Posted on 09/19/2003 6:27:05 AM PDT by bedolido
WASHINGTON - The California recall is fueling outrage among liberal activists nationwide, helping to fire up the Democratic Party's base earlier than usual heading into a presidential election, political organizers and analysts said.
Democrats are hoping that the recall will boost their chances at the polls in 2004, given that an angry party base has proven to be a potent political force in the past.
Two Democratic presidential candidates - Howard Dean and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham - have already taken the opportunity to appear with Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and denounce the recall. A third, Sen. John Kerry, did the same Wednesday.
Stoked by a unified message from Democratic Party leaders in recent weeks, many labor union members, environmentalists and abortion-rights advocates see the recall as part of a pattern of Republican attempts to circumvent democracy. They cite the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton, the U.S. Supreme Court's intervention in the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election, and the standoff in Texas over a GOP push to redraw congressional boundaries.
"Our folks are fed up with Republican shenanigans," said Keith Kelleher, head organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 880 in Chicago.
A couple of years ago, 500 to 1,000 people from the union local signed up to make political contributions, he said. This year, Kelleher has signed up 3,000 members from the union local, which largely represents home-health-care workers, and hopes to double that heading into the 2004 election.
"The biggest things they mention are getting Bush out of office and the California recall," Kelleher said last week while attending a union political conference in Washington.
Already furious about many Bush administration policies - particularly the war in Iraq - liberal activists who help form the Democratic Party base are only further enraged by the attempt to oust Davis.
If the U.S. Supreme Court steps in and overrules this week's federal court ruling postponing the recall, it would only rekindle bitter memories of the 2000 election, further infuriating liberal activists.
A divided Supreme Court voted 5-4 along partisan lines to halt the Florida recount in 2000, allowing Bush to become president, a decision that continues to rankle many Democrats.
"It would feed into Davis' main charge that the Republican institutions of government are trying to steal elections," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
There's no evidence the recall is part of some coordinated GOP assault, and recall organizers have denied the initiative was orchestrated by the Republican Party. The recall drive was launched by Ted Costa, a longtime Sacramento anti-tax advocate, and 1.6 million Californians signed petitions to qualify it for the ballot.
But Democratic Party activists blame Republicans because Costa and other early recall supporters are conservatives, and the signature-gathering process was bankrolled by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista. Although the recall and the other examples cited by Democrats don't appear to be part of some "vast right-wing conspiracy," Democratic Party loyalists believe it - and that's all that's needed to have an impact, Sabato said.
"Several celestial bodies are coming together simultaneously to produce Democratic energy," he said. "It may not be enough to win, but it's enough to help toward a victory" in 2004.
History has shown that anger among a political party's base supporters can help carry it to victory, boosting fund raising, volunteer ranks, turnout and ultimately vote totals on Election Day.
Conservatives infuriated by Clinton's policies, including the 1993 tax increase and his failed attempt at national health care reform, helped lead the GOP to its historic takeover of Congress in 1994. Four years later, liberals outraged by impeachment proceedings against Clinton helped the Democratic Party pick up seats in the House of Representatives, one of just two times in the 20th century the party holding the White House made such gains in a midterm election.
"Being able to fire up the activists and the people who will give money is a huge, important thing," said Bruce Cain, a political-science professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Anger among liberal activists has helped vault Dean - a relatively unknown former governor of tiny Vermont - into front-runner status in the Democratic presidential nomination battle, Cain noted.
Dean tapped into that fury as an early and outspoken opponent of Bush's plans to go to war with Iraq. And now he's trying to tap into the outrage over the California recall.
"I believe the right wing of the Republican Party is deliberately undermining the democratic underpinnings of this country," Dean said as he stood alongside Davis at a Los Angeles news conference Sept. 6.
Clinton echoed that theme during an appearance with Davis on Sunday in Los Angeles, saying that the recall was orchestrated by "Issa and the Republicans."
"This is an incredibly powerful issue," said Zack Exley, organizing director of Moveon.org, a Berkeley-based liberal activist group.
The group appealed to its 1.5 million members nationwide to help fight the recall earlier this month. In a little more than a week, 96,000 members from California and 129,000 from outside the state signed an online petition opposing the recall as "an attack on American democracy."
Similarly, NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading abortion-rights group, sent e-mail to its 100,000 nationwide members in late July asking them to oppose the recall. About 10,000 signed an online petition, a "fairly remarkable" response for a state issue, said David Seldin, the group's communications director.
The recall is "becoming a real rallying cry" for Democratic activists, said Ann Lewis, chair of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Vote Center and recently the party's point person in California. When she met with Democratic activists and donors recently in New Mexico and New York, they were all talking about the recall.
"It has clearly had the effect of activating Democrats even sooner than they would have been" heading into the 2004 election, she said.
Sherwin Carroll, president of Service Employees International Union Local 96 in Kansas City, Mo., said the recall had helped fire up the health care workers and janitors in his local.
"If the president and the Republican Party can force this recall on a governor, what can they do to working-class people?" Carroll said in an interview during last week's conference.
The recall will become an even more potent issue for Democrats if Davis is ousted and replaced by a Republican, predicted Dick Harpootlian, a Columbia, S.C., lawyer and former head of the state's Democratic Party. "I think our base is fired up; the question is how fired up they get," he said. "California, if the recall's successful, is just one more log on the fire. It's a big log."
Michael
Real democrats are getting more, and more tired of their party's LIBERAL demonRATs. For sure, here in Texas but I'll wager my hard earned money that it's also that way across the entire South.
The Federal Ninth Circuit behaves exactly like the tyrant Hugo Chavez' court stooges in preventing Venezuelans from their constiutionally permitted recall.
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