No one has acquitted himself very well in the political flap over Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and the Latino student organization MEChA, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan.

Bustamante's Republican challengers in the gubernatorial recall race have made irresponsible and untrue charges, calling the campus club a violent, racial separatist organization. MEChA, which was formed in the political ferment of the late 1960s, is no such thing today, if it ever was. Yet state Sen. Tom McClintock and staff members of Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign have used Bustamante's membership in MEChA during his student days at Fresno State University in the 1970s as an excuse to play divisive, racial politics. That's dismaying and it's bad for California. They should cut it out.

Bustamante, for his part, could have handled the situation a lot better. When McClintock made it an issue, Bustamante should have forthrightly stated what the group meant to him then and what it means to him now, and have done with it. He failed to do that.

For the record, MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, was formed in 1969 from another student group, the United Mexican American Students. Aztlan is the mythical homeland of the Aztecs. No one knows where Aztlan was, but anthropologists' best bet today is not California, but somewhere in the Mexican state of Zacatecas.

There is no denying that MEChA, at its formation, proudly joined in the radical sloganeering of the time. Its founding document, El Plan de Santa Barbara, was named rather grandiosely in the style of the many plans that circulated during Mexico's revolution of 1910-17. One of the racist slogans inaccurately linked to MEChA, "For the race everything, outside of the race nothing," actually comes from El Plan de Aztlan, a document issued by UMAS before MEChA existed.

But this is trivia. For more than 20 years MEChA has operated on roughly 300 college and high school campuses more as a student pep club than as a political organization. It is no more violent or revolutionary than the Young Republicans. MEChA has no national board or leadership and its chief role for years has been fostering social gatherings and keeping Latino students in school.

Because MEChA has no central leadership, its college chapters set up Web sites on their own. Some of these sites have links to racist organizations. The MEChA chapters should kill those links.

But for McClintock to compare the club to the Ku Klux Klan, and for Schwarzenegger's operatives to try to link Bustamante to racist organizations ---- which they have done in calls to this newspaper ---- is wildly inaccurate and politically unwise. Such race-baiting politics backfires every time.

MEChA, in short, is not a real issue in California politics. It's a red herring. All serious candidates for the governor's office should stop the name-calling and address the real problems California faces, starting with a specific plan to get the state's budget in the black.