While statewide polls of California voters reveal a uniformly negative attitude toward Gov. Gray Davis' performance, they also indicate that many of those who disapprove of him also are reluctant to vote to dump him from office through a recall election.

Roughly speaking, the Democratic governor has the approval of 20 percent to 25 percent of California voters -- a historically low level -- but twice that many oppose a recall. Davis' hopes of surviving a looming recall election lie in solidifying and expanding that opposition by branding the recall an illegitimate coup d'etat attempt by right-wing extremists.

Bob Mulholland, the state Democratic Party's jihad warrior, has gone so far as to predict that if Davis is recalled and succeeded by a Republican, the successor governor and any other GOP official would be fair game for recall themselves.
Mulholland's characteristic hyperbole not withstanding, he raises an interesting aspect of the unprecedented anti-Davis drive. Is it, in fact, a legitimate use of the century-old recall power or a misuse that will morph into just another deadly weapon in California's ceaseless ideological wars?

An examination of the question should begin with a spot of history. As schoolchildren are routinely taught, the recall is one of a trio of political reforms that swept through Western states, including California, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to the stranglehold that economic interests -- railroads and mining companies, particularly -- held on officeholders.

The recall has been used rarely, perhaps a half-dozen times a decade, and usually to remove a local government official, although a couple of Republican state legislators were recalled in the 1990s after they helped longtime Assembly Speaker Willie Brown retain power in the Capitol.

The other two populist reforms of the early 20th century, the initiative and the referendum, were also using sparingly, at least until the late 1970s, when the initiative -- which allows voters to legislate directly -- was employed to pass Proposition 13, the landmark property tax measure. Since then, the initiative has blossomed into a political tool that's used regularly to bypass the Legislature. The referendum -- which allows voters to overturn a law enacted by the Legislature -- remains rarely used, however.

The explosion of initiatives lends credence to the theory that the recall could become another oft-employed political weapon. As Republican Congressman Darrell Issa has demonstrated in the Davis recall, if one is willing to spend about $1.5 million, he probably can buy enough signatures to force a state official into a recall election.

That said, a recall could succeed -- or even become a credible threat -- only if the official has, by his own actions or fickle fate, fallen into the kind of political quicksand that is sucking at Davis. And it's his situation that frames the legitimacy debate.

A recall isn't impeachment, a quasi-criminal action that involves indictment, in effect, by the state Assembly, followed by a trial by the state Senate with a two-thirds Senate vote required for conviction and removal. It's probable that Chuck Quackenbush, the scandal-plagued Republican state insurance commissioner elected in 1994 and re-elected in 1998, would have been impeached had he not resigned.

A recall is, in effect, a way to express buyer's remorse. Someone is elected to an office and then, for whatever reason, loses the confidence of voters and is recalled, a process roughly analogous to the "no-confidence" vote in parliamentary democracies such as Britain. The officeholders who have been recalled in California have, for the most part, been accused of poor performance or duplicity, not crimes. By that standard, the recall drive against Davis is legitimate.

There remains, however, a danger that it could become just another weapon of political warfare, so after the Davis situation is settled, one way or the other, we should raise the signature threshold for recall petitions. Oddly enough, the constitutional requirement for governor is 12 percent of the total vote for the office in the last election -- in this case, just under 900,000 names -- but for legislators, members of the Board of Equalization and judges, it's 20 percent. Boosting it to 20 percent for everyone would be a judicious step.