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from www.sfgate.com – Porn star Mary Carey was arguably the face of the California gubernatorial recall. Everybody remembers “the porn star.” Of course, Carey’s candidacy was better known for promoting other parts of her anatomy.

She was the only candidate who listed her chest measurements (36 DD) in her press materials and the only candidate to bare her breasts at campaign events.

In that way, she was the anti-McClintock.

But that was 10 years ago, Carey tells us. Now, after tours through the reality show “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” (and later, its spin-off “Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House” )and a happy marriage to a union electrician, she no longer does hardcore sex scenes in movies.

A disgruntled President Obama fan, she voted for Republican Mitt Romney for president in 2012. And she thinks GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL, is “totally hot.” “I think Marco Rubio would be the smartest decision for the Republicans,” Carey said. “Plus, he’s really good looking. I think Marco Rubio is hot. If he is the president, he would be the hottest president ever.”

She paused to consider what effect her endorsement might have: “I don’t know, is this going to deter him from running?”

Now, she’s mostly doing “solo work,” as they say in the trade, and personal appearances in erotic clubs around the country. She performs in a few films a year for the Cinemax network and she’s appearing in an independent film titled “Sake Bomb,” starring a largely Japanese cast. She plays “a porn star,” she said. “Go figure.” All these enterprises are enough to give her a six-figure income.

Next up: She’s shopping her memoir. It’s the story of a girl who went to prep school, was raised by her grandmother because she said her mother was schizophrenic and her father had cerebral palsy.

Carey was only 23 when she moved Los Angeles in April 2003. The fledgling theater major dropped out of Florida Atlantic University, where she had taken classes for three years, to seek her fame in LA’s adult film world. When she filed her candidacy papers for governor, she still had Florida license plates on her car.

She signed with a smaller company whose owner Mark Kulkis promised to make “me a household name in a year.”

One day, he asked her a question: You want to run for governor? “Well, I didn’t graduate from college,” Carey recalled telling him. “I dropped out.”

No, no don’t worry about it. You just have to be 18 and have no felonies.

So Kulkis, the president of Kick Ass Productions, much like any other campaign operative, began prepping Carey on everything from the state’s budget deficit to its tax structure.

“I’m really good with coming up with funny answers and being witty,” Carey said. “Because I was kind of goofy, people mistake my playing dumb for really being dumb…. realistically, if I was dumb, I wouldn’t have been able to get through these interviews and come up with funny answers.”

Her platform included making lap dances tax deductible, wiring the governor’s mansion with webcams and placing a tax on breast implants.

As she explains it now: “I think there should be a tax on all plastic surgery instead of a car tax. Everybody has to have a car to get around California, plastic surgery is something they’re electing to get. Most people who are going to get plastic surgery are probably driving their car there. So if you’re going to pay the tax on a car or plastic surgery, either way, why not put the tax on plastic surgery so people will have lower costs on a car.”

Part of the implant tax was promotion, then. Her production house touted that all of their performers had natural parts. Alas, Carey — not unlike mainstream politicians — has backslid a bit on part of her platform. A few years back, she got her first implants.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t get them,” she corrects. “I just said they’d be taxed.”

But Carey was not only a new name to mainstream audiences, she was fairly new to porn audiences when the recall started. She and Kulkis were cagey marketers, though. She befriended a reporter — no, not this one — who told her when then-candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger would be filing his candidacy papers in Norwalk. Carey drove there an hour early and waited in her car. When Schwarzenegger emerged from the building, she popped out of her car in her red-white-and-blue bikini — right in front of a bank of two dozen TV cameras.

Soon, she didn’t have to pull such guerilla media tactics, as the cameras flocked to her. Still, she didn’t have much exposure to the political or entertainment business outside of the adult film industry.

“Yeah, you know what’s so funny? A lot of the things did when I was younger, I totally wouldn’t do those things now,” Carey told us. “I hadn’t really done mainstream stuff. Her first mainstream appearance on the red carpet was when the Game Show Network — where she won a debate between some of the recall’s fringier candidates — sent her to the Emmy Awards to promote the debate show spoof.

“I had never been to any red carpet other than the Adult Video News Awards. I didn’t know really know how to pose on the red carpet properly, so I was posing like porn girls do at the AVN awards. I was posing totally inappropriately.

“I was totally out of my element at the Emmy’s. It was crazy,” she said. But that was Mary’s campaign. “I guess because I was so naive, that’s kind of made it more entertaining. I just never thought what I did, I just did it. I’m still like that a little bit. But I would never flash my boobs at a press conference now. I would definitely be way more careful now. That’s what happens when you grow up in the entertainment world, you lose that free spirit, naivete.”

She ran again for governor in 2006, but dropped out to take care of her mother, who jumped out of a fourth-floor window. Carey describes her mom as “schizophrenic.” She appeared on “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” to deal with her addiction to Xanax, she said. But she also saw it as way to mainstream acceptance.

“I jumped at the opportunity because I knew it would be a chance,” Carey said. “At that point, Ron Jeremy was the only adult star to star in a normal cable channel’s recurring reality show. I knew that getting a reality show would open more doors to me.”

Today, Carey said she is “in a good place. I’m happy.”

And she thinks the recall was a good idea “because it showed what a democracy our country is….but I don’t think Arnold was the best choice. I don’t think anything changed. “I’m grateful for the recall,” Carey said, acknowledging how it helped her career.

“If it wasn’t for the recall, who knows what I might have done. I might have had to do gang bangs.” She laughed. “No, no, no. I never would have done gang bangs.”