Gray Davis entered office as a loud environmentalist, promising
a green agenda for the Golden State. But has he fulfilled this
promise? Not according to many California environmentalists. The
Sierra Club — disappointed in his record after endorsing him in
1998 — still hasn’t decided whether or not to endorse his
re-election.
Environmentalist Cynthia Elkins of the Environmental Protection
Information Center told the Los Angeles Times that Davis’s
pursuit of contributions from companies like Pacific Lumber Co. has
stunted his environmentalism. “Because these industries have
contributed so heavily to his war chest, he feels indebted to these
industries,” she said. The coin-operated governor, as Davis is now
called, received more bad press this week for yet another apparent
quid pro quo: Three months after timber companies gave him over
$100,000, he opposed a $22-million timber tax.
The legislative analyst to the California Assembly, as well as
several Democrats, had recently proposed the tax “as a way to help
close the state’s $23.6-billion budget deficit,” the Times
reports. But Davis, suddenly concerned about the fiscal stability
of timber companies, “successfully opposed it during budget talks.”
The Times described this position as the “latest in a
series of steps Davis has taken as governor that have helped bring
the timber industry, long allied with Republican candidates, into
the fold of the Democratic incumbent.”
The timber industry evidently sized Davis up as an
“environmentalist” with versatile convictions. Since 1999,
according to the Times, timber companies have given him
about $450,000.
Cold cash has a way of unclogging Davis’s ears. Now his
officials sound almost sensible about the dangers of excessive
taxation on the struggling lumber industry. “Apparently this is an
industry that operates on fairly small profit margins,” Department
of Finance spokesman Sandy Harrison said to the Times.
“Imposing this [tax] would increase the cost of what already is a
costly process, and there is a concern that it could put small
timberland owners out of business.”
To the dismay of environmentalists, Davis officials are also
resisting a move to designate the coho salmon an endangered
species, reports the Times. Robert Hight, director of the
California State Department of Fish and Game, told the paper that
Davis is pursuing a compromise plan to recover the salmon without
listing it a threatened species — “because it’s the right thing to
do for the fish.”
Environmentalists unsatisfied with this approach “voiced
opposition” during a June conference call with Hight, but he “cut
off the conference call and left the room,” reports the
Times.
Forced by promiscuous fundraising to serve many masters, Davis
isn’t succeeding in pleasing any of them. Keeping the
environmentalists in his corner should be the least of his worries.
But it isn’t. Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club,
blasted Davis in the Times: “When a special interest is
giving substantial campaign contributions, and the governor is not
keeping his campaign commitments — which on forestry issues, he is
not — you’ve got a very serious problem.”
Such comments explain the frustration of Democratic officials
who are finding it difficult to get even liberals excited about
Gray Davis’s re-election. As one Democratic consultant put it to
the San Francisco Chronicle, the “real problem is that
Davis has turned off even fellow Democrats, who should be his
natural base.”
Davis can’t seem to find his footing in a campaign that the
liberal establishment assumed was a cake walk. His campaign
officials claim that he is leading in the polls, but by how much?
They can’t say. A Davis deputy press secretary said vaguely to Los
Angeles radio talk show host Larry Elder this week that it is a
“single-digit lead,” then said the only poll that counts is “on
election day” — a cliché popular with operatives whose
candidates are polling badly.
Bill Simon is making matters worse for Davis by co-opting issues
that he should own. In recent days, for example, Davis has had to
explain away the expansion of offshore oil drilling in Californian
waters after Simon promised to ban the drilling. “Davis is in a
world of trouble with voters,” say liberal columnists Philip Matier
and Andrew Ross.
