primary, Ersoy feels Clinton is “too much of a war hawk” in addition to having too many ties to Wall Street. “I don’t want to vote for her,” he said.

But “if you ask me in late October,” he added, “and there’s a real possibility of a President Trump, I might say, ‘OK. I’ll vote for Hillary.’”

This USC/L.A. Times poll was conducted March 16-23 by telephone, both cellphone and landline, among 1,503 registered voters in California, including 832 Democrats and non-party voters eligible to take part in the June primary. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points for the full sample and 3.7 percentage points for the Democratic primary sample. It was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic polling firm, and the Republican company American Viewpoint.

The poll found the race between Clinton and Sanders dividing along lines that have become familiar during nearly two months of primaries: Sanders overwhelmingly wins voters younger than 30; Clinton does better with older voters. She leads among women by 11 percentage points, among men by 5 points.

Clinton leads narrowly among white voters but has a much larger edge among blacks and Latinos. In a surprise, given her family’s long-standing popularity with Asian voters, Clinton appears to be trailing Sanders with that group, although his edge, 43% to 35%, is within the poll’s margin of error for such a subgroup.

Clinton’s lead among minority voters is “much more muted” than her edge in previous contests in Texas and across the South, said pollster Anna Greenberg. That’s largely a result of a generational divide, with Sanders leading among younger Latinos, much as he does among young white voters. The other minority groups are too small to allow a detailed breakdown by age.

The other significant division in the primary is by party. California’s Democratic primary is open to registered Democrats as well as voters who decline to state a party. Clinton leads Sanders by 14 percentage points among registered Democrats; Sanders leads by 9 percentage points among the nonpartisan voters — again a pattern seen repeatedly in other states.

Among Sanders voters, 80% polled said they would vote for Clinton in November, although the share saying they would do so “reluctantly,” 45%, outnumbers those who would do so “enthusiastically,” 35%.

About 1 in 8 Democratic primary voters surveyed said they would refuse to vote for Clinton if she is the nominee. That’s half the level of rejection that Trump faces among Republican primary voters.

Among the Democratic primary voters most resistant to backing her in the fall are white men 65 and older, according to the poll. By contrast, only 4% of people who identified themselves as students said they would refuse to vote for Clinton — another indication that Sanders’ core supporters are unlikely to reject her candidacy.

By 72% to 21%, Democratic primary voters said in the survey that they are excited about the prospect of voting for the first female president.

Sanders has centered his campaign around the belief that the U.S. economy is unfairly rigged by Wall Street and big corporations. Not surprisingly, a large majority of his voters share that view.

The poll asked people if they thought that in today’s economy “everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run if they work hard” or if “it’s mainly just a few people at the top who have a chance to get ahead.” By more than 2 to 1, Sanders’ voters said that only those at the top could get ahead.

Clinton’s supporters were more evenly divided, with 52% saying that everyone had a fair chance and 42% saying that only those at the top could get ahead. That reflected, in part, the feelings of Latinos, who are more likely than other Americans to say that hard work still pays off in the long run.

Those who backed Clinton were also more likely than Sanders’ backers to say that “when it comes to good jobs for American workers, our best years are ahead of us.” More than 6 in 10 of Clinton’s voters agreed with that statement, compared with just under half of Sanders’.

Neither group of Democratic voters was as pessimistic as Trump’s supporters, however. A majority of them said that when it comes to good jobs, “America’s best years are behind us.”

david.lauter@latimes.com

For more on Campaign 2016, follow @davidlauter

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ALSO:

Trump leads Republican primary field

California’s June primary just became crucial in the race for the White House

Full coverage of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll

Full poll results and detailed crosstabs

Updates on California politics

Live coverage from the campaign trail

Spencer Pratt had a few things going for him when he launched an insurgent campaign to become Los Angeles’ next mayor.

He had a heart-tugging origin story that saw him transform from a has-been television star into one of the thousands of residents who lost their home in last year’s Palisades fire. He faced an unpopular incumbent in Mayor Karen Bass. He was powered by a vigorous social media presence and an angry electorate thirsty for change.

He was able to capitalize on those conditions to outraise his main rivals, Bass and city council member Nithya Raman, and transform his candidacy from an afterthought into a national story. Running as a Republican in a super-blue city like L.A. put him at an automatic disadvantage — one that might have been extremely difficult to overcome in the end. But the Pratt posse started to feel like a bona fide movement the more it thundered on, the type of revolt against the old guard that in previous eras led to the passage of Proposition 13 and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis — the type of movements that forever alter California politics.

Pratt, however, faced an apparently insurmountable obstacle.

Pratt.

With almost all votes counted, he’s going to finish in third place with about 26% of the electorate — the same slice Donald Trump received in 2024 — while Bass and Raman proceed to face each other in November. Political strategists will teach his failed attempt to their clients as a cautionary tale of how a candidate blew every advantage they had when they couldn’t afford to lose one.

Pratt’s first mistake was thinking that Angelenos wanted a campaign of wanton rage. Yes, many residents are furious at the state of the city. Yes, they want change. Yes, the angry Angeleno archetype is a real phenomenon that flares up in local elections to smack back at the powers that be.

But L.A. is not MAGAlandia — running from the right on apocalyptic, whiny messaging will only get you the few Republicans that remain in the city and some disaffected liberals. Pratt didn’t run as a MAGA candidate, but it’s hard to say he didn’t run like one — even as he swore he was running for everyone.

He took every opportunity to ridicule progressives in a city where four democratic socialists sit on the city council, one of them — Raman — has a good chance of becoming the next mayor, and five of the six candidates endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or are moving on to the general election.

Instead of making overtures to that side of the populist coin, Pratt recorded videos obsessing over Bass’ trip to communist Cuba in the 1970s, a well-known fact he treated as revelatory and which made Pratt sound like he was stuck in a John Birch Society meeting circa 1965. His dismissal of Raman as “stupid” and the mayor as “Basura” — trash — came off as facile juvenilia at a time when we already have the Big Juvenile Delinquent running things in the White House. Ridiculing homeless people as “zombies,” “vagrants” and “bums” only riled up the worst elements of the city and turned off anyone with a heart.

Keith Casey of Casey’s Family BBQ serves up food as L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign “block party” event on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Pratt undoubtedly attracted votes from a good amount of non-MAGA people fed up with various problems afflicting L.A. But many of the supporters who brayed the loudest on his behalf were the same people already doing daily propaganda on social media for a failed, hate-filled president and his baleful cronies.

Pratt acted like he believed the AI-generated videos created by fans that cast him as a comic-book hero was real life instead of forgetting that he was a novice trying to take on two experienced politicians. While Bass and Raman trekked across the city during the primary, Pratt limited his public appearances mostly to the Westside and random encounters with supporters he posted on social media. The few times he appeared outside those safe spaces came off as safari expeditions in a mysterious city the 42-year-old lifelong Angeleno obviously didn’t know.

Take the South L.A. block party he hosted last month. Instead of having something thoughtful to say about the state of Black L.A. or how its political leaders continue to neglect the region, all Pratt seemed to take away from that afternoon was that it was in the territory of the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, a detail he shared ad nauseum on social media and to the press — as if kicking it with gang members would fix L.A. or gain him any votes or grant some kind of street cred.

That self-centered cluelessness ended up torpedoing Pratt’s best campaign moment. In the one debate he participated in, Pratt put Bass on the defensive, turned Raman into a tongue-tied mess, kept his answers sharp and relatable, and even earned the praise of the moderators. He should’ve demanded more gatherings like that to flex his mastery of television cameras, make his case to as many Angelenos as possible and showcase the self-proclaimed Pratt Daddy as someone willing to take on hard questions anytime, anyplace, from anyone.

Instead, Pratt declined an invite to their only other scheduled debate and never bothered with the forums civic groups across the city held in order for their members to hear from candidates. Instead, Pratt flew out to New York the week before election day to appear on Fox News.

Sticking to largely sycophantic media who lobbed softball questions hardened his ceiling. Pratt needed to proselytize — not preach to the choir.

The thing is, Pratt made some strong points about the inefficiencies of L.A.’s political status quo and the outrage that is having tens of thousands of people live on our streets. And there’s something appealing about an outsider crashing City Hall, which is way too beholden to sclerotic lifers who can be as clueless about what the city needs as Pratt turned out to be.

Instead, he platformed people who saw L.A. as a hellhole — or “shithole,” as Trump likes to call certain places. It was hard to see what some of Pratt’s loudest and most strident supporters actually thought was worth preserving in the city — but not why they felt he was their man.

In the wake of his loss, Pratt sure hasn’t push back against unfounded claims by too many of his followers and Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson that Democrats somehow rigged the election against him. Quite the contrary, Pratt has insinuated on social media that they’re onto something.

That last point reinforces the ultimate reason Pratt could never become L.A.’s next mayor: He really doesn’t believe in L.A.

Angelenos don’t mind haters — it’s the type of city that frustrates residents even on its best days. But one insult residents won’t brook is someone who doesn’t have confidence in better days ahead for the city no matter how dire things may be.

Angelenos can spot a phony from far away — and Spencer, you’re turning out to be phonier than the fake drama on any of the television shows you ever appeared in.

You vowed to leave L.A. if you didn’t win the race for mayor. Maybe you should stay and try to righteously pressure Bass and Raman to make much needed changes. If you do, urge your followers to do the same instead of them pouting and sitting out the mayor’s race.

But if you don’t, well, maybe you never really loved L.A. as much as the City of Angels, warts and all, deserves. And you kind of need to really love L.A. to really fix what ails it.

Step up, or step outta town.