The campaign to recall California Governor Gray Davis may
succeed, admit a growing number of California Democrats. Daniel
Borenstein of the Contra Costa Times
reports that “the state Democratic Party mouthpiece, Bob
Mulholland, predicted last week that Republicans would gather the
necessary 897,158 valid signatures to qualify the recall for a
statewide vote.” The website Davis Recall.com reports “426,664
signatures to goal,” with “91 days to go.”
Davis is sufficiently scared that he has regrouped his old
campaign team,
reports the Los Angeles Times on Monday’s front page.
That means Garry South is back, and even Chris Lehane, Al Gore’s
infamous spinner. Lehane, recall-minded Californians should note,
served as a flak for Davis during his self-inflicted electricity
crisis. Davis paid Lehane with tax dollars until public attention
forced him to stop. Lehane is, then, a particularly astute
selection for Davis’s recall-defense team.
Steve Smith, the state’s labor secretary, has taken a “leave of
absence” to “lead the new committee set up to save Davis,” reports
the Times. The name of the committee is appropriately
ludicrous: “Taxpayers Against the Governor’s Recall.”
Taxpayers want to save Davis’s political career? Taxpayers would
like to end it. Especially now as Davis plans for an $8 billion tax
hike, an idea he opposed until he was safely reelected. Taxpayers
now face a $38 billion deficit, thanks to Davis’s incompetence,
excessive spending (36% increase in spending), and miscellaneous
corruption.
The latest Times
poll has Davis’s job approval rating at 27%. Davis feebly
argues that a special election would squander taxpayer dollars, a
curious complaint from someone not having counted them too strictly
before. The Times reports that his supporters estimate
that a special election will cost $25 million. That’s a pretty
abstemious day for Davis. He and his cronies have squandered not
millions but billions.
Garry South calls the recall effort “political egomania.” South
and Davis are above this sort of thing. Such is their commitment to
pristine politics that they have hired “circulators” to sabotage
the recall drive.
Reports the Sacramento Bee: “Kimball Petition
Management Inc., a Southern California firm already paying
circulators to collect signatures for a banking privacy initiative,
has been tapped to organize the anti-recall signature
gathering.
“The firm is authorized to pay $1 per signature collected, 25
cents more than last week’s going rate paid by Rescue
California.
“‘It’s being used to try to tie up the professional petition
circulators so that they won’t work on this recall,’ said Tom
Bader, who is directing signature gathering for Rescue California.
‘It’s just shameless.’”
Meanwhile, some Democrats are circling Davis’s political corpse.
They would like to see U.S Senator Dianne Feinstein replace him. “I
believe a recall election can be appropriate when serious
malfeasance and corruption is found,” Feinstein
wrote in an opinion piece quoted by the Sacramento
Bee. “But I don’t believe it is right to overturn the results
of an election simply because of political differences.”
Does this mean she won’t place her name on a recall ballot? No.
Her spokesman Howard Gantman told the Bee, “I cannot
address hypotheticals. Senator Feinstein does not choose to address
hypotheticals.” Not exactly a vote of confidence for Davis.
“A recall is supposed to be for some abuse of office —
‘Something outrageous has happened and we have to recall him,’”
Davis is quoted as saying. His use of the state government as a
campaign cash register — so thoroughly documented last year in the
endless stories about jobs, contracts and appointments doled out to
donors — certainly qualifies as an abuse of office.
Governor Hiram Johnson instituted the recall power in the early
twentieth century for use against graft-ridden hacks like Davis.
Johnson, by the way, was a Republican. He belonged to the
Lincoln-Roosevelt League, a reform society that took aim at the
Davises of its day.
