Posted on 11/04/2002 7:54:01 AM PST by bonesmccoy
Folks...watch the bold faced punch lines at the end from Garry South...
With the end of an expensive, aggressive California governor's race finally on the horizon, Democratic incumbent Gray Davis flew around the state Sunday exuding a feeling of smooth skies ahead.
"It's all over," said Garry South, the governor's senior adviser, with a Cheshire cat smile aboard Davis' chartered 727 airplane. "All over but the shoutin'."
The cautious Davis, wrapping up an eight-month general election campaign, was slightly more circumspect with two days until Tuesday's election.
"It's over when the secretary of state says you won," he said Sunday. "(But) I feel very positive. . . . I can see victory at the end of the tunnel."
Davis skipped across California the past weekend on a six-city, two-day trip aimed at energizing his party's voters. The events reflected an upbeat, confident governor and his campaign staff who have seen in the past week giving him a lead of 7 to 10 percentage points over his Republican challenger, Bill Simon.
Speaking to reporters Sunday, the governor began referring to the grueling 2002 election as a thing of the past -- comparing it with his 1998 gubernatorial campaign against GOP candidate Dan Lungren, which Davis won in a landslide.
"In a way, this (election) is more gratifying because we worked through some very serious challenges -- a national recession, an energy crisis of biblical proportions," he said. "This is more gratifying, because we had to work hard and fight through all the nonsense to get to where we are."
Davis traveled Sunday with his wife, Sharon, and most of the Democratic candidates for statewide office.
At the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles' Crenshaw district, Davis swayed to gospel music and told hundreds of African American worshipers, "With your help, and God's blessing, we'll continue to make progress."
In San Diego, revving up a crowd of 150 campaign volunteers with the help of a mariachi band, Davis gamely broke into a chant of "Four more years!" in Spanish.
And, in a departure, his stump speeches began openly rejoicing at what Democrats of the past could only dream about -- domination of all statewide constitutional offices.
"We're going to surprise the pundits," Davis said in San Diego. "We're going to vote for a Democratic sweep!"
Independent polls released last week showed all seven statewide Democratic candidates holding slim to substantial leads in the campaigns for constitutional offices.
Democratic organizers said they expect to increase that gap with a coordinated $5 million get-out-the-vote campaign involving phone bank volunteers in 22 regional state offices.
And the Davis campaign committee -- still flush with cash after raising more than $65 million for the governor's re-election bid -- said it would spend $4.8 million on television ads and $4 million on phone banks and mailers in the final days to reach 600,000 state voters.
That means that by Tuesday, about 8 million recorded and live calls will go out to newly registered or regular Democratic voters, who will hear reminders to vote from people including former President Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and actor Martin Sheen.
While Simon's campaign insisted the race was closing, Davis and South said the Republicans can't compete in manpower or in grassroots appeal.
"They've been lying about their polling, lying about their money, lying about their media," South said. From the start of the campaign, "this crew was not ready for prime time. . . . They're running a novice candidate who doesn't have a clue what he's doing."
Analyzing the race for reporters, South predicted Davis would win by 8 to 12 points, but acknowledged it was an unusually tough and costly campaign.
"You have a sitting governor whose job ratings tanked a year and a half ago and never recovered," due to the energy crisis, South said. "And you have roughly half of the people of the state who think (California) is going in the wrong direction.
"Those two things combined are usually a death knell" for an incumbent governor, he said. "But we're going to win in spite of that. That's what our money got us."
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