The first face I recognize on the plane to the Republican convention? Pete Wilson's. The former governor is sitting five rows ahead of me -- in your standard three-across seat in coach.

And the first face I recognize on the ground in St. Paul, at the airport? John Oliver's. The ``Daily Show'' correspondent (he's the Hugh Grant manque' English guy) is doing a standup in front of the entrance to that now-famous Twin Cities landmark, the Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Airport Men's Room.

The nearly 12-year-old photo of former Gov. Pete is by the Times' Rick Meyer.

For all the strength of numbers and financial muscle of the Baby Boom generation, it may have gone bust, at least as far as the White House goes.

Barack Obama and now Sarah Palin can only by the biggest of stretches be included in the tail end of the Boomers; Joe Biden arrived a few years too early, and as everyone now knows, there are scores of things younger than John McCain, including Mt. Rushmore, M&Ms and the Baby Boomers.

Unless Hillary Clinton or another Boomer getting long in the tooth were eventually to wind up in the White House, the only Chief Executives from that biggest and most prosperous generation of Americans will be two presidents who have in common only the Boomer tag: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Images by EPA/Tannen Maury and Kiichiro Sato/AP

We'll be hearing a lot in the next few days about all the things Sarah Palin brings to John McCain's campaign (anti-abortion cred, status as a reformer, magnet for angry Clinton supporters, yada yada yada), but there's more than one area where she'll do the Arizona senator more harm than good. The obvious one is that she's completely unqualified to be president if anything happens to the 72-year-old McCain, but the less obvious one is that her devotion to Big Oil almost makes Dick Cheney look green.

No Alaskan is really qualified to weigh in on the U.S. energy debate: This is a state whose government budget is almost entirely underwritten by oil companies, which send each resident an annual royalty check to boot. Palin gets some credit for rejecting the suspect relationships with oil companies that have brought down nearly the entire state's Republican old guard -- in fact, her meteoric rise from mayor of Wasilla, pop. 8,000, to the governor's mansion can be traced to the ongoing corruption scandal -- but that doesn't exactly make her a maverick. She is a stalwart proponent of drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge as well as stepped-up offshore drilling, while her major accomplishment as governor so far has been to make Alaskans even more reliant on Big Oil by increasing their "resource rebate" to $1,200 per household.

Even the environmentally challenged Bush administration is too tree-hugging for Palin, who sued the U.S. Department of the Interior for listing the polar bear as a threatened species. She doesn't deny that global warming is happening -- its effects are too obvious in Alaska -- but doubts that it has man-made causes. That doesn't just put her at odds with nearly every credible climatologist on Earth, it puts her at odds with John McCain. And her positions on drilling will only fuel the Obama camp's line that Republicans are too cozy with oil companies to end the country's petroleum addiction.

* Photo by Kiichiro Sato / AP

I have reported on government and politics for many years but never followed the minutiae of how delegates are selected to attend national conventions until this year, when I did a series of posts on both major parties' efforts. Registered Democrats who got the word and signed up in advance -- and declared themselves for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton -- voted for delegates at caucuses around the state on Sunday, April 13.

I live in Rep. Xavier Becerra's 31st congressional district, where four caucuses -- three for Clinton, one for Obama, reflecting Democrats' vote in the Feb. 5 California primary -- took place. It was an extremely hot day for April, and the most popular guy at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center, where the Obama delegate voting took place, was the man selling paletas.

Janice Hahn was still hurting early in the Democratic convention week over the fact that her candidate, Hillary Clinton, did not get the presidential nomination and won't be on the ticket. "I think this may have been the last chance in my lifetime to elect a woman president," said the Los Angeles councilwoman.

But that doesn't mean this ardent Democrat will consider a vote for John McCain, now that he has chosen Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running-mate.

"I think when all is said and done it was always about more than having a woman in the White House," Hahn said by phone shortly after 11 a.m. Denver time, as her plane home was about to begin taxiing. "John McCain's priorities are just not in line with most women's. The stakes are just too high. Hillary said it in her speech. 'Were you in it just for me?'"

Hahn may be typical of most women Democrats in Denver over the last week. She is the first woman elected to office from a family of staunch Democratic men (all of whom served, however, mostly in nonpartisan office): Her late father Kenneth Hahn, the legendary county supervisor; her uncle Gordon Hahn, a state assemblyman and councilman; and her brother Jim Hahn, Los Angeles mayor, city attorney and controller.

McCain can be assumed to be trying to reach Hillary Clinton supporters who are rooted less deeply in Democratic politics than the Hahns.

2005 photo of Janice Hahn by the Times' Al Seib

Readers sound off on the Democratic convention in Friday's letters.  One reader considers Barack Obama an empty suit.  Another, a basketball fan, thinks he's the Magic Johnson of politics.  And everyone's still talking about Hillary Clinton. 

Annie Jelnick, of Corona Del Mar, asks Democrats to put the plight of Clinton's supporters in perspective:

I think the Democrats are missing the point with regard to whether or not Hillary Clinton's supporters will unite around Obama.  We understand that we lost but right now, many of us are still smarting over that.  We felt she was and is an excellent candidate, and yes, we wanted to support a woman...

If Obama is the best candidate, when all is said and done it will be proven in the privacy of the voting booth.  All of the posturing and teeth-gnashing by prominent Democrats won't make a whit of difference.

In fact, what are they afraid of?

*Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. And I'm wrong. There was no embrace this morning between rival mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, no jabs at the press for wanting to make a united Democratic front into a potential gubernatorial smackdown. Newsom spoke to California Democrats at the convention in Denver, then walked off the podium and down the hall with a trail of paparazzi, while Villaraigosa marched past. The two did not even look at each other.

Newsom not only delivered the speech of a man running for governor, he killed. He hit his campaign talking points or, at least, those things that ought to be his campaign talking points: San Francisco's universal healthcare program, universal preschool, universal this and universal that. Environment. Living wage. Same-sex marriage -- not by taking credit for launching the movement, but by calling on California Democrats to defeat Proposition 8, the gay-marriage ban.

He repeated these words often, and he sold them: "If we can do it in San Francisco, let me promise you, we can do it in the state of California." Or: "I promise you. We have evidence. This is not an assertion, this is not another political speech. I will show you how it's done. We have done it in San Francisco. It can be done anywhere."

And get a load of this zinger:

Give Howard Jarvis his due (or his don't) for Proposition 13, but I nominate Willie Brown as the father of late-20th-century government reform in California. No, really. It was Brown who brought us legislative term limits by amassing so much power as Assembly speaker in the 1980s and halfway through the 1990s that the only way to loosen his grip was to appeal to voters outside his home district to boot him from office. Before Brown was termed out, even Republicans with a majority in 1994 and 1995 were coaxed or intimidated into keeping him in charge.

You could make a good argument that Brown is also the father of numerous failed attempts to strip lawmakers of their power to draw their own district lines -- attempts like Proposition 11 on this November's statewide ballot. The members are term-limited, but the parties still have full power to perpetuate themselves and control who gets what seat in the Assembly, the Senate, the Board of Equalization, and Congress, and whoever has the majority is expected to work hard to keep it, at almost any cost.

Brown pretty much admitted as much Thursday morning to members of the state Democratic delegation in Denver. Don't even think of giving up that power, he said.

"Let me assure you, whoever is drawing the lines will dictate the course of action of who gets elected, and who gets elected will determine what happens to the policy issues in the halls of the Legislature," Brown told bleary-eyed Democrats. "Make no mistake about it; this is not about good government. Good government is whether or not we do the things that remove misery from people. That's the highest priority, and the process of drawing those lines gets us that opportunity."

The bottom line? "We have got to make sure that the no vote on Prop 11 equals the yes vote for Barack Obama."

Listen for yourself: Download willie_brown_82808.mp3

This may be a good point at which to draw your attention to a column by the Times' George Skelton, one of many seasoned Capitol observers who see the current budget fiasco as a result of extreme views on each side -- which he writes is in turn a result of districts gerrymandered by the party in charge. The the rule requiring a two-thirds vote for a budget or a tax increase may be enemy number one, but districting is close behind.

Needless to say, many disagree, like the author of this Calitics article calling redistricting reform "pointless." The real culprit, the piece says, is the "wingnut Republican caucus" and the two-thirds rule. Sacramento expert Bill Cavala labels the argument for reform "bunkum."

Frankly, I find myself wondering whether Proposition 11 would make any difference, and I think one of those earlier Brown-inspired reforms -- term limits -- has brought California to the brink of disaster. But that doesn't mean all old-school ways are best. The so-called wingnuts are a result of safe Republican districts, in which the winning candidate is all too often the one who outflanks all opponents on the right. If redistricting reform doesn't take care of that, I don't know what will. Besides, if Brown hates Prop 11, can it be all that bad?

*Photo: Randi Lynn Beach

I have been thinking hard about what I can cherish and treasure from the Bush White House years, one simple thing I have to be thankful to Dubya for, and I have found it.

Perspective. Bush's Iraq war has given me a sense of scale about money that's actually relieved me of a lot of worrying and fretting.

One month of the war in Iraq is costing this country an estimated $10 billion dollars. Once you use that as a yardstick, no other expense, no other crisis seems as expensive, as intractable and terrifying as it once did. A $15 billion California budget deficit? No sweat! It's only six weeks' worth of war Iraq dollars! The Bear Sterns bailout -- pshaw, that's only three months in Iraq war dollars. And a possible $40 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? A mere quarterly check for the Iraq war.

So to paraphrase Jack Valenti's line about Lyndon Johnson in the White House, I now sleep a little better knowing that virtually nothing we might do here at home would cost as much as the Iraq war is costing us already.

The photo of President Bush returning to the White House yesterday from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, is by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.

Columnist Rosa Brooks sends an unexpected message to Democrats about Barack Obama: he's not a miracle worker. Talk about tamping down expectations.... Elsewhere on the op-ed page, George Washington University Professor Henry R. Nau advocates a Reaganesque melding of force and diplomacy in dealing with Russia, columnist Patt Morrison wades into the dispute between LAPD Chief Bill Bratton and retired cops over Hollywood security details, and security expert Bruce Schneier scoffs at the Transportation Security Agency's tightened photo ID rules:

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

Over on the editorial page, the board tips its hat to Hillary Clinton for pushing her supporters to accept defeat and line up behind Obama:

It was only recently that Clinton insisted her followers needed a "catharsis" at the convention, which sounded to some Obama supporters like a call for a co-starring role in Denver. Ironically, she achieved that role not by competing with Obama but by embracing him.

The board also encourages lawmakers in Sacramento to combat greenhouse-gas emissions by passing a "smart growth" bill, while calling on Congress to ignore automakers' request for subsidized loans:

If Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie are important enough to merit a helping hand from Washington, why not show some taxpayer-funded love to GM, Ford and Chrysler? Aren't the Big Three, which collectively employ nearly 250,000 people in the U.S., also "too big to fail"? The short answer is no, they're not.

* Nifty illustration courtesy of Jon Krause/Tribune Media Services