Biggest Winners Weren’t Necessarily on the Ballot

Don’t be fooled by election results.

As so often happens in politics, all is not as it first appears.

Some seeming Orange County winners who declared victory basking in television lights Tuesday night have actually suffered bruising blows--while some bona fide winners were not even on the ballot.

Take the case of Republican Curt Pringle, safely returned by voters to his state Assembly seat. But in reality, Pringle is one of the election’s biggest losers, shorn of his powerful speakership with the Assembly’s return to Democratic hands. And two Pringle proteges failed in their own campaigns, proving that the Garden Grove legislator’s coattails have been hemmed.

“It was a very difficult year,” he said. “The electorate’s sentiments were with the Democrats this year.”

By contrast, a noncandidate--a little-known Mission Viejo nurse named Anna T. Boyce--is celebrating a resounding victory in her fight to legalize the medical use of marijuana. With Proposition 215’s passage, the 67-year-old widow activated by her husband’s painful cancer death now hopes to see an Orange County “cannabis club” opening in Huntington Beach or Santa Ana.

All across Orange County, the voting tallies reveal stories of bitter losses and sweet victories that may not make the front pages or the 11 o’clock news, but still matter when it comes to figuring out the real-life impact of election day.

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Among the winners:

* The Walt Disney Co., with Anaheim voters’ support of a hotel tax to help beautify the seedy street-scape flanking a soon-to-be-built second theme park next to Disneyland.

* County environmentalists, who are cheering the prospect of a Democratic Assembly’s remaking of the California Coastal Commission. The commission in recent months infuriated local lovers of the environment by voting to allow homes on the Bolsa Chica wetlands and near the famed Trestles surfing beach.

* The rich, as voters rejected an attempt to restore the two top tax brackets for the highest personal income tax payers. On the flip side, however, local governments and schools lose because the measure would have generated up to $700 million in revenue. And among the losers:

* Lobbyists, whose free-wheeling ways could be crimped by statewide passage of political reform measure 208, which prohibits lobbyists from making or arranging contributions.

* Orange County cities, who in the wake of Proposition 218 must ask residents for approval to impose taxes.

Scott Diehl of San Clemente appears to have lost not one job, but two--his City Council seat and, as a result, his chairmanship of the board for the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency. Stripped of his toll-road job, he’ll lose his $120-a-meeting stipend.

Others may have scored more than one victory in Tuesday’s balloting.

Orange County attorney Tom Umberg, a former assemblyman who ran the state Clinton/Gore campaign, delivered the best showing for a Democratic candidate since 1976, sparking speculation that Umberg could be headed for Washington soon for a presidential appointment.

Some past losers saw their political stars once again ascending.

Eileen Walsh was county finance director at the time of the bankruptcy and now manages a trash dump. On Tuesday, she won a spot on the Laguna Beach Unified School District board.

Then there’s County Sheriff Brad Gates, who wasn’t even running Tuesday but who still managed to chalk up two defeats.

Gates led the campaign to defeat Proposition 215, the medical marijuana initiative that won 56% to 44%. Gates couldn’t even garner a majority in hometown Orange County. Voters also failed to heed Gates’ advice when they defeated a measure--Proposition 205--to provide millions of dollars for jails and juvenile halls.

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The sheriff blamed his marijuana defeat on money. His campaign lacked it. And the proposition’s boosters had it in bushels, most of it provided by a few wealthy out-of-state benefactors, among them New York billionaire George Soros.

“It’s a scary day for democracy when a billionaire can spend his money on a dishonest proposition when everyone knows the clear bottom-line goal of it is to legalize drugs,” Gates lamented.

But winner Boyce, the 5-foot-1 nurse who campaigned hard for the measure, talked Wednesday not of money but of her late husband, suffering from lung cancer when he found relief in a few puffs of marijuana after chemotherapy.

“I did not expect it to pass,” Boyce said of the measure. “I’m walking on air. I’m sure my husband must be saying, ‘Go to it, kid.’ ”

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Eric Bailey.

O.C. VOTE TABLES: A28