Nunez Offers New Health Deadline, Channels Unruh

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez today said negotiations on health care reform were closing in on a deal while declaring only one more week to be left for such a deal... and defended his campaign fundraising practices by invoking the words of a legislative icon of the past.

All of this came at a morning news conference called for Nunez to introduce Warren Futurani, the Democratic candidate for the Assembly who won the special election this week in California's 55th assembly district. The Democrat appears to have garnered just slightly less than 50% of the vote, but Nunez suggested this morning that final results from Tuesday's election may actually give Futurani the win outright.

After some brief remarks, Futurani was left to watch as Nunez then fielded questions on a host of other issues.

Most newsy is probably the status of health care reform. The buzz around the state Capitol this week has been that a deal is starting to take shape, one that as it's been described seems closer to the positions of Democrats than that of Governor Schwarzenegger. To be fair, though, no details have really been seen. And Nunez today summoned his 47 fellow Assembly Democrats to Sacramento to update them on the private talks.

"An incredible amount of progress has been made on the negotiations," said Nunez. "At this point, it's a matter of closing out the last two or three very small issues."

Nunez declined to say what those issues were. But he did report that Democratic legislators are being called by the tobacco industry to try and stop plans for a tobacco tax hike that would help pay for the health care reform plan.

And he placed a new deadline on the issue: December 21. That's the last day, says Nunez and his advisers, for political operatives to begin the process of placing an initiative on the November 2008 ballot that would pay for health care reform... a cost pegged at about $14 billion a year.

Meantime, the Speaker was asked to comment on the latest story raising questions about how he's spent money in his campaign account. The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that Nunez's committee bought a lot more French wine on an overseas junket than originally revealed, and that the state Democratic party recently bought back a lot of that wine.

Nunez never really commented on that particular issue, choosing instead to field the question by promising that campaign donors don't influence his policy decisions. "People might want to be critical of how creative I am about raising money," Nunez said. "And I've been a pretty good fundraiser. But at the end of the day, that creativity is the result of campaign finance laws that are in effect now."

And he also said this: "I believe in the Jesse Unruh mantra."

Unruh was the legendary Assembly speaker of the 1960s known as "Big Daddy." The late Democrat once declared campaign money to be the "mother's milk of politics." But he also famously said the following, which is probably the "mantra" Nunez was apparently embracing:

"If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics."

Hear Nunez's comments on political fundraising by clicking below.