Bill Simon will appear with Gray Davis on October 7 at a
gubernatorial debate sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.
Simon should bring to the debate this week’s article in the San
Jose Mercury News on Davis’s comical graft — “Davis’ fervor
to raise funds irks many backers,” reads the headline.
Many Democrats, according to this story
in the Mercury News, find the governor’s fundraising
astonishing in its over-the-top crassness. “They commiserate about
Gov. Gray Davis and his zealous fundraising the way veterans share
war stories,” writes reporter Dion Nissenbaum.
The Mercury News relates a revealing story about
Davis’s shakedown of Steve Kirsch, the founder of Infoseek. Kirsch,
who had already given Davis $22,000 for his re-election campaign,
called the governor recently to discuss with him the merits of an
environmental bill. Davis quickly returned the call, but the first
words out of his mouth to Kirsch were: “How come you weren’t at my
last fundraiser?”
This “startled” Kirsch, reports Nissenbaum, who notes that
Kirsch’s experience mirrors that of Wayne Johnson, the president of
the California Teachers Association. In a policy meeting on
education at Davis’s state capitol office, Johnson got hit with a
stark request from Davis for $1 million. This flabbergasted
Johnson, not only because the hard sell occurred under the capitol
dome, but because CTA legislation was pending before the governor.
Davis didn’t get the money — and didn’t support the
legislation.
Davis’s use of state government for fundraising purposes has
clearly hardened into habit. The Mercury News reports that
since 1973 Davis “has raised an astonishing $116 million.” In the
last three years, he has netted $56 million.
How did such an acharismatic, visionless political figure pull
this off? By hanging a For Sale sign on his administration. Even
his supporters find the line between state policy and his
fundraising interests hard to distinguish. “In more than three
dozen interviews with the Mercury News, many Democrats,
donors and former Davis fundraisers said they were shocked when
discussions with the governor and his staff were clouded by
questions about how much they had given to Davis,” reports
Nissenbaum.
Chris Martin, managing partner of the Cannery marketplace in San
Francisco, told the Mercury News that at an interview for
a state commission slot “he was grilled by the governor’s first
appointments secretary about his political donations.” Martin said
the first question in the interview was “How much did you donate to
the governor?” and the second was “How much did you give to the
other guy?”
Energy company executives — a group Davis has frequently called
“greedy” — say that the governor has wrung them for money. “It was
point-blank put to them that for him to have dinner with them they
had to put together $100,000, that that’s the price for having
dinner with the governor,” Gary Ackerman, executive director of the
Western Power Trading Forum, said to the Mercury News.
Calpine, Dynegy, Reliant, Enron, Duke, Thermo-EcoTek and
Williams dutifully ponied up funds for Davis’s re-election. But
their contributions fell below $100,000, reports the Mercury
News. So Davis officials told the companies’ trade group, the
Independent Energy Producers, that it needed to make up the
difference before Davis would show up at the group’s fundraiser.
The IEP then wrote a check for $25,000 and Davis appeared.
Simon’s description of Davis as the “coin-operated” governor is
hardly hyperbole. At the October 7 debate, he will have reams of
evidence to prove it.
Though some Republicans are giving up on Simon — many of them,
ironically, are the very same Republicans who lecture conservatives
on the need to be “team players” and focus on “winning” — the race
remains competitive. Even last week’s Democrat-friendly Field Poll
found that most Californians disapprove of Davis. Those numbers can
only go up as more Californians learn that many of the critics of
Davis’s fundraising aren’t Republicans, but his fellow Democrats
and even donors.
