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Monday, June 30, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:53 AM:
We're really in "All hail blogger mode!" I'm manually reinserting this because idiot blogger has buried it between Saturday night and Sunday morning and put it in the archives for neither. So I guess it's true: Google or no, same old blogger.All hail blogger! This is coming to you from notepad for later posting. If it ends with blogger mentioned alongside foul epithets, you'll know I had to add the html and post manually.
Item:
Calif. Gov. Davis Faces Recall Fight
Democrat's opponents gathering signatures and support for his ousting
I'm really torn on this. On the one hand, I would love to see Gray Davis get the axe. On the other hand... then what? We stand at the same place we were for the 2002 elections. Gray Davis is a governor against whom the case could be made by wilted asparagus. There are rotting artichokes better suited to the office. And yet, the California GOP managed to field a candidate who could not leap these extremely low hurdles.
The elements of the Republican party most jubilant about Gray's troubles now had best check their hubris until they've a victory in hand. While Davis probably would not withstand a recall election, there is still no credible Republican to replace him. The lead GOP challenger is a guy named Issa who also happens to be the one financing the recall effort. Predictably, a hit piece appeared in the Merc'y News and elsewhere suggesting that his enthusiasm for gun rights is matched by excessive enthusiasm for guns and a few run-ins with the law that you'd rather not write home about. While the pieces didn't really draw blood, they constitute 90% of what is known about Issa outside his own district. Up here in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area (I was in SF a few days a week ago) there is chatter about what a cad Davis is but I've yet to hear the name of a single challenger escape anyone's lips in casual conversation.
Truth be told, the GOP would be best served if this issue merely clouded the waters for Democrats. If it gets to a vote, they're going to have to get a plausible candidate and agenda together on short notice and history shows they couldn't even manage it with a couple year's lead time and a fixed date last time out. The problem is that conservatives are fascinated by the idea of a new conservative governor in the Reagan mold but they have no idea what that means. The last election might as well have been called after - in a 24 hour period - the Simon campaign went from supporting health care benefits for gay partners as a reasonable thing that Simon's own company had offered for years to frothing at the mouth against them when the conservatives who had got him the nomination shrieked. The flip from mushy capitulation to moderates to resolute capitulation to conservatives revealed a candidate whose vacuity made Gray Davis look like the picture of constancy and sobriety. Now the conservatives are going to have to decide where they're going. A lot of moderate Republicans are understandably peeved that the conservatives effectively joined worried Davis campaign staffers in sinking the relatively popular LA mayor Richard Riordan and they aren't going to be eager to give the right wing another shot when all they could scrape up last time was Bill Simon, a well-meaning businessman who plainly had no business in the dirty business of a statewide California race. If conservatives don't want to wind up spending some time in the wilderness as punishment for their overreach, they'd best cool it with the recall talk and devote the next two years to fielding a candidate and crafting an agenda satisfactory to more than their own wishful thinking. I am not registered to vote in California. If I were, my signature would appear on a recall petition. But I would sign with an enormous amount of trepidation, for as right as Davis' removal is, unless the GOP leadership shows itself to be immensely more intelligent than it has appeared of late it may simply serve as the set-up for a Democrat campaign against a GOP whose sole idea is no Gray Davis at any cost. Such an approach is as bankrupt as the anyone-but-Bush campaign run by far left Democrats on the national level and just as apt to fail.
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