If Richard Riordan runs for governor, he would do so with at least a slight karmic advantage. Gov. Gray Davis feared him so much a year ago that the Democratic incumbent intervened in the Republican primary, buying up air time to blast Riordan from the right, the left and every other direction he could think of.

Initially conceived as a way to wound Riordan's campaign, the Davis barrage instead delivered a fatal blow, and Bill Simon went on to win the Republican nomination. Simon's error-prone general election campaign proved why the governor picked him as his favorite candidate to run against.

But Riordan had more than Gray Davis to blame for his defeat. Riordan ran last year as the candidate of leadership and vision while offering little of either. His campaign was so sloppy it left close observers questioning whether the former two-term mayor of Los Angeles had what it took to be governor.
Now, with his friend Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling back, Riordan might step forward as a candidate to replace Davis should the attempt to recall the governor succeed. But Riordan will surely fail again if he doesn't learn the right lessons from his disastrous run a year ago.

The first one is to be prepared. Davis is not suddenly going to become Mr. Nice Guy with the voters threatening to end his career by recall. He is going to attack with more ferocity than ever before. With time short, Riordan must help his campaign staff imagine every possible bomb Davis will drop on him, and the best way to respond. He can't afford to let the governor's blasts go unanswered in the media.

But he also can't let them distract him. The best way to defend against the governor's relentless negativity is to paint a positive picture for the voters. It's amazing how many candidates have failed to do this in the past and regretted it. Riordan and Simon are only the latest examples.

The voters already know why they can't stand Davis. There will be no need to pile on in this campaign. But if Davis goes down, the successful candidate to replace him will be the one who gives voters the best sense of who they are and why they're qualified to save the state.

Riordan can do this, but it's going to be expensive. The recall rules allow the governor to raise money in unlimited amounts. The same applies to any generic campaign in favor of the recall. But candidates running to replace Davis are limited to contributions of $21,000 or less. To overcome this restriction and have a chance to get his message out, Riordan will have to put up his own money, and lots of it. If he's not willing to do that, he should probably stay out.

Next is discipline. Riordan's gregarious manner is endearing, and if he were governor, it would be fun to listen to him think out loud about every conceivable issue facing the state. But campaigns are a time for focus, not rumination, and for Riordan, focus is job one. He simply must sift through his bag of tricks and pull out a few that will give Californians reason to trust him to turn their state around.

He could start with his résumé. When he was elected mayor of Los Angeles, Riordan was an outsider, a successful businessman and charity leader taking over a deeply wounded city fresh off the 1992 riots, its economy in tatters. Though he came from the minority party, he built bridges to the opposition and helped lead a transformation of the city. That's experience directly relevant to the task at hand today in California.

There's also this: He is not afraid to take on powerful interest groups. As mayor, he led a coalition for education reforms that battled the teachers union for control of the Los Angeles Unified School District board, and won. His slate of candidates didn't work miracles, but the city's schools are better today than they were a decade ago. Later, Riordan sided with Latino families who wanted their children to learn English. He was one of the first politicians in California to endorse Proposition 227, which limited bilingual education, despite widespread opposition by the education establishment and the ethnic lobby.

Guts like this would come in handy were Riordan elected governor. For California to pull itself out of the mess it's in, the state's leaders are going to have to confront entrenched interest groups who will surely squeal at every proposal for change. They are going to have to re-engineer government, exercise policy triage, ignore the boutique issues and figure out how to get out of the way so that the state's still-dynamic private sector can create more good jobs. In the long run, economic growth is the only way to provide the revenue necessary to finance the level of services Californians demand from their government.

The state is ready to hear a message for how to get this done, and Riordan is qualified to deliver it. But it's still not clear he knows how.