Monty Holden, head of the California Organization of Police and
Sheriffs, has been cashiered from his position on a supposedly
nonpartisan California state police commission. This is Governor
Gray Davis’s crass payback for Holden’s endorsement of Bill
Simon.
Davis equates state government with his personal interests, so
he sees nothing wrong with dumping a qualified appointee who
happens to prefer the Republican in the race. Garry South, Gray
Davis’s campaign manager, had tried to stop COPS’s endorsement of
Simon by hurling foul-mouthed threats at Holden’s colleagues. “Has
Holden lost his mind?” South wrote to COPS earlier this year after
he learned that Holden was thinking of endorsing Simon. “If this
reflects his sentiments, he needs to lose his job!”
After this memo appeared in the press, South denied that he was
threatening Holden’s position on the state commission on Peace
Officer Standards and Training. Now it’s clear he was. South
thought that he could frighten Holden and COPS away from a Simon
endorsement. But his thuggish tactics backfired on him, making the
Davis crowd look more unsavory than ever.
This perception is hardly reserved to Republicans. Many
Democrats don’t trust Davis either, which explains why they openly
admit that his administration is troubling even as he languishes in
the polls.
California Assemblyman Dean Florez, a Democrat, told the press
that he recently lost his chairmanship of the Joint Legislative
Audit Committee because he asked honest questions about Davis’s
role in the Oracle scandal. The Davis administration and their
surrogates in the California Assembly did not appreciate Florez’s
scrutiny of a $25,000 donation from Oracle to Davis after the
governor granted the company a $95 million no-bid contract.
“My overall impression is it seems like the speaker’s office and
others aren’t interested in aggressive oversight, especially in an
election year,” said Florez. He said that some fellow Democrats
want to “stop the aggressive coverage and get back to where audit
reports come out and are ignored.”
Florez’s willingness to spill the beans about this bogus
administration is matched by Kathleen Connell, the state’s
Democratic controller. She has made it abundantly clear that she
considers Davis a bad governor — she railed against Davis last
year for panicking during the electricity crisis — and uses her
powers to subvert his plans. Sacramento Bee columnist Dan
Walters
reports that last week Connell sent out checks to counties to
cover welfare checks even though Davis had intended to withhold the
payments in an effort “to ramp up pressure on the Legislature to
act on the budget.”
Democratic Assemblyman John Dutra, for his part, dismisses
Davis’s current budget proposal as “obviously totally
inadequate.”
Meanwhile, Davis faces the problem that any attempt to unite
Democrats around his campaign could simultaneously divide him from
Californians. He knows that he must throw a few bones to
ideological Democrats upset with him, yet he doesn’t want to look
like a left-wing buffoon.
His zigzagging from corrupt centrism to straightforward
liberalism could end up creating more problems than it solves. He
is, for example, on the verge of signing a piece of liberal
landmark legislation that could inflame auto-loving Californians.
AB 1493 “would make California the first state to regulate auto
emissions of greenhouse gases to combat global warming,” reports
the Los Angeles Times. The bill has been bitterly opposed
by the auto industry, which predicts that the law will lead to
higher taxes and limit the types of vehicles Californians can
drive.
Why is Davis toying with this dubious legislation? One reason is
that environmentalists don’t like him and he desperately needs
their votes. They see him as a sell-out to the corporate crowd. One
environmental lobbyist told me that environmentalist anger with
Davis “is quite high,” because his administration has been on sale
to big business for the last four years. Some officials sympathetic
to Davis at the Sierra Club, according to this source, were afraid
to hold a recent vote on whether or not to endorse Davis because
they thought most members would vote against endorsing him.
Politics without principle is a juggling act Davis can’t quite
master. With too many people to fool and too many interests to
reconcile, he is losing his compass. Monty Holden’s decision to
endorse Simon over Davis is beginning to look like a good career
move.
