Talk Radio plus the Internet. That sounds like a very good "grass roots" way for a candidate on the right to go from now on. Get on Talk Radio and promote your Internet site. The use that to organize and fund raise.
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Radio Free California
The Davis recall is a triumph for the new media.
John Fund's Political Journal
Thursday, October 2, 2003 12:01 a.m.
There were 31 petition drives to recall a California governor before the one directed at Gray Davis. All failed to make the ballot. Ted Costa, the antitax crusader who became the official sponsor of the Davis recall, knew this one would be different when in early February he appeared on Eric Hogue's Sacramento talk show at 5 a.m. to announce he was collecting signatures for a recall. Within minutes a few of his neighbors were pounding on his door wanting to sign up. Within hours more than 300 people had appeared at his office.
California's recall revolution was an unusual confluence of citizen anger at a failed political establishment, a governor who seemed competent only at manipulating the political process for his own selfish ends, and a budget crisis that he helped hide from the voters until after the 2002 election. The whole process was fueled by talk radio and the Internet.
"Without the support of talk show hosts, it might not have happened," says recall strategist Dave Gilliard. "These shows have created activists, people who go out and work." Consultant Sal Russo, who worked for Davis challenger Bill Simon last year, says, "Talk show hosts are the new precinct captains of democracy in California. The Internet piggybacked on talk radio as a vehicle for both fundraising and downloading petition forms so people could just sign it and mail it in." Howard Dean isn't the only one to realize the potential of the Internet in politics.
Everyone has written about the $2 million that Rep. Darryl Issa contributed to the recall effort in May and June. That money was invaluable in ensuring the collection of the necessary 897,000 signatures in time for special election this year. But many observers agree that even without Mr. Issa's dollars, the recall would have qualified for the March 2004 ballot fueled by smaller donations from a larger number of donors and the organizing power of talk radio and the Internet.
"Californians spend more time stuck in their cars listening to conservative talk radio than sitting in easy chairs reading the state's uniformly liberal newspapers," says George Neumayr of The American Spectator. Regular listeners may total only 20% of the general public, but they vote and discuss politics with their friends far more often than most people.
It's hard to trace the origin of the recall effort, though answers may come from books now being written on the recall by journalists Daniel Weintraub, John Gizzi and Steve Greenhut. All three agree that the recall was far more a spontaneous populist uprising than an effort of the "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Pat Caddell, a Democratic pollster who worked for both Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, said he first started talking up the recall after last November's election when he realized that low voter turnout after Gov. Davis's negative campaign had substantially reduced the signature threshold for a recall--12% of the vote cast in the previous gubernatorial election. Mr. Russo said he met with some dissident Democrats in Sacramento on Jan. 24. "They wanted to get rid of Davis for reasons of ethics and ideology," he recalls. "They urged me to help engineer a broad-based recall." The recall leadership ended up not including major Democrats, but polls still show 30% of Democrats will likely vote in favor of the recall next week.
But talk radio didn't wait for the consultants to strategize; it gave the recall a life of its own. The flashpoint appears to have been a Jan. 20 interview with Shawn Steel, the outgoing chairman of the California Republican Party. Mr. Steel appeared on a morning talk show on San Francisco's KSFO hosted by Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgan. Ms. Morgan pointed out how estimates of the state's budget deficit had nearly tripled since the election and asked him, "What can we do about Davis?" Mr. Steel paused for a moment and said "What about a recall?" The phone lines suddenly lit up, and Mr. Steel and Ms. Morgan had a movement behind them. Mr. Steel and others call Ms. Morgan "the mother of the recall."
Within days two statewide recall drives were launched. One was headed by Mr. Costa's Sacramento-based group, People's Advocate. The other was spearheaded by Howard Kaloogian, a former GOP state legislator from San Diego who had often clashed with Gov. Davis.
Mr. Kaloogian soon got Roger Hedgecock, San Diego's most popular talk-show host, interested. "My listening audience has been energized by this issue like no issue I've ever seen," says Mr. Hedgecock, a former mayor of San Diego. "They saw the recall as a way to focus their frustration and take citizen action. Rather than call this recall democracy run amok, isn't that the essence of what we want voters to do: get involved?" Ms. Morgan and Mr. Hedgecock got so involved that they ended up making radio commercials promoting the recall that ran on their own stations and those of their competitors.
Soon national talk show hosts got into the act, most prominently Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Mr. Limbaugh made a splash in August when he told his listeners that Arnold Schwarzenegger "was no Ronald Reagan, and no solid conservative." After Mr. Schwarzenegger came out with a free-market economic program, Mr. Limbaugh softened his critique and noted that the actor seemed to have decided to run a more conservative campaign. Mr. Hannity made news by securing the first interview with Mr. Schwarzenegger in which the candidate announced he opposed gay marriage, supported the medical use of marijuana and opposed statewide school vouchers (though he left the door open to local ones).
Mr. Schwarzenegger seems to have been the first candidate to grasp fully how much the new media have begun to overshadow the old media of newspapers and broadcast TV in California's political process. Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, told MSNBC this week that he thought that the actor had "created some Teflon" for himself with his emphasis on nontraditional media such as talk radio, the Internet and entertainment TV shows. "We in the sort of more traditional media are sitting back. We're going, 'Hey, what about us? We're supposed to be important,' " he said. "So if Arnold Schwarzenegger wins without us, we're going to be looking at our role in the future and exactly what that should be."
So to will officeholders in California and elsewhere. They know their public image and ability to govern is being affected by faster news cycles and the ability of people to find information about their record on their own. As Gov. Davis has found, these forces can create an unforgiving political climate that render political spin useless. Mr. Davis theoretically understood that big changes were coming, but characteristically failed to act on that knowledge. In an op-ed he co-wrote three years ago, he noted that "we live in a remarkable moment when technology is turning the impossible into the commonplace. . . . It is a matter of time before these innovations transform the way we govern ourselves." Little did he know that one of the first political uses of this transforming technology would be facilitating a way to boot him out of office.
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