CALIFORNIA CRAZY

My east coast and out-of-country friends have taken to emailing me these days with messages like, "Is there a cloud of odd smelling smoke hovering over your home state?" As they cover the gubernatorial recall, the national news seems to think that "crazy" is our state’s title and "circus" its last name.

Myself, I have reluctantly but steadily come around to the conclusion that the recall is not quite as unhealthy an exercise as many of my Democratic friends believe.

The thumbnail history of the recall, from a Democratic perspective, is that the recall is a right-wing attempt to either "hijack" or "buy" the governor’s seat, the two terms being used interchangeably and sometimes in the same sentence. Democratic operatives, high and low, loudly and publicly theorize that this is part of a Republican campaign to "steal" elections that they had already lost, in line with the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton and the Supreme Court appointment of George Bush, the Lesser.

But this is a cart/horse thing. Yes, the recall effort was started on the right, and only came to an actual election because Republican Congressmember Darrell Issue pumped a million dollars into the petition campaign, hence the "buying" charge. But Issue put money into the recall campaign only after he realized a peculiar fact: a large number of hard-core California Democratic voters indicated just as much disaffection with Sacramento in general and Davis in particular as are their hard-core Republican neighbors.

This has been a long-time building. The creation of a state governmental apparatus that has been growing increasingly more distant from, and less responsive to, its average citizens, and this feeling comes from both ends of the political spectrum, Oakland and Oxnard alike. There have been a number of attempts to reign this unresponsiveness in from both the left and the right, first in the mass demonstrations and street action of the 60’s and 70’s, later in the passage of such propositions as 13 and term limits, to no apparent avail. The freight train that is state government rumbles on, oblivious, running over all of us here on the ground, liberal and conservative both, if not equally, at least in turn.

Gray Davis has made his own special contributions to the problem. The first is his almost round-the-clock contribution collection machine, coupled with a propensity to favor the interests of contributors over constituents (see his support for the prison guards while teacher pay falls behind, as well as his vetoes of banking privacy laws as just two of many, many examples). Gray Davis did not invent this practice, but few have done it so brazenly.

The second was his dithering during the beginning stages of the energy crisis two years ago, coupled with his subsequent signing of the long-term power contracts. Yes, deregulation was conceived and consummated under a Republican governor (Pete Wilson), and the main gouging was done by energy companies friendly to President Bush. But the latter are out of the reach of California voters. Davis was not.

At least, we thought he wasn’t, until he manipulated the 2002 gubernatorial election. This—not Davis’ bland personality or the state’s alleged nuttiness—is what made the recall go from theory to reality. An election—when it involves real public debate on important issues—is as much a public catharsis as it is a decision-making process, a vetting of the public bile, a way of getting things out of our system. Davis aborted all of that. He used his considerable campaign treasury to knock the one Republican out of the Republican primary who might have made a decent conversation of last year’s election—Richard Riordan—and then turned the fall election into a "yeah, I’m a son-of-a-bitch, but I’m not as sorry a son-of-bitch as that bastard I maneuvered the Republicans into running against me" contest. Californians didn’t like the choices given.

I didn’t support the recall last winter when they were gathering signatures in the shopping malls, but I must say that I am duly pleased with some of the results. It is immensely satisfying, now that he suddenly needs us, to see the haughty and distant Gray Davis have to squirm and come out of his office, discovering his constituent base. I like to be pandered to, every now and then.

And so, like the elderly man at the AC Transit stop, the recall allows us to flail away with our cane at the passing bus of state. Crazy? Maybe. We risk getting ourselves dragged under the wheels. But these days, that seems to be the only way to get state government to slow its roll and pay us some attention, if only for a fleeting moment. Thank you for that, my Republican friends.