OCTOBER 3 - 9, 2003
Posted on 10/05/2003 6:58:20 PM PDT by ambrose
OCTOBER 3 - 9, 2003
New Sheriff in Town?
Terminator's pumped up by Sacramento rally and one of the latest polls
by Bill Bradley
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s massive rally on the south side of the state Capitol, the climax of his four-day bus tour of California, provided just what the Los Angeles Times editorial board must fear. It was a dramatic demonstration of how a powerful celebrity can channel populist anger, creating a political experience unmediated by elites. While Schwarzenegger for the most part struck a positive, upbeat tone Sunday afternoon, declining to attack his principal antagonists -- Gray Davis, Cruz Bustamante, and the Times -- the disdain for the political class underlying his message was palpable.
"Bring me the broom. We are going to clean house here," he declared, pointing over his shoulder to the Capitol and holding a broom aloft as his supporters screamed their support. The Rainbow coalition-style cast of children on the stage behind him applauded his every move.
There was no torch-lit Nuremberg-style parade, of course, the fantasy image underlying the concerns about Schwarzenegger’s purported Hitler statements of a quarter-century ago. But the crowd’s raucous reaction to Schwarzenegger’s full-throated pledge to "kick some serious butt here," coupled with the endless live renditions of a reunited Twisted Sisters’ 1980s hit, "We’re Not Gonna Take It" – complete with Schwarzenegger jamming along on guitar after his 14-minute address - must have been disconcerting to those peering out of their windows at the spectacle below as well as Schwarzenegger opponents watching on TV.
Some 10,000 people attended, twice as many as last year’s farmworkers march on the Capitol, the only comparable rally in recent years. Schwarzenegger planned to march across the Sacramento River, up Capitol Mall, then to the stage on the ornate Renaissance restoration building’s south steps. But fresh security considerations in the midst of this increasingly rancorous campaign put the kibosh on that.
In contrast, Davis drew only a few hundred supporters to his big rally Saturday at the Teamsters’ hall in Oakland, despite the presence of the governor, the state’s two U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Willie Brown and Jerry Brown, making a rare appearance on behalf of his former chief of staff.
In the midst of the tumult of charges against Schwarzenegger, a welter of conflicting poll numbers are being bandied about. The Schwarzenegger and Republican camps, which are not exactly the same thing, insist that their polls show steady and large support for both the recall and Schwarzenegger.
Team Gray says the recall is falling and Schwarzenegger is fading, though one key member of that team says Schwarzenegger will still win the replacement ballot. A new Knight-Ridder poll still shows big support for the recall and a solid Schwarzenegger lead. But the Friday night portion of that poll reportedly showed much closer results. Of course, Friday night is a notoriously bad night for polling, as younger voters, who in this election largely disdain Davis and back Schwarzenegger, have better things to do than talk to pollsters.
Intriguingly, both Republican and Democratic sources say that the prison guards’ union, excuse me, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, has a new poll showing sizeable leads for both the recall and Schwarzenegger. The prison guards are the canary in a coal mine of California politics. Except, in their case, the canary doesn’t drop in the cage but instead pries open the bars and flies around with the run of the place. Their read is generally a harbinger of impending power shifts
The prison guards were huge players and the biggest contributor in Republican Pete Wilson’s 1994 win. They played the same role for Davis in 1998. In the recall, they have pulled their punches, perhaps because Schwarzenegger spent three hours signing autographs at their convention last year. And perhaps because they believe there will be a new sheriff in town. Indeed, even reporters who are writing that Schwarzenegger is in serious trouble say they expect him to win.
Meanwhile, Davis is making preparations for his defeat, calling for an extraordinary session of his seldom-convened Cabinet for the afternoon after the election and making plans for the shredding of documents.
Interestingly enough, in its Sunday story alleging sexually obnoxious behavior by Schwarzenegger, the Times has quietly dropped its claim that his political opponents weren’t pushing the story on the paper.
This followed in the wake of the Weekly’s Saturday report that a former close colleague of Davis, Jodie Evans (who the Times disingenuously described merely as a peace activist) is also a veteran Democrat and former close colleague of Governor Davis. Evans was instrumental, according to the Times story Saturday, in urging one of the women to come forward after the newspaper’s initial investigative piece on Schwarzenegger ran in Thursday’s editions. Given the Times’ acknowledgement of Evans’ role, it was the newspaper’s responsibility to properly identify her for its readers.
And so we move forward to the final two days of the election. Sunday night tracking polls should be even more interesting than those taken on Friday and Sunday, given their more reliable samples.
LA Times caught not revealing role of a Davis supporter behind one of the women making claims against Arnold.... snagged!
Where's the poll?From THIS article:
Team Gray says the recall is falling and Schwarzenegger is fading, though one key member of that team says Schwarzenegger will still win the replacement ballot. A new Knight-Ridder poll still shows big support for the recall and a solid Schwarzenegger lead...See also:
NEW POLL SHOWS SOLID SUPPORT FOR RECALL, SCHWARZENEGGER
KFMB News ^ | 10-5-03 | KFMB News
Posted on 10/05/2003 3:44 PM PDT by ambrose
NEW POLL SHOWS SOLID SUPPORT FOR RECALL, SCHWARZENEGGER
(10-05-2003) - California voters polled as new allegations were surfacing last week about Arnold Schwarzenegger's treatment of women still favored the Republican actor over the front-running Democrat by a slim margin and supported recalling Gov. Gray Davis.
The Knight Ridder poll, released late Saturday, found voters surveyed Wednesday through Saturday favored removing Davis, 54 percent to 41 percent.
The percentage of people saying they would definitely vote to oust Davis, however, declined each day the poll was conducted, from 52 percent Wednesday to 44 percent Saturday. Those saying they either were probably going to vote for the recall or were unsure how to vote increased from 10 percent Wednesday to 24 percent Saturday.
The poll surveyed 284 people on Wednesday and 200 on Saturday; margins of error for the day-to-day samples were not released with the poll results, which appeared on the Web site of The Mercury News of San Jose.
"What looks like is happening is people who thought they were going to vote yes are unsure," said Stuart Elway of Elway/McGuire Research, which conducted the poll for Knight Ridder.
The poll surveyed 1,000 California voters by telephone and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
Schwarzenegger led the 135 replacement candidates with 36 percent in the poll, compared to 29 percent for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.
On Thursday, the second day of the four-day polling period, Schwarzenegger was faced with allegations of sexual harassment in a Los Angeles Times report in which six women claimed the bodybuilder and actor had groped or sexually harassed them between 1975 and 2000.
Schwarzenegger apologized later Thursday to "those people that I have offended" and said he had "behaved badly sometimes." On Saturday, he went on the offensive, denouncing sexual harassment allegations as untrue and painting them as a late-stage effort to derail his campaign.
"They're trying to torpedo my campaign. They're trying to make me look bad out there so that people vote no," Schwarzenegger said during a campaign trail stop in Clovis.
An earlier poll that was conducted over the three days before the Times story about Schwarzenegger was published found the effort to recall Davis supported 57 percent to 39 percent, with a margin of sampling error of 4.8 percentage points. That poll, conducted by Field Research Corp. Monday through Wednesday, found Schwarzenegger leading Bustamante, 36 percent to 26 percent.CLICK HERE for the rest of that thread
I got a kick out of this one LOL
"Gray Davis...YOU'VE JUST BEEN ERASED!"
After three weeks of silence on social issues, GOP gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger aligned himself with a majority of voters Wednesday by supporting abortion rights ...He said he supported domestic partnerships at a time when polling shows Americans are becoming more accepting of same-sex relationships.
...the action star said he supports the assault weapons ban, the Brady bill and trigger locks the state now requires for each handgun sold.
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