Blue Gray
Neumayr, George
BY GEORGE NEUMAYR 0 my a pol as congenitally unlikable as Gray Davis could inspire a recall within less than a year of his election. Unattractive even under the best circumstances, the ghoulish...
...What good will this recall do if it replaces a tax-and-spend Democrat with a tax-and-spend Republican...
...California needs a pro-business budget slasher like McClintock...
...Hiram Johnson, the Republican governor who authored the law, belonged to the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, a reform group that took aim at the Davises of its day...
...Besides, since when has he endorsed Republican-led recalls...
...Countrywide Financial Corporation, one of the top employers in the state with some 30,000 employees, announced in the summer that it was aiming its expansion plans outside of California...
...By early summer, even Garry South, the political strategist who devised Davis's re-election last year, was sensing doom...
...Among the early possibilities are parachuting a barely Republican celebrity into the race, providing a mulligan to last year's hapless gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, and letting Issa try to capitalize on his $1.7 million investment in the recall—or maybe all three...
...Fidelity National Financial also plans to relocate—the state's business climate is too "oppressive," said its CEO...
...A few days later, Davis appeared before Latino leaders and promised to sign a bill that would give driver's licenses to illegal aliens...
...He championed the discarded Gann Amendment that restricted increases in state spending to increases in population and inflation...
...South was off to work on Senator Joe Lieberman's presidential run...
...He once blasted Republicansfor a "pull up the ladder" (I've got mine) attitude...
...Former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, the other liberal Republican being urged to run, is no fiscal conservative either...
...On the day the recall petition was certified, Davis appeared at a San Francisco day care center, sitting "on the floor in a circle of children for an awkward rendition of 'This Land is Your Land,'" reports the Los Angeles Times...
...Leftists may organize bus caravans to the polls, but it may well be less out of any warm feelings for Davis than to try to derail the Racial Privacy Initiative, the latest move from dogged affirmative-action foe Ward Connerly, which is slated to appear on the same ballot...
...Long before it became fashionable to pile on Davis, McClintock drew attention to the 37 percent spike in state spending that busted the budget...
...With Davis's approval rating slumping into the 20percent bracket, recall organizers—led by San Diego Republican congressman Darrell Issa—had little difficulty gathering the requisite names, over a third of which came from Democrats...
...The Pumping Iron muscleman wouldn't exactly lend gravitas to the fray...
...I am sad to say that California, where Countrywide has been headquartered for more than thirty years, does not provide a business climate that is conducive to cost control or business productivity," its CEO explained...
...Like most state recall laws, California's dates back a century to the Progressive Era...
...Davis scrambled to form a phony anti-recall front group, Taxpayers Against the Recall, and asked his secretary of labor to take a "leave of absence" to help organize a union-led counterattack...
...And to sign the petition, they merely had to click www.RecallGrayDavis.comthis is the home of Silicon Valley, after all—download a copy, print it out, add their name, and send it in...
...It's just shameless...
...Proposition 49, the Democrat-endorsed initiative he spearheaded last year, raised state spending by up to $455 million for what amounted to state-paid babysitting—before- and after-school programs...
...Pulling up the ladders will not be enough to protect us from the crime and the ultimate need for more tax dollars to take care of increasing social problems...
...Unable to gum up the recall drive, Davis then sent out frantic allhands-on-deck signals to the state's ever-ready leftists...
...Two factors Hiram Johnson could never have imagined—talk radio and the Internet—completed the lethal political environment...
...Barely out of their mothers' wombs, the kids may have been ready to vote for the recall too...
...The governor also has on his side the state Republicans' penchant for turning easy elections into fiascoes...
...Right...
...I've gotother things going on in my life...
...What expertise Schwarzenegger would bring to a state budget crisis is anybody's guess...
...Had Davis heeded his prophetic calls, the state would be awash in surpluses, not deficits...
...It's being used to try to tie up the professional petition circulators so that they won't work on this recall," Tom Bader of the recall group Rescue California told the Los Angeles Times...
...An up-for-anything state Republican Party desperate enough to throw the long ball was happy to join in...
...His authority as a budgetary expert is the pledge of earnestness the Republicans badly need in order to show that the recall isn't a buffoonish exercise in sour grapes, vanity, or power politics...
...Frustrated Californians spend more time stuck in their cars listening to conservative talk radio than sitting in easy chairs reading the state's uniformly liberal newspapers...
...In a 1991 letter to the editor in the California Political Review, Riordan wrote: "We must be willing to increase the tax dollars for schools...
...Or one clown with another...
...Now approaching his sixth year in the governor's mansion, he has no one else to blame...
...I was ashamed to call myself a Republican duringthat period...
...Unless or until Republicans abstain from an orgy of opportunism and back someone serious, the recall election will not end California's crisis, but extend it...
...Just to be sure, Issa ponied up $1.7 million for professional signature gatherers...
...Asked about the impeachment of Clinton, he notoriously said: "That was another thing I will never forgive the Republican Party for...
...He's a fiscal conservative," swear his Republican backers...
...Roughly 900,000 signatures were required...
...In the original election last fall that gave Davis his second term, they found a way to dribble the ball off their knee in an open court...
...The governor's handlers also tried luring professional signature-gatherers by offering them more money to gather anti-recall signatures—a buck a signature, twenty-five cents more than the recall groups were paying...
...Maybe if the famously gray Davis can quick get himself a personal ethics problem or two, then the Terminator can cut him some slack too...
...That South considered this task less hopeless than defending Davis against a recall was a cause for real panic among Dems...
...Budget-hawk Tom McClintock, a Republican state senator who came within 25,000 votes of becoming state controller last year, is the one serious candidate in an unserious field...
...Unattractive even under the best circumstances, the ghoulish governor of California became intolerable, as the state plunged into the political equivalent of a nightmare Los Angeles traffic jam: a $38 billion deficit, a state credit rating hovering near junk-bond status, a tripling of the automobile tax—in California!—and a quasi-socialist business climate that drives companies into the deserts of Arizona and Nevada...
...Who knows what will happen this time...
...He ditched Davis, telling the Los Angeles Times that he would "take no formal role in fighting the recall effort...
...But of course it is Kennedy cousin-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger who got much of the giddy GOP interest...
...Bizarrely, he used the occasion to cast himself as a protector of abortion rights...
...All of which serves to make the recall—theoretically at least, an opportunity for the GOP to play the white knight to 40 million Californians in distress—look more frivolous and opportunistic than ever...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
