“IF THERE IS ONE THING non-Californians need to know about this campaign,” said veteran GOP strategist Allan Hoffenblum towards the end of the mid-September state Republican convention in Los Angeles, “it’s that it’s not a ‘circus.’ It’s not a ‘spectacle.’ It’s not a joke.” There has been a lot of nationwide bemusement at the campaign to subject Governor Gray Davis to a recall vote one year into his second term. There have been understandable worries that the anti-Davis forces–particularly Darrell Issa, the multimillionaire congressman who donated millions of his private fortune to hire signature gatherers–have been a bit too professional in their harnessing of popular outrage, in a way that the framers of California’s recall laws a century ago would not have countenanced. After the effort to impeach Bill Clinton and the intransigence of Democrats still stewing over the 2000 Florida recounts, there are points to be raised about Americans’ unwillingness to abide by the result of an election–since the lion’s share of the misdeeds for which Davis might be ousted were committed before Californians returned him to office last November. There are things to be said about the information economy, and whether it has bred a customer-is-always-right expectation that anything we dislike can be changed now–fine in an economy, perilous in a democracy. But to describe the recall, which will take place on October 7, as some kind of joke is frivolous. Anyone who has covered a campaign in California has heard the perennial complaint of candidates: No one in California cares about politics. Mayoral, senatorial, and gubernatorial candidates complain that news shows seldom devote more than 30 seconds to politics–45 if you’re lucky–and only well into the show, somewhere below pet rescues and Beyoncé Knowles’s cleavage. Not so this time. Every night, the networks lead their news programs with 8 to 10 minutes of recall coverage, even when something blows up in Iraq. And when the five top candidates debated for the only time last Wednesday at California State University, Sacramento, a quarter of the state watched as if their lifestyles depended on it.
By now the whole country knows California’s problems. It has the worst credit rating in the nation. It is running a $38 billion deficit, higher than all the other states combined. It has a worker’s compensation program that operates as a stealth welfare program, subsidizing people who complain of angst and malaise, while offering stingily low benefits for the truly injured. It is a litigation capital and has high taxes. And Davis locked the state into a series of contracts in 2001 that will guarantee California expensive energy for decades.
Ordinarily, the answer to such problems is to Throw the Bum Out. California blew its chance to throw Davis out in 2002, reelecting him 47 percent to 42 percent. But that doesn’t mean the recall can be dismissed as sour grapes. Californians have grown convinced in the past year that their entire political system is short-circuited, and that nothing less than a systemic rewiring will fix it.
The state, recall proponents say, has been taken over by special interests, who control the government through their campaign contributions. Davis may be the most egregious practitioner among recent governors, but this “pay to play” system, as it’s called, is rife in all corners of government. Detailing the varied workings of pay-to-play over the past five years would make a book. Let’s content ourselves with the week before this magazine went to press, which was not atypical. The owners of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings gave a $100,000 check to Davis’s anti-recall committee the very week he was due to consider a bill that would require taxpayers to fund a new arena for the team. Indian gambling interests are now the biggest special interest in the state, and this week four former agents of the California attorney general’s office said the Division of Gambling Control systematically undermined enforcement of corruption and embezzlement laws at the state’s Indian casinos.
Social interests, as well as commercial ones, take advantage of this system, and consistently force through laws that Californians can’t stand. A few weeks ago, Davis signed a law–not in the statehouse but at a ceremony to which only the minority press was invited, held in a small motor-vehicle registry in East Los Angeles–that permits illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. An even more amazing new law mandates anti-homophobic sensitivity training for foster parents, and bars any would-be foster parent from steering his child away from his proclaimed “gender identity.”
THE COALITION ON WHICH the California Democratic party was built is breaking down, and is being replaced by a coalition of special interests. It’s unsurprising then, that Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the Democrats’ only candidate to replace Davis, played it so cool throughout the debate. Bustamante has an appealing sugary baritone and a Reaganesque smile, but he has funded his campaign with millions of dollars from Indian gambling interests, and backs virtually every important piece of legislation that Davis has signed. In Bustamante, California has the real possibility of replacing a recalled governor with one who is even less popular. Faced with a united Republican party, he would get clobbered.
But the Republican party is split in two. Outsiders tend to look at the split as a social one: between “economic” conservatives and “social” conservatives (like the pro-lifers from the Survivors movement who hold signs outside Schwarzenegger rallies reading “Hasta la vista, babies”). But it’s more accurate to use a more Californian polarity: State senator Tom McClintock is a Reagan Republican, but he inhabits a party that is directed by the more Nixon-Republican strategy of Karl Rove, who prefers to snipe at his opponents’ base by co-opting their issues. Film actor and political neophyte Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Nixon/Rove-Republican candidate. (In an early September speech he even reminisced fondly about having been drawn to the GOP by watching Nixon debate Humphrey in 1968.)
Last fall, California conservatives fought tooth and nail to secure the governor’s nomination for the uncharismatic Bill Simon, freezing out Rove’s candidate, the former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, and turning a likely victory into a five-point loss. As such, the McClintock wing of the party has been in bad odor with the Republican operatives bent on victory. Buzzing around the party’s convention on its opening morning were three Republican county chairmen from conservative central California, who asked to remain nameless. All were leaning Schwarzenegger. They were miffed at McClintock on a personal level. While the Schwarzenegger campaign had called each of them to enlist their help, the McClintock campaign hadn’t called at all. The explanation for that is simple, say people close to McClintock. “Tom just doesn’t have a big enough operation to have people make those calls.” But that’s because he doesn’t have a big enough base. Last Thursday, Republican leaders in the assembly and virtually all the county chairmen closed ranks behind Schwarzenegger.
Republicans are rallying to Schwarzenegger before they have any idea what they’re getting. There is paradox on paradox here. Certain journalists with an esthetic interest in the campaign have hoped he would “break free of his handlers and run a truly independent campaign.” But Schwarzenegger is not a “truly independent” candidate; he owes his position to the desire of Republicans to capture the governorship–and he will get votes only from pro-recall forces, who are mostly Republican. They are delighted to see the trend in new voter registrations since May: 120,000 first-time voters are 45 percent Republican, 40 percent “declined to state,” and only 10 percent Democratic.
The conventional wisdom is that Schwarzenegger had to appeal to these new voters by using last Wednesday’s debate to convey depth on policy matters. This he did, but in the most canned, superficial, and uninspiring fashion possible. Did Arnold win by not losing or lose by not winning? We can’t tell, because we haven’t a clue what the people who support him are thinking. We haven’t a clue what he’s thinking himself. Republicans, perhaps unwilling to entertain the possibility that the public has tired of them, are positing that the public has tired of politics in general.
So they’re offering entertainment instead. They note that their party has done well with intellectually underestimated actors in the past, most notably Senator George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. But there’s a difference. Reagan used the familiarity his film roles won him to gain an audience for a well-thought-out political platform. Schwarzenegger is running as the Terminator. His position on the driver’s license law? “I vill töööminate it!” The rest is silence, or, at best, platitudes on how important children are to him, and how important it is to make the economy grow. Schwarzenegger had emptied his cartridge of rehearsed gags 10 minutes into the debate last week, and for the remaining 80 he sounded shockingly like a typical Sacramento politician.
IF THIS WERE 1982, one would be looking at Tom McClintock as potential presidential timber. He has the policy mastery of Bill Clinton, and brags that he will use his knowledge of the inner workings of Sacramento to short-circuit every Democratic program he can. He has an itemized plan for undoing virtually all of the 38 percent that spending has increased under Davis’s governorship. To do this, he says, it is “essential we have someone who already knows this government intimately.” His rhetoric is absolutely stirring, particularly when he describes the California of low taxes, brand-new infrastructure, and civic involvement that his parents came to in the 1960s. “I remember that state,” he said to the assembled crowd at the recent Republican convention. “I lived there. You lived there. It was real. And it was taken from us. Ladies and Gentlemen, don’t you think we should go and get that state back?”
But McClintock has a rather tormented relationship with the U.S. census. He is fond of throwing into his stump speech the datum that in the 1990s, for the first time in California’s history, more native-born Americans fled the state than settled there. McClintock understands what this means for his state but is a bit dim about what it means for his ability to become governor. His base is indeed alive and well and politically active . . . but it is living in Idaho and Nevada.
McClintock noted in the debate that he is the only major candidate who has signed a no-tax pledge, the only one who supports Proposition 54 (which bans racial data-collection), the only one who is pro-life, and the only one who supports the right to bear arms. He is sticking to his Republican guns, and Republicans may not forgive him for it. They warn that he is turning into the Ralph Nader of the Republican party. McClintock has said he will not withdraw from the race. (“I’m glad I have the whole press corps here,” he said at the convention. “I’ve said I’m in this to the finish. If you can find a more unequivocal way of phrasing that, tell me, and I’ll use it.”) So Republicans are threatening McClintock with the stick of a primary challenge in his (state) Senate campaign next spring, and (according to some but not all sources) offering him the carrot of a Schwarzenegger-backed run for the (U.S.) Senate against Barbara Boxer next fall.
McClintock’s deputy campaign manager John Stoos says that the campaign has mobilized California’s small donors, which is quite believable, and that he is raising money over the Internet faster than Howard Dean, which is questionable. But because McClintock is living in the era of pay-to-play, he needs tons more money than such small donors can supply. Taking a page out of Cruz’s playbook, he was the beneficiary last week of an $850,000 ad expenditure by the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. And when he made what was perhaps the biggest speech of the season, before a banquet of Republicans at L.A. airport on September 13, a huge banner behind him read:
The Sovereign Nation of the
AGUA CALIENTE
BAND OF CAHUILLA INDIANS
California Republican Party
That last line was a cut-out strip that had been sloppily scotch-taped onto the sign–right over the line that said (doubtless), “California Democratic Party.”
For all that, the GOP’s Hoffenblum is right. You can fault the recall proponents, and you can ridicule the 135 candidates vying to replace Davis. You can even say that this race is being run according to the very pay-to-play rules that it was meant to curb. But you cannot accuse Californians of exaggerating when they describe themselves as being on the political brink. This is a pivotal election, and it is being conducted with about as much seriousness as a free people can reasonably bring to such an endeavor. Of course, none of that guarantees that we’ll like the new politics better than the politics it replaces.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
