Why Davis deserves to be recalled
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/perkins/20030620-9999_mz1e20perkin.html
Joseph Perkins
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
June 20, 2003
Gray Davis is a dead man walking. The most unpopular governor in California history very well could become the first occupant of the state's highest office to be recalled by the voters.
Davis suggests that the recall campaign – which he previously dismissed as quixotic – is nothing more than a nefarious attempt by Republicans to overturn the result of California's last gubernatorial election.
" It's being organized and financed by a bunch of rich losers," Davis told The Orange County Register. "Nothing but a bunch of losers running around talking to one another.
His Grayness is particularly ticked off at Rep. Darrell Issa, the Vista Republican, the multimillionaire car-alarm magnate, the prospective gubernatorial candidate, who has ponied up more than $800,000 to gather signatures for the recall petition.
" He just wants to run for governor on the cheap," Davis sneered, in recent remarks to a San Francisco radio station.
But the Davis recall would not be headed to the California ballot – either this fall or next spring – were it supported exclusively by the state's Republican minority. No matter how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars Issa spent on signature gathering.
Indeed, recall drives have been waged against California governors on 31 previous occasions. All failed. In fact, not even one proposed recall made it all the way to the state ballot.
Davis faces the ignominy of actually facing a recall election, of becoming only the second governor in U.S. history to actually be recalled, because of his unfavorable standing among California residents across the board.
That was borne by a recent poll released by the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco think tank. It found that the Democrat's approval rating has fallen to a historic low of 21 percent. It also found that most of the Golden State's likely voters can hardly wait to kick Davis to the curb, including not only an overwhelming majority of Republicans, but also half of independent voters and a third of the governor's fellow Democrats.
So why has his Grayness fallen into such broad and deep disfavor with the California electorate? Because he has grossly mismanaged the Golden State's affairs.
Indeed, in the space of roughly a year and a half, Davis turned a record $12 billion state budget surplus into a record $34.8 billion deficit. He insists that it was not his fault, that the state economy simply went bust.
But the fact is, under Davis' watch, the state government increased its spending a whopping 36 percent – far in excess of inflation, far outpacing growth in California's population. Had the governor resisted the urge to spend, to buy off special interests like California's powerful teachers union, the state would not now be facing the mother of all budget crises.
California would not be borrowing billions of dollars on Wall Street to pay its bills, downgrading its bond rating to one the nation's lowest. And the state's taxpayers would not be facing the prospect of surrendering even more of their paychecks to Sacramento to close the budget gap that Davis and the spendthrift legislature created.
Davis' mismanagement of the state's budget is matched only by his mishandling of the state's recent electricity crisis.
He did not cause the crisis, as he so often reminds. But his failure to lead when the crisis first reared itself cost California businesses and residents tens of billions of dollars in higher electricity prices.
Indeed, Davis got an early warning of looming trouble in the electricity market in the form of sharply rising wholesale power costs, as the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters recounted this past spring.
" California utility executives begged Davis and state utility regulators to allow them to raise rates and sign long-term supply contracts," according to Walters, but they "delayed for six critical months, until the utilities had their financial backs to the wall."
Had Davis been a real leader, had he gotten the state's utility regulators to act sooner rather than later, California taxpayers wouldn't have gotten stuck with more than $40 billion worth of highly unfavorable long-term contracts with energy generators. And California residents wouldn't be facing higher electricity prices than consumers in almost every other state.
Opponents of the Davis recall, including not only the governor's hardcore Democratic loyalists, but also a few Republican pragmatists, say his ouster will plunge the state into political chaos. But the state already is in chaos, not the least because Davis lacks the leadership prowess to navigate California out of the fiscal abyss into which he steered it.
A new governor, lacking the albatross Gray Davis has draped around his neck, could hardly do any worse. And there's a good chance that his successor would do a considerably better job as California's chief executive.
Perkins can be reached via e-mail at joseph.perkins@uniontrib.com.