California Candidates Enter Final Day of Campaigning
Monday, October 06, 2003
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The California gubernatorial recall race entered its last full day of campaigning Monday as polls showed front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger's support slipping and more women came forward to accuse the A-list actor of sexual harassment.
Gov. Gray Davis, fighting for his political life, said that Schwarzenegger owed voters an explanation of the charges before they went to the polls Tuesday.
Schwarzenegger insisted the continuing stream of allegations was an orchestrated strategy of dirty tricks by Davis' camp, and refused to address the individual claims, now involving 15 women.
"I can get into all of the specifics and find out what is really going on," he told "Dateline NBC" Sunday night. "But right now I'm just really occupied with the campaign."
"A lot of these are made-up stories," Schwarzenegger told the interviewer. "I never grabbed anyone and then pulled up their shirt and grabbed their breasts, and stuff like that. This is not me. So there's a lot of this stuff going on.... "
"So you deny all those stories about grabbing?" he was asked.
"Not at all," said Schwarzenegger. "I'm just saying this is not — this is not me."
"As soon as the campaign is over," he added, "I can get into all of the specifics and find out what is really going on, but right now I'm just really occupied with the campaign."
With polls showing the race tightening, Davis said in another televised interview Sunday that Schwarzenegger "is in sort of a free-fall" and could be overtaken in the closing hours of the campaign.
If the gubernatorial recall succeeds, it will be for only the second time in American history.
Davis also used the power of incumbency to create news Sunday, signing a law making California the largest state to require employer-paid health care (search) for an estimated nearly 1.1 million working Californians currently without job-based coverage.
The Los Angeles Times reported that four additional women claimed Schwarzenegger touched them inappropriately. They included an unidentified 51-year-old woman who said Schwarzenegger pinned her to him and spanked her repeatedly three years ago at a West Los Angeles post-production studio.
Three other women named by the Times said Schwarzenegger fondled them in separate incidents outside a Venice gym in the mid 1980s, at a bar in the late 1970s and on the set of the movie "Predator" in 1986.
Schwarzenegger spokesman Sean Walsh dismissed the accounts of three of the women, and said the actor had no recollection of the alleged gym incident.
Schwarzenegger did not address the allegations during a march to the state Capitol Sunday. Davis "has terminated opportunities and now it's time to terminate him," Schwarzenegger said before addressing a Capitol rally crowd of nearly 5,000.
After the "Dateline" segment aired, two of the women who claim Schwarzenegger harassed them said they were upset the actor said some of the accounts were fictional.
"That incensed me," said Colette Brooks, who claims Schwarzenegger grabbed her buttocks when she was a 23-year-old TV news intern in the early 1980s. "He's dodging any sort of culpability. He's dodging these allegations. It's highly disconcerting and runs smack of dishonesty."
Democratic Attorney General Bill Lockyer (search) said Schwarzenegger should volunteer for a state investigation whether or not he is elected governor.
Lockyer noted the one-year statute of limitations for sexual battery has expired on all the complaints that have surfaced since the Times reported Thursday that several women claimed Schwarzenegger groped or sexually harassed them between 1975 and 2000.
Schwarzenegger spokesman Rob Stutzman accused Lockyer of engaging in the sort of "puke politics" the attorney general had earlier warned Davis to avoid.
A Knight-Ridder poll released late Saturday found support for recalling Davis might be slipping, although 54 percent favored removing him while 41 percent were opposed.
The poll, conducted Wednesday through Saturday, found the percentage of people saying they would definitely vote to oust Davis dropped in the last days the survey was conducted, from 52 percent Wednesday to 44 percent Saturday.
The poll of 1,000 registered voters, conducted by Elway-McGuire Research, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The poll also indicates the race tightening between Schwarzenegger and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante (search), the leading Democrat among the replacement candidates. Davis is not allowed to replace himself.
The poll showed Schwarzenegger with 36 percent support, to 29 percent for Bustamante. A poll conducted by the Field Research Corp. between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1 gave Schwarzenegger a 10-point lead over Bustamante.
Bustamante, a Democrat who is not close to Davis but urges a "no" vote on the recall question, used the harassment allegations to attack Schwarzenegger.
"First there were three, then five, then six, then nine, then 11 and now 15," Bustamante told a crowd in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena Sunday. "You know, after a while, these start to sort of depersonalize, start to sound like numbers. These are not numbers. These are women, women who were harassed in the workplace."
Schwarzenegger told ABC's "This Week" that the harassment allegations and reports that he praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as a young man are "campaign trickery." He consistently stopped short of denying all of the women's accounts.
Asked to clarify which of the harassment claims he denied and which he could not remember, Schwarzenegger replied that it didn't "make any sense to go through details," adding that no woman had ever said to him, "I don't want you to do that. You went over the line."
"Now," he stated, "all of a sudden, isn't it odd that three days and four days before the campaign, all of a sudden all these women want to have an apology?"
Schwarzenegger's leading Republican opponent, state Sen. Tom McClintock, called the allegations "very, very serious," but said they need to be treated "with a certain degree of skepticism because it's been brought up so late."
Schwarzenegger planned campaign stops Monday in San Jose, Huntington Beach and San Bernardino. Davis was to appear in Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles, while Bustamante planned appearances in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
