California Governor Attempts Belated Personality Makeover
By DEAN E. MURPHY - NEW YORK TIMES
SACRAMENTO, Aug. 29 - As he crisscrosses California pursued by forces bent on his political ruin, Gov. Gray Davis is looking a lot more life-like than the Gov. Gray Davis who traipsed into this mess.
Sure, his hairdo is still tightly coiffed. And at a news conference here the other day, when an oversize gulp of water dribbled from his chin, he was probably too obsessive in patting himself dry.
Still, something is very different about Mr. Davis these days as he campaigns against the Oct. 7 recall that could cut short his 30-year political career in his second term as governor. He is laughing at himself. He is offering words of contrition. He is admitting shortcomings. He is slapping people on the back and talking about his private life as he has not done since his early days in politics.
And, oddly enough, he seems to be enjoying himself even as he strives to undo the nagging impression that he is engaged in a monumental act of political desperation, warding off the Republicans and the unsettledness within his own Democratic Party.
"They're panning my answer, and I haven't even finished it yet!" Mr. Davis said in mock protest during a televised interview this week, as his familiar denunciation of the recall was drowned out by a loud crashing sound off-camera.
Mr. Davis's public flash of personality seems to be partly genuine and partly orchestrated.
The man who began his first Inaugural Address in 1999 with a confession of plodding ambition ? "Well, it took us 23 years, but we made it." ? has approached his personality makeover from staid politician with the same dogged calculus that helped him win five statewide elections, and just a few years ago, had some national pundits talking about a run for the presidency.
"I would love everyone to love me," Mr. Davis, 60, told an audience in San Francisco this week. "If you ask me if I am Bill Clinton, no I am not. Most governors we have elected probably wouldn't be talk show hosts."
But Mr. Davis is also not the Gray Davis most Californians thought they knew just a few months ago.
They now know that Mr. Davis did not make the baseball team in eighth grade, but he took to heart the coach's admonition that he get some direction (by his senior year, he was captain of the baseball team).
They know that his wife, Sharon, steered him toward a religious reawakening (church used to mean guilt, now it means inner peace).
They know that his Army tour in Vietnam turned him on to politics and the Democratic Party (he did not see many of his well-off Stanford classmates on the battlefield).
They know that he gets home from work about 8 p.m., likes to be in bed by 11 p.m. and during the intervening three hours gets very annoyed when he is bothered by telemarketers (especially, one of his favorite lines goes, when they call asking for former Gov. Pete Wilson).
And they know that it is a Herculean struggle for him when he tries to appear more easygoing in public (in college, he even tried to go by the chummier name, Joe ? he was born Joseph Graham Davis Jr. ? but the experiment failed).
"It's what politicians try to do, they try to cover their warts," said Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, who employed Mr. Davis as his chief of staff during his two terms as governor during the 1970's and early 1980's. "My father went on a diet. Other people try to get a few new suits."
Mr. Brown, a politician known for his unpredictable manner and colorful personality, said he hired Mr. Davis as "someone upright and deliberative" to manage the array of diverse personalities he had assembled in his administration ? not to be one of them himself.
"He is pretty much all business," Mr. Brown said.
But, he added: "If Hillary Clinton can bake cookies after being asked about Whitewater, I don't see why Gray Davis can't talk about not making the baseball team. There are a lot duller people in this business than Gray Davis."
During a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on television and radio in the San Francisco Bay Area this week, Mr. Davis acknowledged it was not necessarily easy breaking from his time-worn political persona, but even that confession came off uncharacteristically natural.
Many in the audience chuckled with him as he described his predicament.
"I grew up in the 50's when they taught you to keep your feelings to yourself, now I am in the world of Oprah and Jerry Springer," he said. "It is tough. Here is this guy in the 50's trying to live in the world in 2000. All I can say is we are doing the best we can."
A cluster of consultants ? like Ann Lewis, the White House communications director during President Clinton's impeachment, and Mr. Clinton himself ? have urged him to open up more to the public. Ms. Lewis moved to California last week from Washington for the duration of the recall campaign, and she could be seen this week shadowing Mr. Davis at his appearances.
The so-called charm offensive is being coupled with a take-charge offensive, as Mr. Davis makes big public displays of signing bills into law and takes every opportunity to position himself as the state's bulwark against polices of the Bush administration unpopular in California.
At a news conference here on Thursday, he accused President Bush of trying to impose "Texas-style environmental standards on California" by relaxing clean air rules on industrial plants. On Wednesday, on the trading floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco, he attacked Republican efforts in Washington to undermine California's new financial privacy law.
While conceding there is plenty of political calculus at work in her husband's double-barreled offensive, Mrs. Davis, one of the governor's closest advisers, said in an interview that the essence of his approach to the recall comes from the heart as well as from years of experience being politically underestimated.
His candor has even surprised her at times, Mrs. Davis said, especially when he has spoken to audiences about his religious beliefs. But with Mr. Davis's political career on the line, both husband and wife agreed it was the time to let the public into their lives.
"I think probably the smartest thing we have done in the whole campaign is going directly to the voters so they can see him," Mrs. Davis said. "He is amazingly calm and relaxed, and his whole future is at stake here."
Mrs. Davis, who has been keeping a busy campaign schedule as well, said the couple wanted to let people know that in many ways they live normal lives and have the same likes and dislikes as other Californians.
Mr. Davis has high cholesterol, worries about prostate cancer and watches what he eats, sticking to low-fat foods. He prefers broccoli to most other vegetables because he gets more nutritional bang for the buck. When he gets home at night, he switches on ESPN before checking the news channels. And every morning he works out in the gym for an hour, both to keep in shape and to reduce stress.
Right now, stress on the home front comes in the form of a $5,000 air-conditioning repair bill at the Davis's condominium in Los Angeles, Mrs. Davis said.
"There is nobody there to wave the magic wand to make our problems go away, any more than anybody else's," Mrs. Davis said. "It is just that ours is compounded with the fact that somebody is trying to take our livelihood at the same time our air-conditioner went out."
When things get tough politically, Mrs. Davis said, she reads from Psalms in the Bible to her husband as a reminder that "these things have happened to rulers for 3,000 years." The couple regularly attends Roman Catholic Mass, and her religious faith, Mrs. Davis said, has always been something her husband has admired and, more recently, sought to share.
Even so, Mrs. Davis never expected to hear him speak publicly about such a private matter as his faith. He did so for the first time a few years ago, she said, but now it is becoming more regular.
"It is not who he always has been," Mrs. Davis said. "You have to believe in the power of redemption."
Certainly Mrs. Davis does. Her relationship with Mr. Davis got off to a rocky start when they met on an airplane in 1978, and its progression to marriage almost serves as a blueprint for what the Davis campaign is hoping to accomplish with the California electorate in the next six weeks.
Mr. Davis, who was Mr. Brown's chief of staff at the time, was late for the flight and had it held up on the tarmac. Mrs. Davis, who worked as a flight attendant, was furious about the delay. When Mr. Davis boarded the plane and slipped into the back row, she approached him.
"Who do you think you are?" she recalled asking him. "You've made 120 people late."
Mr. Davis did not offer his name, responding glibly with two words: "Black coffee."
"I said in a slightly louder voice, `I cannot hear you because the engines are so loud, but I think you said, `I would like a cup of black coffee please,"' Mrs. Davis said. She got him the coffee and did not speak to him for the remainder of the flight.
A few months later, Mr. Davis was running late again, and as fate would have it, Mrs. Davis was working the flight. When Mr. Davis saw her at the door, she said, he considered turning around and waiting for the next plane. But he did not. The two struck up a conversation, and with time, Mrs. Davis said, she saw there was more to her husband-to-be than a colorless bore demanding black coffee.
"It wasn't love at first sight for either of us," Mrs. Davis conceded. "It took us a while to warm up to each other."
It would be five years before they married. In the case of the recall election, Mr. Davis has less than six weeks to go.
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