Posted on 11/03/2002 11:45:49 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
As the bruising and often bizarre campaign for governor of California winds down, Democrat Gray Davis and Republican Bill Simon are making last-minute appeals to voters in what political professionals regard as a climate of unprecedented civic malaise.
"My sense is that voters are completely disengaged to a degree that I've never seen," said veteran Democratic strategist Gale Kaufman.
For months, voters have been telling pollsters they don't want to vote for either Davis or Simon, and there's not much else on Tuesday's ballot to get their political juices flowing. The Legislature snuffed out virtually all competition in California congressional and legislative races by gerrymandering districts for the convenience of incumbents.
In addition, California's initiative process, which often generates ballot propositions that overshadow candidate races, produced a humdrum lineup this year.
Many people who work in or study politics say they believe voters' detachment goes beyond unappealing and uninteresting choices.
"It's not just Davis versus Simon. They're preoccupied with other things," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California. "The reasons are probably as complex and convoluted as the world we live in now."
Democratic political consultant Darry Sragow ran down a list of public anxieties: the war on terrorism and threat of future attacks, potential war against Iraq, ever-shrinking 401(k) portfolios, the dot-com meltdown, corporate scandals, scandals in the Catholic Church, electricity instability, sniper attacks.
"They say, 'Nothing good's happening out there. I can't affect any of that and nobody who's elected to office can affect any of that,' " Sragow said.
Amid all of this, voters find little uplifting about the campaign for governor.
Simon, a wealthy Los Angeles investment banker who has never sought elective office, denounces Davis as a corrupt and incompetent governor who has made the electricity crisis worse and driven the state into red ink because he is so preoccupied with raising money to further his political career.
Davis condemns Simon as a right-wing ideologue out of step with California voters and a shady businessman with no qualification for high public office.
For all practical purposes, Davis selected his re-election opponent.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan was the prohibitive favorite to win the GOP nomination in the March 5 primary. As a moderate Republican, he was regarded as Davis' strongest potential opponent.
Davis plainly saw it that way. He unleashed an unprecedented cross-party television advertising assault, hammering the avowedly pro-abortion-rights Riordan over his inconsistent statements on the issue.
If Davis' goal, as advisers stated, was merely to rough up his likely opponent, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The Riordan campaign crumbled under the weight of the onslaught and the candidate's clumsy response to it.
That left Simon – a virtually unknown conservative niche candidate, but one with enough money to get on television – as the improbable default winner of the nomination by a landslide.
Simon, who along with his brother heads the family investment firm, was tarred from the start by circumstances beyond his control – mounting public hostility toward CEOs and a spate of accounting and insider-trading scandals.
Beginning in early June, the Davis campaign exploited the anti-CEO sentiment with a barrage of TV commercials pounding highly selective aspects of Simon's business record.
It's hardly unusual for a candidate of modest means such as Davis to make his tax returns public and demand that his wealthy opponent do likewise. But Simon failed to anticipate the issue and grudgingly made his returns available more than three months after the April 15 tax filing deadline.
Barely a week later, a Los Angeles jury delivered a $78 million fraud verdict against Simon's firm over a failed pay-telephone venture with a convicted drug trafficker. Five weeks later, a judge threw out the verdict, but with a substantial assist from the Davis ad machine, the damage was done.
The most spectacular blunder was when Simon jumped on an accusation by a group claiming to represent law enforcement that Davis had illegally accepted a campaign contribution in his state Capitol office. The supposed photographic proof turned out to have been taken in the Santa Monica home of a Davis supporter.
Through all of this, the race remains competitive, if barely so.
A nonpartisan Field Poll published Friday showed Davis maintaining the same lead of 7 percentage points over Simon he has held since midsummer, with a remarkable 25 percent of the probable electorate undecided, favoring a minor-party candidate or planning to skip the governor's race on the ballot.
Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of "The Target Book," a bipartisan analysis of California political campaigns, handicaps the race this way:
"The majority of voters would like to go to the polls and vote Gray Davis out of office, but Bill Simon has yet to make the case that he's a reasonable alternative. There are more Democrats than Republicans, so all things being equal, the Democrat probably wins."
Still, he said, it is incredible that given the Simon campaign's blunders, the race isn't over.
"One of the big stories in the campaign is Gray Davis' inability to put Bill Simon away," Hoffenblum said.
On this point, crocodile tears abound as both campaigns portray themselves as being under siege.
Garry South, Davis' senior campaign strategist, has spent much of the Davis campaign's war chest of more than $60 million in a merciless drive to obliterate the GOP opposition. Given that the electricity crisis sent Davis' once-formidable popularity into the tank, South said it is remarkable that the incumbent isn't already consigned to being only the second California governor to be denied a second term. (The first was Democrat Culbert Olson, who was unseated by Republican Earl Warren in 1942.)
"We have a governor whose job-approval ratings have not been good for a year and a half," South said. "We have a state where people, by a pretty healthy margin, believe things are headed down the wrong track. We're in the middle of a recession. The economy has been flat, if not sliding, for nearly two years.
"The real question is not why doesn't Gray Davis have a higher standing with the voters; the real question is why Gray Davis is still standing at all."
Whether such a political tale of woe can be topped, Simon senior strategist Sal Russo gives it his best shot.
"You can't ignore the fact that (Davis) has run the most negative campaign that's ever been run in American history," Russo said. "He can't run a positive campaign because Davis doesn't have anything to say about a record that anybody could be proud of."
While there are significant differences between the candidates, they threaten to be obscured by a looming state budget deficit that neither has addressed with any specificity. Davis says it is premature to talk about it until the numbers are in. Simon says he will balance the budget without raising taxes, but can't say how.
Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, said that whatever the candidates' divergent philosophical underpinnings, either would have minimum flexibility in confronting the grim fiscal realities next year.
"Even if God intervened and Bill Simon won, he'd have to deal with the same budget shortfall as Gray Davis. He'll have to deal with the same (solidly Democratic) Legislature," said Pitney, a former national Republican political operative. "Even though both candidates would shrink at the thought, the outcome might not be that much different."
One of the most clear-cut differences between Davis and Simon is on issues dear to organized labor. Merits aside, that gives the incumbent an enormous organizational advantage – that Republicans concede they can't come close to matching the Democratic/labor voter turnout operation on Election Day.
Davis has presided over an increase in the minimum wage, restoration of mandatory overtime pay after an eight-hour workday and a groundbreaking paid family-leave program financed by a payroll tax. All of these, Simon maintains, are bad for workers because they inhibit the ability of small businesses to expand and create jobs.
Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, said organized labor is engaging in a full-scale drive directed at the roughly 20 percent of California voters who have a member of a labor union in the household.
"When they say this is a lackluster year in politics . . . we think about it in terms of the issues," Pulaski said. "There have been a lot of bills signed into law for working families, and that's important to our folks."
John Marelius: (619) 718-5007;
County voter guides and previous stories about local, state and national races can be found online at SignOnSanDiego, the Union-Tribune's Web site, at www.uniontrib.com.
I think Simon has Davis nailed!
California Power Crisis animations featuring Governor Gray Davis
AND......................
...to see what bad, bad things Davis has done... - CLICK HERE
calgov2002:
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I blame Ward Connerly for this. He got his Racial Privacy Initiative qualified, but engineered it so that it will appear on the 2004 ballot and not this one. If that initiative were present, you'd be seeing a lot more conservatives showing up at the polls, giving Simon a much better chance.
Shouldn't that be " DEMOCRAT voters are completely disengaged to a degree that I've never seen.."?
God intervened, and KO'd Rearend.
he'd have to deal with the same budget shortfall as Gray Davis.
Simon will not do as Davis, he'll do as Simon.
Let's get out the vote! Here's a tool...
Click here to download the California Republican Liberty Caucus' tri-fold pamphlet on the governor's race!
It's a .pdf file, so you'll need Acrobat Reader... it's free, and chances are good you already have it on your computer. Try the link and see.
Print it using the printer-icon button in the Acrobat toolbar in your browser (not File|Print in your browser's menu). It's intended for double-sided printing using single pieces of paper-- no stapling needed if you do it that way, and saves trees! ;-) Print one side, then invert the paper and feed it through a second time for the second side. Fold, and sally forth to get out the vote!
Give this to friends, walk your neighborhood, take it to stores, give a wad of 'em to your school, hand some out at your house of worship, at clubs, at stores and small businesses...
Let's retire Gray Davis!
Let's show the media and RINOs that "It's the base, stupid!"
Let's show Gray Davis that money can't buy him love ...or re-election!
Freepers and RLC activists can claim considerable credit for nominating Bill Simon, so now let's elect him!
DUMP DAVIS!
Do the right thing.
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