Due to a posting glitch, this story was originally marked as posted at 2:49 a.m., when it was posted at 2:49 p.m.
With no end in sight to the state's flurry of ballot initiatives and the state likely to hold a special election this year, top Republican adviser Steve Schmidt and Democratic strategist Chris Lehane are among several California heavyweights forming a new firm solely designed to work on ballot-box campaigns.
Schmidt ran Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election drive, while Lehane worked in the Clinton White House and defeated a GOP attempt to change California's electoral college system.
The new firm, LFM Campaigns, also will include:
-- Democratic consultant Ace Smith, who was Hillary Clinton's California presidential campaign chairman and serves as an adviser to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a potential gubernatorial candidate
-- Republican strategist Adam Mendelsohn, adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the governor's former communications director
-- Mark Fabiani, Lehane's longtime business partner and a former communications aide to President Clinton
The firm's name refers to Lehane, Fabiani and Mercury Public Affairs, in which Schmidt and Mendelsohn remain partners. They will continue to operate their own firms in addition to LFM Campaigns, Lehane said. While all are based in California, he said they consider the firm to be national in reach, especially as California's brand of direct democracy spreads to other states.
"If you look at the history of proposition work, the ones that have been most successful from a strategic perspective are those that have crossed party lines or have been seen as bipartisan," Lehane said.
LFM Campaigns is geared toward running campaigns for initiatives and referendums that have bipartisan support, such as the Schwarzenegger-backed redistricting initiative that voters approved last fall. Mendelsohn ran that campaign as the governor's political adviser, a role he will continue to play as Schwarzenegger pursues more initiatives related to political and budget reform.
"All of us have worked together in some capacity, and in some instances have worked against each other," Mendelsohn said. "We'll take each initiative and referendum on a case by case basis, and there are initiatives we won't work on for conflict reasons."
There should be no shortage of campaign business in the next two years. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office last week asked the Legislature to schedule a special election as soon as April to ask voters to pass several budget solutions, from new borrowing to changes in the budget process.
"Both the governor and Legislature have been working on those so obviously that's something consistent with the type of approach we'd take, but I don't want to be presumptuous," Lehane said.
Mendelsohn said he and Schmidt have decided to focus on initiative campaigns for the time being. They recently cut ties with potential GOP gubernatorial contender Meg Whitman, and they plan to remain on the sidelines in the 2010 race.
"We have made a conscious decision to stay neutral in the governor's race," Mendelsohn said. "We don't want to do candidate work. To do a governor's race, if you're going to do it right, the only way to do it is 100 percent of the time, and that's to the detriment of family and other business."
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