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Barack Obama admits one of his (many) talents is that people find in him what they want to see....and local elected officials have been looking at Obama and seeing...a Sugar Daddy!

By their lights, Obama is the key to a slew of ballot-measures here in the Southland that would, if passed by voters in November, increase taxes and government revenues. Local government leaders have been figuring Obama will produce a big turnout of Democrats – and drastically improve the chances for passage of their tax-and-spend ballot measures…

One of my talented curmudgeonly friends – who has made a livelihood out of eating from the public trough - sat down recently to enlighten me about the scuttlebutt inside the inner sanctums of the Four-Level (LA’s version of Washington, D.C.’s Beltway).

“The local electeds (I can’t help it if he talks this way!!!) have been positively giddy about the political picture with Obama on the ballot,” he told me. “They figure he’ll create a Democratic tidal wave that will lift all their ballot measures into the victory circle.”

Here’s the ballot measure landscape, as described to me by this jaded friend of mine:

• MTA’s ½ cent sales tax, meant to raise $40 billion over 30 years for mass transit improvements. “Expect most of this money (if passed) to go for giant rail projects that will make all the MTA elected officials’ construction and development pals and contributors richer than Midas. Forget about any significant cash going to bus improvements. Buses are so yesterday – only poor people ride them.”

• LA city’s anti-gang, parcel tax that’s supposed to raise $30 million per year – ad infinitum. This tax plan is the brainchild of Councilwoman Janice Hahn and will be a full-employment act for rehabilitated gang members looking for a less lethal gig as gang counselors. My jaundiced friend says: “If this passes, our chances of ending the gang plague will be a lot greater than our chances of ever getting rid of this tax. Our kids will be paying this tax even after the Second Coming.”

• The LA Unified School District also is trying to capitalize on the perceived Obama gravy train. The district recently agreed to put a $7 billion bond measure on the ballot. “I had hope for a while that a school district that cannot teach our kids how to read, write or do math would dither so long over what to do that it would miss the deadline for placing a measure on the ballot.,” my friend told me. “But alas! I forgot to figure that once the school board members saw the money their greed would propel them to act – not procrastinate, debate endlessly and fall into a swamp of indecision., their default mode.”

• Last, but not least, the LA community college is shooting for a $3.5 billion bond measure to build new facilities. “Didn’t they approve another bond measure a few years back – and can anyone show me anything they’ve built with that money,” my friend asked.

Wow. There was a lot of negative energy flowing out of this conversation with my, er, friend (?), a kind of reverse-Nirvana thing going on. I really wanted to distance myself from that kind of karma so I gave him some phony excuse about having to get back to work to finish a story and excused myself.

I hadn’t heard from my friend for about three weeks when the phone rang today. It was my misogynist, cynical friend on the line. “Hey!” he shouted, sounding very upbeat. “Did you hear?!”

I immediately wondered what catastrophe must have gone down to warrant his passion – maybe an entire government bureaucracy had collectively committed hari-kari, in public, on Channel 35. What? I asked. What happened?

“Schwarzenegger has screwed them up!! He’s looking at a 1 cent sales tax increase. It’s too much…if that goes on the ballot, the whole house of cards will collapse. There’s likely to be a voter revolt, not an Obama bounce, facing the MTA, City Hall and the boards of education! All their best-laid plans will be at risk! Fantastic!”

But why so happy? I asked.

“Because,” my friend chuckled, “all these government agencies will now be running scared, and they’ll have all their little elected officials running all over the place raising money to pay for hugely expensive campaigns - TV ads, flyers, you name it - to get voters to support their tax and bond measures! It’ll be great. For me.”

For you? “Yeah, I’ll be taking a leave of absence from (his government job) to run one of these campaigns – at twice the salary I’m making here pushing paper in this bureaucracy.”

In other words, you don’t care if the measures pass or fail just that they create big budget campaigns that hire guys like you to run them? “You got that right, dude!”

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