Team Jamie makes another mid-season acquisition.

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I hope we remember this sort of thing if Jamie ends up winning, and she says it was all about the club from day one:

[Former Al Gore Aide Mark Fabiani], one half of the crisis communications team dubbed the "Masters of Disaster" along with former Gore aide Chris Lehane, was part of Gore's legal team during the Florida standoff -- a team headed by Boies. Now Fabiani is joining Boies again on behalf of Jamie McCourt, the estranged wife of Dodgers owner Frank McCourt.

The McCourts are locked in a nasty divorce case that could affect the team and even put its ownership in question. For Dodgers fans holding out hope for a quick resolution, the hiring of Fabiani seems to be a step in the wrong direction.

In a fitting indication of just where Jamie McCourt stands at the moment, Fabiani's last known engagement was helping Goldman Sachs weather the PR maelstrom associated with its recent fraud accusations. That arrangement ran into some trouble, though, when it surfaced that Fabiani's business partner, Chris Lehane, began slamming potential GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman for her Goldman Sachs connections. Fabiani and Lehane are the two name partners in their eponymous firm, and it stands to reason that one of them couldn't promote G-S while the other attacked it.

Sort of delightful in its symmetry, isn't it? In making her case for the highest award possible, Jamie has exposed the Dodgers in ways that have certainly been harmful to the club. All the while, her desired endgame is to own the team, leading it into the future. I'm not saying what she's done is wrong; rather, it might just be misguided. As I see it, she has next to no chance of being approved by the rest of baseball's owners, due largely to the circus surrounding the team because of the divorce. Owning a baseball team isn't a right conferred upon the wealthy; it's as much a popularity contest as anything.

But hey, popularity is Mark Fabiani's game, and he plays it well. I wouldn't put it past him to help Jamie regain a great deal of public favor; at the moment, neither Frank nor Jamie is tremendously well-liked by the public, so there's certainly room for growth. I'm not sure, though, how much he'll be able to help her get the votes necessary to own a baseball team. But honestly, she's got bigger concerns at the moment. She's got to get paid, and she's got to fix her public reputation. Mark Fabiani can help her with the first part by addressing the second.

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