DNC CHIEF Terry McAuliffe trotted out the Democratic talking points on last night’s recall vote with twenty minutes to go before the polls closed: “The signal coming out of California would be, with the economic conditions there, George Bush should be very nervous. People are angry in California. They’re angry all over the country because of the economic conditions that the Bush administration has brought on.” (This, it should be noted, was in the same interview where he said, with a straight face, “I still have high hopes that Gray Davis is going to pull this thing out tonight.”) Mark Leno, a Democratic California assemblyman, got the memo too: “What I think is going on here is that Californians are fairly frustrated. And they’re taking it all out on Gray Davis. They’re angry and frustrated because we’ve lost 10 percent of the three million jobs that have been lost since George Bush took office. . . . I’m saying that there’s an angry mood among voters, and it’s part of a national recession. In the past five years since George Bush has been governor, we’ve lost 300,000 . . .” He kept talking, right through the Freudian slips, but you get the idea.

Democrats hope to accomplish two things by playing up the “angry voter” theory. They want to characterize Schwarzenegger’s success as the product of irrationality. Californians are so blinded by their rage, say McAuliffe and his colleagues, that they aren’t thinking straight, and somehow wound up with the Terminator as governor.