Michael Huffington, Mark Simon and now the guy who made a hundred million dollars selling car alarms.

Huffington and Simon both lost.

Whether the car alarm magnate is going to follow in their footsteps is an open question, to be settled in October.

Whatever happens in this civic nightmare, I still think he doesn't have any more qualifications for public office than I have. And that, I am sorry to say, is zilch.

But he does have a lot more money than I do.

Oh, I know, if I could scare up 65 friends and raise $3,500, I could run for governor, too. But I don't have that kind of money to throw away and I am almost certain I don't have 65 friends. Or maybe even three. And I've never been a star in the business world—or any other world, for that matter.

I know there are those who disagree with my premise. It's their contention that those who are successful in the business world, such as the car alarm maker, are likely to be better politicians than politicians. After all, so this reasoning goes, success in one field ought to bring success in another.

This same premise is what drives some doctors into fields other than medicine. Because they constantly make life or death decisions, they sometimes get the feeling they can be as successful at politics (or almost anything else) as they are at, say, surgery.

I don't think that's true.

Politics basically is a constant series of compromises. You give and you get, but seldom do you get all you want in politics. What you get is some of what you want.

Chief financial and chief executive officers don't usually compromise. They issue orders and expect them to be obeyed. They are one-man shows.

If they are good at what they do, they accept suggestions, properly presented, but usually they view them as suggestions and nothing more.

Unfortunately for them, in democratic government the executive governs with the assistance of Legislature and the judicial systems, neither of which take direct orders to do much of anything. So government is not as clean and efficient as, say, running Intel or IBM, but that's the messy way in which democracy works in the United States.

Rich men, particularly very rich men, who no longer have to bother about making a living and who think politics will relieve their boredom, seem to think otherwise.

And having a lot of money makes it possible for them to indulge this whim. They can afford to run for public office. I suspect they do so not so much because of their patriotic fervor but simply because they can.

They've got the money and, as the late Jesse Unruh used to say, money is the mother's milk of politics. Lots of money.

It takes enormous amounts of cash to run for almost anything anymore. Mostly that's because candidates appeal to the voters via television, and television advertising is immensely expensive. Most politicians seem to start the job of raising money to get re-elected almost immediately after getting elected.

Then when the election approaches they saturate the television networks with advertisements that almost no one believes. The ads don't do much to convince voters of the candidate's worth in spite of spin doctors and the host of experts who appear from somewhere just before elections.

What they do do is establish name recognition. By the time the election comes we at least know who the candidate is, even if we only have a vague idea what he or she stands for.

So the equation is pretty simple: If you have a lot of money, you can at least establish who you are.

Or, as in the case of the car alarm magnate, you can put up enough money to gather enough signatures to force a recall election. I hasten to add that wouldn't make a recall election happen if there were some reason to have one.

The current governor has done a great job of ensuring that a recall sounds reasonable no matter who pays to bring it into being.

But it still seems like democracy run amuck to me. Without money and lots of it we might well be spared the idiocy of re-electing a governor we just re-elected a little over half a year ago.

But then no one ever said life was fair or that California was like any other state in the Union. In fact, there are lots of residents in other states who think California is full of zanies.

And they just could be right.