response 5 of 264:

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.

response 7 of 264:

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.

response 9 of 264:

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.

response 11 of 264:

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."

response 13 of 264:

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%. 

response 15 of 264:

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. ;-)

response 17 of 264:

Jul 27 13:24 UTC 2003

Har har.

response 19 of 264:

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.

response 21 of 264:

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.

response 23 of 264:

Jul 29 04:14 UTC 2003

Did San Diego have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts?

response 25 of 264:

Jul 29 06:50 UTC 2003

Maybe they didn't pay their electric bill?

response 27 of 264:

Jul 29 21:47 UTC 2003

Here's what the Democrats could do-- look up and down the lists of 
registered democrats in the state.  Find another one named Gray Davis.  
There's bound to be more than one.  Pay off this other Gray Davis to 
run on the recall ballot.  People could easily think it was the real 
Gray Davis, and think that by recalling the real Davis, they have 
sufficiently vented their anger at him, and thus be willing to vote him 
back in.  The deal would be that if the other Gray Davis actually gets 
elected governor, he agrees beforehand to resign after taking the oath 
of office.  Then the Lt. Governor (a Democrat right?) would become 
Governor, and act as a puppet for the real Gray Davis (Willie Brown did 
something similar when he was forced out as California House Speaker as 
I recall, found somebody willing to act as a puppet for him)

But the real Davis shouldn't be recalled.  A regular election was held 
already and Davis hasn't been convicted of a crime.   What is the point 
of having regular elections if the electorate doesn't respect the 
results and let the winners serve their terms?  California needs to 
overhaul its recall laws, otherwise every Democrat who gets elected 
from now on is going to face petition drives financed by millionaires 
and run by anti-tax zealots and there will be elections being held 
constantly.

It seems to me that the recall vote has nothing to do with Davis 
whatsoever, and everything to do with voting to respect the electoral 
process

response 29 of 264:

Jul 30 03:00 UTC 2003

Some newspaper (SF Chronicle, probably) did a story recently in which they
interviewed somebody named Gray Davis and somebody named Bill Simon, neither
of whom were interested in running, but both of whom would have been quite
elligible if they were willing to pay a few thousand dollars.