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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The effort to recall California's Democratic governor shows again that the GOP will stop at nothing to win more power.
Jun 21, 2003 | Darrell Issa is a second-term Republican congressman from Southern California. He's as conservative as they come -- pro-business and anti-abortion, supports prayer in school, opposes affirmative action, never met a tax cut or an oil well he didn't like. In socially liberal California, he's got exactly no chance of ever winning statewide office.
And yet, he just might be the state's next governor.
California Gov. Gray Davis was reelected just seven months ago. Although you'd be hard-pressed to find a single Californian who actually likes Davis, he was able to win reelection because the Republicans fielded a neophyte challenger -- bumbling businessman Bill Simon -- who was as clueless as Davis was conniving. Davis beat Simon by 47 percent to 42 percent in the most expensive gubernatorial race in California history.
But for Republicans in George W. Bush's America, defeat is not an option. If the vote in Florida goes against you, make them stop counting the ballots. If the Senate Democrats won't confirm your most extreme judicial nominees, change the rules so they can't filibuster anymore. If Texas Democrats won't show up to vote on your crudely partisan redistricting plan, tell the federal Homeland Security forces to hunt 'em down and bring 'em in.
And if you can't win a regular election against the Democratic governor of California, just wait a few months and then demand the right to try again.
Seizing on a provision in the California Constitution that allows voters to recall the governor for no reason at all, Republicans launched a recall drive earlier this year. Although Davis is suffering incredible difficulty in navigating California's dire fiscal straits -- the state faces a huge budget deficit brought on by the foundering national economy, the dot-com bust and the state's failed effort at energy deregulation -- the political establishment wrote off the recall proponents as ideological windmill-tilters. But then came Darrell Issa and his money. Issa announced that he would run for governor in a recall election -- and that he was putting up $700,000 to ensure that the recall drive made it to the ballot.
Overnight, the recall has become a real possibility, and Democrats are apoplectic -- not because they might lose Gray Davis, a man they loathe nearly as much as the Republicans do, but because someone like Darrell Issa might be able to take his place.
"We won an election fair and square," complains Kristen Spalding, chief of staff for the California Labor Federation, a coalition of unions that backed Davis in 2002. "Six months later, the Republicans want a 'do-over.' It's not the way this works. There has been no malfeasance, no legitimate reason for a recall. It's just sour grapes."
But for some, it's something much worse. It's another example of Republicans' manipulating the rules and procedures of the democratic process to ensure their own partisan gain, no matter the cost in taxpayer money or public cynicism. It happened in 1995 when House Speaker Newt Gingrich led congressional Republicans in a shutdown of the federal government. It happened in the right's relentless pursuit of the Whitewater witch hunt against Bill and Hillary Clinton, and again in the impeachment of President Clinton.
If the recall drive makes the California ballot, voters will be asked not just to decide Davis' fate but also to name his replacement if Davis is recalled. There is no primary and no runoff; it would be remarkably easy for a candidate of any party to get on the ballot, and no matter how many candidates there are, whoever wins a plurality of the vote wins the governor's office. That confluence of circumstances favors a hard-right candidate like Issa, whose base of loyalists will turn out to dump Davis and then vote solidly for one of their own to replace him. For Issa, it's a custom-made election, paid for in small part by his contributions to the recall drive and in much larger part -- some say $30 million worth -- by the California taxpayers.
"This is a blatant abuse of the recall process," says Craig Holman, who follows campaign finance issues for Public Citizen's Congress Watch and drafted a campaign finance reform law adopted by California voters in 1988. "The recall process is intended as a once-in-a-millennium procedure that would be invoked to remove some office holder for, most likely, criminal activity. This is clearly not that. It's Darrell Issa using his money to try to set up a procedure in which he could potentially get elected governor realizing that he can't do it if he followed the normal route."
Recall supporters reject the notion that recall is part of some larger Republican power grab. For them, this is a campaign about a disliked and dishonest Democrat, a politician whose sole policy goal often seems to be the collection of campaign contributions, a governor who lied about the depths of the state's budget crisis in order to win reelection.
"This is about Gray Davis -- it's unique to California and unique to him," said David Gilliard, director of Rescue California, the organization running the recall drive.
And for the governor, that's a problem. Gray Davis has spent his political life making sure elections involving Gray Davis aren't about Gray Davis. He won his first gubernatorial election in 1998 by painting his Republican opponent, Attorney General Dan Lungren, as a right-wing zealot. He won reelection in 2002 by running what amounted to two separate negative campaigns. First, he invested millions of dollars in the Republican primary to make sure that his strongest potential challenger, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, was defeated by a lesser Republican and didn't make it to the general election. Then he waged a nasty and expensive war against Simon, portraying him -- not entirely unfairly -- as a stumbling businessman with hard-right political views. Throughout the campaigns, Davis gave voters much to dislike about his opponents, but little to like about himself.
"Gray Davis is good at winning elections," said Jack Pitney, a professor of government at California's Claremont McKenna College. "But he wins elections by making people dislike his opponents. He has never given people a reason to like him."
Davis might have tried to do that when he ran for reelection in 2002. "Reelection campaigns can be a time for reflection on positive things that were accomplished in the incumbent's first term," said Mark Baldassare, research director for the Public Policy Institute of California. But as Baldassare explained, that sort of feel-good message "never took hold" in the negative campaign of 2002. To be fair, the California economy had gone so far south by November 2002 that there was little left for Davis to tout.
