Arnold Schwarzenegger, the gubernatorial candidate who's vowed to "clean up Sacramento," has recruited for his team a passel of political operatives with some serious dirty laundry of their own.
Remember Chuck Quackenbush? He was the insurance commissioner driven from office three years ago when it was discovered that he went soft on insurance companies that allegedly bilked thousands of policyholders whose homes were damaged in the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Rather than fining insurance companies for misconduct, Quackenbush reached settlement agreements that required the companies to contribute millions of dollars to private foundations.

Those foundations produced a series of public service announcements that starred the politically ambitious Quackenbush.

As The Bee's Gary Delsohn reported Thursday, the political consultants who hatched the Quackenbush scheme and benefited handsomely from it are now working for Schwarzenegger. They include longtime Republican operatives Jeff Randle, Don Sipple and Marty Wilson. Joe Shumate, another former Quackenbush consultant, told The Bee he's been contacted by the Schwarzenegger team about a job but has not yet been hired.

The re-emergence of the Quackenbush team is illustrative of the nature of politics in Sacramento (or Washington or Austin or Albany for that matter). An army of campaign advisers, public relations firms, pollsters, lobbyists and assorted other camp followers finds itself between jobs. This army depends on infusions of cash from special interests: insurance companies or labor unions or energy companies or trial lawyers or doctors or Indian gaming tribes. With term limits, and now recall, candidates come and go at a dizzying pace. The political class that feeds on campaigns is constant. So are the special interests.

Schwarzennegger has tried to position himself above it all. Launching his campaign using the co-authors of one of California's most recent scandals suggests he's not very familiar with the cesspool he says he wants to drain.