In Gray Davis’s recent interview
with the editorial board of San Diego Union Tribune, the nerdy
braggart exploded defensively about California’s energy crisis last
year: “If I didn’t panic, you wouldn’t be able to put out your
paper. I saved this friggin’ paper. I kept the lights on in this
state. Do you understand that? I kept the lights on.”
Davis demands a “round of applause” for his sterling management
skills. Those who say he bungled the crisis last year don’t “know
squat,” he huffed, adding ludicrously, “This is like a war. This is
worse than being in Vietnam. This is a full-out war against
me.”
“I saved this friggin’ paper?” “Worse than being in Vietnam?”
Add delusion to Davis’s résumé of weirdness.
California’s electricity crisis ended with no thanks to Davis.
He simply prolonged it. In hock to the power-plant-stopping
environmentalists and price-cap statists, Davis resisted common
sense for months.
Californians can recall that Davis did not keep the “lights on,”
but turned them off. Remember the Davis-ordered “rolling
blackouts”?
This should rank as one of the most insane public policies in
the history of California government. Davis’s random pulling of the
plug resulted in car crashes and hospital emergencies as traffic
lights and dialysis machines went dead. Newspapers showed pictures
of children trapped in elevators.
This is what passed as “crisis management” for Gray Davis. He
chose this draconian measure over the only rational incentive to
conservation: abolishing price caps. Instead of letting consumers
choose to pull the plug, Davis just pulled it for them.
And Californians punished him for his panic. In May of last
year, as the crisis continued, Davis’s approval ratings had dropped
to 46% from 63% just five months earlier.
So Davis turned his attention to demagoguery and Madison Avenue
tricks. He hired two smearing spinners, Mark Fabiani and Chris
Lehane, to demonize the energy companies and shift blame from Davis
to anyone else. Fabiani and Lehane were happy to join up with a pol
even less popular than Al Gore, their former client, as Davis paid
them $30,000 a month from California’s vanishing public till until
bad PR forced him to cut loose this PR team.
Lehane and Fabiani’s work as state employees appeared to consist
mostly of writing Op-Eds for Davis in out-of-state newspapers.
Naturally, the New York Times and Washington Post, always ready to
help a liberal politician get his spin out, obliged them. In the
piece for the Washington Post under Davis’ name, the governor made
the Churchillian point that his state’s self-made crisis was the
new Republican president’s “problem.”
Davis is apparently doing his own PR these days. How else to
explain his “I saved-this-friggin-paper” rantings? Like Gore, Davis
is under the odd impression that swaggering is a substitute for
charisma.
The interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune also revealed
Davis’s Clintonian streak. Davis has embraced the former
president’s reelection modus operandi: take credit for good things
beyond your control, dodge responsibility for bad things within
it.
Hence the California governor who vilified the free market at
every turn last year claims authorship this year for its bounty:
“We have created, net, 900,000 new jobs. We were up to close to a
million before Sept. 11. No state in America has come anywhere
close to that. When I took the oath of office, we were the
seventh-largest economy on the planet. We passed Italy my first
year, France my second year, and we will pass the U.K. in two
years. We are the fifth-largest economy in the world. Only Germany,
the U.K. and Japan and the United States are better than us.”
Yes, California’s economy is strong — strong enough to
transcend Davis’s quasi-socialism. Last year Davis, on a
hyperactive conservation kick, went out of his way to drive
business out of the state with such outlandish measures as
threatening to imprison businessmen who refused to turn off outdoor
lighting after business hours.
Davis’s expertise lies not in creating jobs, but in killing
them. Yet he is certain that Californians will prefer his record as
a bureaucrat to Bill Simon’s record as a businessman.
“This state is not going to elect someone who has never held
office, rarely voted and is out of step with the state on most
major social issues, including women’s right to choose, sensible
gun control, energy deregulation…He is pro-voucher and
pro-privatization,” Davis said. “You need to bring something to the
table. You need to pay your dues. You need to serve on some board
or commission. Run for some office. Do something that shows your
civic contribution before you ask people to vote for you.”
That Simon is not a career politician won’t scare Californians.
Indeed, as they pay the state’s mammoth electricity debts created
by a career politician, they may very well take relief in voting
for a candidate who isn’t one.
