UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. – A few people enjoying the barbecue lunch provided by XBIZ Tuesday at the Webmaster Access West show wondered what the ABC News trucks were doing parked by the venue. Was this small show that attracted at best a few hundred attendees really deserving of one truck, let alone two? Were they there for Jenna Jameson, who had showed up to sign a few autographs?

The answer, sadly, was no. They were not there to camera-ogle Jenna or even to shoot B-roll of barely naked ladies preparing for the party at the Playboy manse that night, much as the presumably male cameramen might have preferred to do so. They were there for the politics.

Yesterday was election day in California, an important one that many observers believe may decide the economic future of the state for years to come. Sharing the hotel with the adult industry contingent was a group of “No on 1A” fiscal conservatives who had gathered to watch the returns and hope for the defeat of initiatives they believe are anathema to the state’s philosophy of governing and taxation.

As each of the important initiatives – including 1A, which had been vigorously promoted by Governor Schwarzenegger – was soundly rejected by the voters, one can easily imagine the revelry of the conservatives – which included radio host Michael Reagan, Ventura County Supervisor Peter Foy, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association – easily competing with that of the porn biz party-goers. For that group, defeating a tax is sex. 

Predictably, those few pundits who realized that the seemingly-disparate groups were sharing the same digs found it ironic. Such was the take by Carla Marinucci on the SFGate.com blog. With typical tittilation, she breathlessly related the hotel co-habitation.

“One mind-boggled political operative spy gave us the live update,” she wrote.

“‘The Howard Jarvis Stop the Teabag party, or whatever they’re calling it, is right next to the party for Webmaster[s]. They have one section and the web porn people have the other two. It’s like Boogie Nights out here.'”

“With nude posters and live autograph sessions by porn stars, (the posters of naked women were taken down apparently for propriety’s sake), he says the adults-only crowd didn’t look like they were watching returns.

Indeed, the webmasters may not have been watching returns, and the party at the Playboy mansion is always a good time, but the general mood at the event was hardly celebratory. Adult entertainment is experiencing a downturn the likes of which it has never experienced in its existence. Production is down by a very high double-digit percentage, sales are plummeting faster than 401Ks and even the online marketplace is going through its first truly significant crisis.If anything, the turnout for the show and the talk of the show reflected the seriousness of the situation.

The irony is not that the two groups shared a hotel, but that the fiscal conservatives (and manyinterested observers) believe that adult entrepreneurs are by definition fiscally liberal in their views. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. Just ask an industry icon like Hustler’s Larry Flynt, as unrelenting a fiscal conservative as there could be. Only a few months ago, at the height of the federal bailouts, he was calling for the government to allow the car companies to fail. (His highly-publicized call for a bailout for porn was not serious, but meant to be ironic.)

Another less obvious irony is that, with the defeat of measures intended to address a state deficit that will exceed $21 billion, many of the same people who celebrated last night will now call for a tax on adult entertainment in order to plug some of the holes in the budget.

Constitutional or not, they will find a surprising amount of support among the general population, a huge percentage of which believes that porn is a reasonable and rational target for extra taxation, according to a recent poll. They continue to believe the exaggerated numbers still being thrown around that position adult entertainment as a recession-proof industry awash in cash.

So, while celebrations were certainly taking place Tuesday night and, for some, will continue throughout the week, for those who made it to Webmaster Access, and for those who could not make it, a grim business scenario only gets gloomier, and the ironic fact that they may be targeted as an unsavory savior of sorts is not lost on anyone.

Just ask Playboy, which owns the Webmaster Access event, and whose stock is currently trading around $2.70/share. They probably will not be terribly amused by the layer upon layer of irony and misperception.