We could call it the "12-year itch" -- a tendency of California voters to shake up an insular political establishment roughly every dozen years by doing something the insiders consider to be outrageous.

The phenomenon dates back at least to 1966, when California voters dumped their governor, Pat Brown, and elected a fading actor named Ronald Reagan as his replacement. It shook up Democrats and establishment Republicans alike, changing the state's political dynamics for a generation.

A dozen years later, right on cue, Californians sent another message to Sacramento that they didn't like how things were going, enacting a sweeping property tax reduction measure over the opposition of just about everyone in the Capitol. Proposition 13 came to symbolize a national revolt against high taxes -- and helped sweep Reagan into the White House.

Voters fired still another broadside against the Capitol establishment 12 years later, in 1990, when they imposed term limits in reaction to a corruption scandal. Proposition 140 ended the careers of some lawmakers that had stretched back for decades, and while the debate over its effects, good and ill, continues, there's no question that it radically changed the dynamics of the Capitol.

Given that history, the recall drive directed at Gov. Gray Davis is timed perfectly. Californians of all ideological stripes, polls say, are unhappy about the state's direction and see Davis as either the cause or the symbol of what's gone amiss. He is the ultimate political professional who spent a quarter-century climbing up the political ladder -- and despite billing himself as being superbly trained for the governorship, he has presided over two management debacles on energy and the state budget.

At the moment, less than two months before the recall election, Davis is losing by a wide and apparently growing margin, and dozens of would-be successors have filed for the recall ballot. Increasingly, the recall is being seen as a slam-dunk, and media attention has turned in large measure to which of the contenders will prevail, with movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante the leaders.

Journalists from around the world are flocking to California to cover the recall spectacle, drawn not only by its unusual nature but by Schwarzenegger's star quality. And many are trying to divine whether the recall is just a California phenomenon or could -- like Reagan, Proposition 13 and term limits -- be the beginning of a larger political movement. Some have even opined that if Davis is dumped, it means that all incumbent politicians, no matter where, are in greater danger.

Those assertions notwithstanding, there's little evidence that Californians are lighting a fire that will sweep across the country. This recall movement is largely driven by the peculiar events that have occurred in California the last few years and Davis' deterioration.

If there is a larger meaning to the recall, it is that Californians are sensing, at least viscerally, a crisis of governance. California is learning that as a society reaches a certain level of complexity, it becomes difficult to forge consensus, and civic leadership deteriorates. Politicians are, in effect, cast adrift, left to their own devices. They then retreat into insider games, focus on influential interest groups and ignore the larger issues stemming from a fast-growing and fast-changing society.

Davis may be an appropriate symbol for insular, special interest group-driven politics that ignores the daunting social and economic reality of California. But the crisis predates him, and merely getting rid of him won't cure it.

Although a different governor might affect political decision-making at the margins, altering the pecking order changes nothing substantial unless we can also re-establish some sense of common civic purpose to translate the popular anger into more responsive, reality-based policies.

In that sense, California may be a harbinger for the rest of the nation as it, too, reaches that level of cultural complexity, finds its social consensus evaporating and learns that the much-vaunted "checks and balances" of the American political system can become insurmountable hurdles to effective government.