The Capitol looked like Protest Central at noon one day last week. On one side of the historic building, hundreds of Harley riders gathered for their annual drive to repeal California's mandatory helmet law. Around a corner of the building, school supporters rallied and then marched on the offices of the governor's education secretary, protesting budget
cuts.
But the event with the most potential long-term significance was the smallest, a gathering of perhaps 150 souls in front of a fountain across from the Capitol's west steps. There, supporters of the drive to recall Gov. Gray Davis from office announced that they had collected the first 100,000 signatures of about 1 million needed to place the question on the ballot.
For California's political establishment, to paraphrase Ross Perot, these guys are like the crazy aunt who won't go away. Using straight-line projections, they are well behind schedule in collecting enough signatures to force an election. They so far don't have enough money in the bank to finance
much of a paid signature gathering campaign. They have little support among the big-name and big-money Republicans and virtually none from political figures outside the party. And their leadership is split, rarely working from the same page.
But there is something about the effort that will keep it from being declared dead unless the Sept. 2 deadline passes without them having collected enough names to move the question to the next step.
Perhaps that something is Gray Davis. A recent Field Poll found him with an approval rating of just 24 percent, the worst for any governor in the 55-year history of the survey. He is a man who commands little respect in the halls of the Capitol and, apparently, even less in the streets of California.
He inherited a flawed energy policy, dawdled as conditions worsened and then overreacted, saddling his constituents with billions of dollars in higher electricity bills. He presided as the state's $12 billion budget surplus became a $35 billion shortfall. Since pushing through some important school accountability measures his first months in office in 1999, he has proposed little (and enacted less) that showed he was able to think creatively about the problems confronting the nation's largest state. The recall drive was the brainchild of Ted Costa, an anti-tax activist with ties to the 1978 campaign that passed Proposition 13, the historic measure that cut California property taxes. Another wing of the effort is managed by Sal Russo, the consultant who ran Republican Bill Simon's unsuccessful campaign against Davis last year. The two have shrewdly used the Internet and conservative talk radio to get the recall campaign off the ground.
Now Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of Vista has joined the fray. Issa and his advisers have made a series of conflicting statements over the past two weeks, but it seems clear that the wealthy car alarm entrepreneur will donate some of his personal fortune to the effort and will try to raise enough money from others to make it a success. If the recall qualifies, he might run for governor himself.
David Gilliard, who will run Issa's piece of the signature drive, says he expects to have a $1.5 million budget to hire hundreds of petition circulators in the days ahead. The committee will also use direct mail to gather signatures. They hope to have 1.3 million by mid-July, in time to force an election this fall.
If they do, it promises to be a spectacle like none the state has seen before. It would be the first election to recall a governor since the law allowing it was passed in 1911. Californians who go to the polls would be asked two questions: Should Davis be recalled from office?
And if he is recalled, who should replace him?
The race could draw a long list of candidates, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger among the potential political and celebrity superstars. Lesser figures, including Issa, Simon and the entire bench of Democratic statewide officeholders, might
also put their names on the ballot. There would be no partisan primary but instead a single, winner-take-all election. The winner would almost certainly have less than a majority of the votes and might take in fewer than one-third of all the votes cast.
The prize? Nominal leadership of a troubled state of 35 million, with a struggling economy, a crumbling health care system, an electricity industry in disarray, schools unsure of their future, and ethnic and racial diversity that could make it a model for the world or an American Yugoslavia. The state's budget will either be seriously out of balance or so mortgaged that it will take years before any chief executive can find the money to launch a new initiative.
Gee. Where do I sign up?