STORIES

Achievements

Exhibitions

Briefly Noted

Academic Senate Chair

Calendar

Credits

Archives

On the Road with Arnold and Gray

Sacramento Bee columnist provides retrospective on recall

Cheerfully admitting his good fortune to have "the best job in California journalism, if not journalism anywhere in America," Sacramento Bee political columnist Daniel Weintraub weighed in about the recent recall election during an Oct. 30 Center for Applied and Professional Ethics forum titled "The California Recall: A Retrospective."

"I thought it was the best job in California even before the recall," Weintraub noted, "although that turned out to be one of the biggest political stories of the year in America and possibly all of California in a generation."

Weintraub summarized the causes and events that led to Governor Gray Davis's exit from office a year into his second term. Though the recall began as response by conservative Republican activists to Davis's 2002 election victory, Weintraub asserted that the movement's wide popularity indicated that most of the electorate believed the state's leader had failed to do his job.

"The recall very quickly struck a chord that crossed party lines and really all levels -- demographic, income, and education," Weintraub said. "It addressed a basic problem concerning California's voting system, what I call a disconnect between the governors, with a small 'g,' and the voters. This disconnect really was felt during the last generation and particularly during the last 10 years in California. Our political leaders have deliberately tried to wall themselves off from voters and create a fiefdom at the capital where they can do whatever they want."

Following a bipartisan slicing of voting districts based on the 2000 census, said Weintraub, the wall became virtually unassailable. "The district boundaries essentially eliminated political competition for legislative and congressional seats," he explained. "Legislators could choose their voters rather than voters choosing their legislators, and that pushed all competition into the primaries and made the November election meaningless."

Increasingly sophisticated campaigning has also taken its toll. Targeted campaign ads zero in on distinct sections of the population while excluding, at least psychologically, the rest. "Campaign operations, particularly at the top of the ticket for governor, have become a series of narrowly targeted messages in a language few people understand," Weintraub said. "If you're not in one of those groups, the message is, 'This isn't for you; stay out.' This had the effect of actually driving voter turnout down." (The 2002 election had the lowest voter turnout in modern California history.)

During the 2002 campaign, the term "puke politics" emerged to describe the misleading mudslinging engaged in by both sides, though Davis proved particularly adept, said Weintraub. "He attacked his opponents' credibility and record of business in a way that was designed to distract voters from his own political baggage, namely the perception that he and his administration operated in what came to be called 'pay for play,'" observed Weintraub. "Davis was not only an effective fund-raiser, but also had a peculiar habit of raising money from people in interest groups. He famously asked, or rather demanded, from the president of the California Teachers Association a $1 million contribution."

When challenged by the press about this, Davis campaign pundits brushed it aside. "The governor's chief campaign adviser told the press over and over last year that none of this would matter," said Weintraub. "His take was, 'No matter what you say about Gray Davis, it doesn't really matter because voters will assume that this guy is just a little more crooked than the other guy, and that's not going to impress them.' Well, he was right last year, but not on Oct. 7."

The knockout punch came when Davis, postelection, announced the budget deficit. "Declining to confirm speculation that the state's deficit was growing to unmanageable proportions, Davis postponed dealing with that problem until after the election," said Weintraub. "And then, shortly after the election, he 'discovered' a budget deficit of $30 million.

"I think that shocked people. They knew in their guts that such a huge deficit could not have emerged overnight, and thus they'd been misled during the campaign."

Weintraub noted that California Governor Hiram Johnson, elected in 1910, championed the initiative, referendum, and recall process as a means of restricting influence in state politics. In closing, Weintraub concurred with Johnson's comment: "If people have the right, the ability, and the intelligence to elect, they have the right, the ability, and the intelligence to reject or to recall."

Taran March