OAKLAND -- If Bill Simon walks like a candidate and talks like a candidate, he's "actively and seriously considering running" for governor again.
So he said Thursday afternoon at the Oakland Hilton, where he did campaign-style one-on-one interviews before heading for Danville to address the Blackhawk Republican women's club -- a speech he said was scheduled long before the effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis "picked up steam."
The 2002 Republican gubernatorial candidate said he and his wife, Cindy, have been touring the state ever since Davis beat him because "it turns out we were right" -- right about the enormity of the state's budget deficit and right about the state's dire energy and water situations.
"We are at a very serious point in our state's history," Simon said, calling Davis a "do-nothing, know-nothing governor" who lied in order to win re-election and now must face the music. "We need to make fundamental reforms now, we need a Sacramento that is accountable to the people."
The recall effort didn't seem to catch fire until Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, began sinking $800,000 into the petition effort. But Simon denied Issa is the driving force -- more than 100,000 signatures were gathered before Issa ponied up, which is more signatures than were gathered in any of the 31 unsuccessful recall efforts mounted against past California governors.
"I have intentionally and consciously stayed away from it," Simon said of the recall, saying the focus had to be on Davis' failures. "If I was involved, I feared it would've been a distraction. Clearly this is not about sour grapes. It is about anger, though."
Voter anger, that is. And so he's "actively and seriously considering running," he said. Last year, that voice spoke against Simon.
Even as Davis' popularity guttered out in the face of a ballooning budget deficit and pricey contracts he'd signed to keep the energy crisis from blacking out California, Simon's campaign seemed to stumble again and again, from a $78 million fraud judgment against his family business -- later thrown out by a judge -- to a public, ultimately baseless and very embarrassing accusation of illegal fund-raising by Davis.
Davis beat Simon with 47 percent of the vote to Simon's 42 percent.
Simon notes it was a difference of only about 360,000 votes in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than a million, in a race in which the incumbent outspent the challenger by more than three-to-one. "That tells you maybe the challenger had some good ideas."
Simon on Thursday touted many of the same platform planks upon which he trod in 2002. Education doesn't need more taxpayer money, he said, but rather better-targeted money, teacher accountability and public-private partnerships. Such partnerships could also improve transportation infrastructure, he said, even as California trims its spending back to mid-1990s levels.
Davis, "a sellout to the unions and the trial lawyers," embodies the kind of "wholesale gross negligence" for which the recall process was created, Simon said.
"Davis and his thugs argue that this is an abuse of the recall process and will encourage people to abuse it in the future -- this is vintage Davis," he said. "This is somebody who has disregarded the interests of our people his entire career. All he wants to talk about are the faults of the people making the accusations.
"Let the people decide... Let them decide with the benefit of the truth rather than being distracted by the lies he puts forth."