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Grex > Agora46 > #121: California's Governor Gray Davis facing recall election | |
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richard
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California's Governor Gray Davis facing recall election
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Jul 25 21:59 UTC 2003 |
Interesting political drama unfolding out in California. The Governor
of California, last year elected to his third term (or is it second
term?) is being subjected to a recall election in the fall. A
millionaire governor wannabe named Darrell Issa funded a petition
drive, supported by most all the republicans in the state, and a lot of
zealous anti-tax groups, and collected over a million signatures to
call for a recall election, and it has been now officially certified
that it will take place.
Pretty interesting that all these anti-tax groups organized to push for
a recall election, which will cost the state many millions of dollars
to hold (elections aren't cheap to put on) Guess you see who the real
tax and spenders are. But the real issue is why overturn an election
just held a year ago, unless Davis was guilty of a criminal act or
being impeached. Davis was elected, and he was re-elected. I hope
that those grexers in California vote against recalling Davis. An
election happened, somebody won, and he has the right to serve out his
term without a bunch of sore losers trying to oust him ahead of time.
I understand Davis is unpopular in California now but he WAS elected.
The deal with the recall will be, based on what I've read, a two part
ballot with a recall question on Davis (yes/no) and if the nays win, a
second part which would be a list of challengers whom you could choose
to replace him with. Arnold Schwarzenegger is ored to run, and with
a long list of candidates, the potential would be there-- if the Davis
recall goes through-- for somebody to become governor with only a small
percentage of the vote.
Hopefully it won't come to that. Davis won his current term fair and
square and he hasn't committed any criminal acts it wouldn't seem that
would warrant his being replaced for the next regular election.
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| 264 responses total. |
dcat
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response 1 of 264:
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Jul 26 00:05 UTC 2003 |
There are some allegations that Davis won his re-election based in part on
false statements and pretenses and that he has reneged on campaign promises.
I don't know how serious those allegations are, though.
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scg
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response 2 of 264:
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Jul 26 00:44 UTC 2003 |
Davis was pretty unpopular when reelected (to his second term), and generally
appears to be pretty incompetent, but the opposition was worse. Davis didn't
disclose the bad financial shape California was in when running for reelection
(why would have have?), but presumably the Republicans would have had access
to that information too, had they wanted to make use of it.
This time, it appears the Republicans will put up Arnold Schwartzenegger as
their main candidate, although qualifying for the replacement ballot is so
easy it's likely that there will be a really large number of candidates.
The recall election is structured such that there will be two questions on
the same ballot: should the current governor be recalled? and if so, who
should replace him? If the recall gets anything more than 50%, Davis is out,
but then the replacement just has to get more votes than anybody else in what
could be a very crowded field. It's therefore conceivable that 49% of the
voters could support keeping Davis, while somebody else gets, say, 15%, and
the one with 15% will be the new governor. I suspect, however, that the
republicans will line up sufficiently behind one candidate that that the
scenario won't be quite that dramatic, but it still seems unlikely that the
winner will be elected with more votes than the current governor, if the
recall passes.
The scary part is that the Democrats are refusing to run anybody as a
replacement, claiming they don't trust the voters to vote no on the recall
if there's a palatable alternative. That may well be true, but it means that
if the recall passes anyway, we're left with a Republican governor in a very
Democratic state.
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janc
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response 3 of 264:
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Jul 26 00:58 UTC 2003 |
Can Davis add his name to the list of candidates trying to replace him? If
he can, he should. So if 49% vote not to recall him and also vote that he
should replace himself if recalled, then he'd probably still win, because
nobody else would get more votes than him.
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dcat
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response 4 of 264:
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Jul 26 01:17 UTC 2003 |
Will votes for a replacement governor be counted from those who vote not to
recall him in the first place?
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jep
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response 5 of 264:
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Jul 26 01:38 UTC 2003 |
re resp:3: That would be pretty amusing!
I hope the recall fails. I hate recalls. They seem invariably to be
run by disgruntled losers.
I'd have been happy if Gray Davis lost in the last election, but he
didn't. He won. And so the office belongs to him until at least the
next election.
Sadly, the news stories I've seen about it make it sound like he will
probably be recalled.
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scg
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response 6 of 264:
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Jul 26 01:51 UTC 2003 |
re 3:
Nope.
Yes, those of us who will vote not to recall him will then also be asked to
vote for a replacement. I just wish there were somebody worth voting for as
a fallback, but it doesn't look like there will be.
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rcurl
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response 7 of 264:
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Jul 26 01:58 UTC 2003 |
I doubt he will be recalled. The democrats will come to their senses when
it comes down to the wire. The recall was instigated by only a tiny fraction
of the electorate, so one can't draw significant conclusions from that.
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twenex
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response 8 of 264:
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Jul 26 02:21 UTC 2003 |
They could institute something like what hapens in Germany, where Parliament
can pass a vote of no-confidence in the Chancellor (=PM) but he is not kicked
out unless the vote passes AND Parliament agrees on a successor candidate.
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russ
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response 9 of 264:
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Jul 26 13:19 UTC 2003 |
To understand this, you need to know some of the background.
Gray Davis took a bad situation with regard to California's power
grid, and made it worse. Rather than just fixing the problems with
the deregulation-that-wasn't (retail electric prices weren't deregulated),
he arrogated all the power to himself and negotiated power contracts on
behalf of California, with the state's money behind them. And he got
(the taxpayers) shafted. Last I heard, he was trying to terminate
those contracts and get better ones.
The voters put Davis back in office on the basis of incomplete or even
false information, so why shouldn't they terminate *his* contract?
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Then there is the fact that Davis only won the last election because
he meddled with the Republican primary, pushing out Richard Riordan
in favor of a much weaker candidate. Anyone who complains about the
hardball tactics being used to get Davis out needs to explain why
Davis's win by hardball tactics had any legitimacy to begin with.
Last, a big part of California's budget crisis is due to the spending
spree the legislature went on during the bubble. With a fiscal
conservative in the governor's mansion, maybe some of that can be
fixed; otherwise, California is going to be a basket case for a long
time. Gray Davis isn't the person for that job.
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sabre
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response 10 of 264:
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Jul 26 17:19 UTC 2003 |
russ is correct. All the states have budget deficits but Ca's is greater than
the rest of the states...COMBINED. I am sick of goverment spending.
I would think californians are too.
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scg
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response 11 of 264:
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Jul 26 18:31 UTC 2003 |
I'm certainly not going to attempt to defend Gray Davis, but he could hardly
have meddled in the Republican primary without the cooperation of the
Republicans. He had a probable Republican opponent who appeared at least as
liberal as he was, and he spent a lot of money (probably accurately) painting
the Republican front-runner as too liberal for the Republican party. It's
certainly not something somebody who cared more about advancing his purported
values than about advancing himself would have done, but the Republican
primary voters responded by voting in droves for somebody who was well known
to be a right wing extremist with no political experience. In the general
election, given a choice between bad and worse, and knowing that Davis had
made a big mess of things, we California voters chose Davis. While voting
for Davis, I was very tempted to emulate the French and show up with a clothes
pin on my nose.
The Democratic manipulation of the Republican primary was limited to attacking
the Republican frontrunner as a liberal. Unlike Michigan, California makes
it difficult to cross party lines and vote in the other party's primary (you
can't be registered as a Democrat and vote in the Republican primary, and
until recently you couldn't vote in Democratic primaries without being
registered as a Democrat, while in the strongly Democratic parts of the state
the de-facto local elections are part of the Democratic primary, so those who
vote in Republican primaries get no vote in local races), so there was no
groundswell of Democrats showing up to vote for the weaker candidate in the
Republican primary. Besides, California Democrats have enough trouble getting
Democratic voters not not vote for Green Party candidates; they're certainly
not getting their voters to vote for conservative Republicans.
If the recall supporters were attempting to replay last fall's election with
different sorts of candidates. It might seem like a reasonable thing to do.
Instead, they're once again attempting to put up inexperienced right-wing
Republicans, the sort of candidates the voters detested so much that they
chose Davis instead of, in a forum where they don't need so many votes to win.
I just wish the Democrats weren't so willing to play right along It appears
to be what one non-Davis Democratic activist recently referred to as being
"in a suicide pact with Gray Davis."
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klg
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response 12 of 264:
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Jul 26 18:45 UTC 2003 |
re: "#7 (rcurl): ... The democrats will come to their senses when
it comes down to the wire. The recall was instigated by only a tiny
fraction of the electorate, so one can't draw significant conclusions
from that."
(Assuming, that is, that they have senses. But we digress.)
Nearly 7M votes were cast in the last election. The recall petitions
were signed by 1.3M voters. 19% is not "a tiny fraction."
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rcurl
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response 13 of 264:
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Jul 26 19:22 UTC 2003 |
That only establishes that the minimum number that would vote no in
the recall is 19%. That leaves a big gap to 51%.
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krj
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response 14 of 264:
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Jul 26 19:41 UTC 2003 |
In California, the government seems to be breaking down. The Republicans
are still reeling from former governor Pete Wilson's a
ttempt to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment;
this understandably pushed the large Hispanic voting block into
the Democratic column. Too bad a faction of the Republican party let
its bigotry overtake its ability to count voters.
(The Republican experience in California contrasts with Texas, where
George W. Bush was open and welcoming to Hispanics -- it's one of the
few things that I give Bush credit for, that he genuinely accepts
people of diverse races and has not played to bigotry for political
advantage.)
So basically, the Republican party is so weak that it let Davis survive
the last election, *after* the electric power debacle. Now a badly
written law may let a GOP governor take office with 15-20% of the
state supporting him. Well, tough tushie on California, I say.
California has gotten too fat for years on the tax money from the
rest of us -- water projects, military contractors. It's come to
regard this largesse as a natural right, and the state has
rewarded the Federal government which made it rich by incubating
a vicious anti-government, anti-tax movement which, starting with
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, made it almost politically impossible
to talk responsibly about government finance.
I'm content to (metaphorically) watch California burn.
(Sorry, Steve! I appreciate your reports from the scene.)
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russ
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response 15 of 264:
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Jul 27 08:44 UTC 2003 |
Steve wrote in #11:
>[Davis] had a probable Republican opponent who appeared at least as liberal
>as he was, and he spent a lot of money (probably accurately) painting the
>Republican front-runner as too liberal for the Republican party.
That's one way to look at it, depending how you define the CRP. (Had
Riordan won, he would have been the de facto head of the CRP and would
have probably attracted many more centrist members.)
On the other hand, it's indisputable that the budget that Riordan had
for getting his message out in the primary was dwarfed by the war chest
Davis had amassed. When Davis decided to meddle in the Republican
primary race, he had the capacity to define the issues in the media.
This was decidedly dirty pool. Democratic voters could probably have
been pushed to nominate an unelectably-leftist candidate had the positions
been reversed (this is something to watch out for this season; Bush's
war chest is immense, and Karl Rove is always taking notes.)
>If the recall supporters were attempting to replay last fall's election with
>different sorts of candidates. It might seem like a reasonable thing to do.
>Instead, they're once again attempting to put up inexperienced right-wing
>Republicans...
"They" in this case is primarily Daryl Issa, whose criminal record is
bound to keep him from getting far even among people who like his voting
record. I've not heard about Riordan deciding to run. It would be
ironic if he got a bigger fraction of the vote in the recall than Davis
got in the last election.
Ken wrote (#14):
>In California, the government seems to be breaking down. The
>Republicans are still reeling from former governor Pete Wilson's
>attempt to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment...
It was anti-tax-monies-for-illegal-immigrants sentiment, but that's
not how it was spun by the Democrats.
>... the state has rewarded the Federal government which made it rich
>by incubating a vicious anti-government, anti-tax movement...
California incubates a lot of radical stuff, using the mechanism of
the plebiscite; Proposition 13 is only the best-known example.
(Prop 13, a "conservative" measure, was a response to a very real
problem that the legislature failed to address. You can contrast
this with some of the nutty stuff debated in various leftist city
councils, from Berkeley to Ann Arbor.)
I suppose you can look at it as one of the laboratories of democracy,
and you check the results by doing autopsies on the rats. ;-)
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pvn
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response 16 of 264:
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Jul 27 08:48 UTC 2003 |
To make it even more interesting both the Huffingtons are apparently in
on that. Arianna is in and her former husband is apparently considering
Aarianna is pissed at her former husband over his adultery with his male
lover - he's got the SF vote fer shure. Arnold is apparently on the
fence - apparently wifey didn't exactly appreciate really funny remark
about "in sickness and in health" reference to her political
affiliation. (governor, nookie, governor, nookie - hard choice)
(One would think that California would be smart enough not to elect an
actor as governor.)
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twenex
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response 17 of 264:
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Jul 27 13:24 UTC 2003 |
Har har.
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tod
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response 18 of 264:
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Jul 27 18:51 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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scg
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response 19 of 264:
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Jul 27 22:15 UTC 2003 |
My take is that if Davis is recalled, whichever party has fewer candidates
on the ballot will win, provided that party's number of candidates is greater
than zero.
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jep
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response 20 of 264:
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Jul 28 03:13 UTC 2003 |
Steve, do you expect Gray Davis to be recalled?
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scg
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response 21 of 264:
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Jul 28 06:12 UTC 2003 |
I don't know. His approval rating is around 20%, so I guess it depends on
how many of the people who don't like him are willing to risk the
alternatives. If polled, I would say I didn't approve of his performance,
but I wouldn't vote for the recall.
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russ
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response 22 of 264:
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Jul 28 21:13 UTC 2003 |
Re #18: Considering that a large fraction of California does not
have natural gas service and relies (stupidly) on electricity for
not just A/C but also heat and domestic hot water, it's a bit more
complicated than that. The accumulated mistakes of 30 years of
infrastructure since the 1973 oil embargo can't be laid at the foot
of this term's governor; his own mistakes are more than enough.
Speaking of stupid infrastructure, I understand that insulation is
so bad in much California construction that people get very chilly
in weather that's still above freezing. On top of that, the solar
water heater is an endangered species even in sunny California.
San Diego was one of the few parts of the state which carried the
wholesale price hikes through to retail, and one of the complaints
which made it to the national media was that people couldn't afford
to take hot showers. Isn't that absurd? (I can go to a camping
store and get a black bag that you fill with water and stick out in
the sun. Voila, hot shower. Works just fine off-grid.)
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pvn
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response 23 of 264:
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Jul 29 04:14 UTC 2003 |
Did San Diego have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts?
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scg
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response 24 of 264:
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Jul 29 06:33 UTC 2003 |
I suspect part of the "why don't California houses have mid-western style
insulation" answer is that insulation costs money. If it gets really cold
every winter, insulation will pay for itself fast. When my heating bill for
a 1200 square foot floor of a 1920s house has never been more than $40 per
month, at current inflated energy prices, it's hard to imagine insulation
being at all cost-effective.
I suspect the complaints about not being able to afford to take hot showers
were whining, rather than real serious complaints.
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