Great piece in the "New York Times Magazine" about the recall. Long, (two parts) but very interesting, and very well written.
------------------------------------------------------------------
All Politics Are Loco!!!
By MICHAEL LEWIS
Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is ''Moneyball.''
The Sacramento directory offers no listing for Charlotte Goland, and so I have no choice but to show up, unannounced, at the address on her check. I don't usually hunt down strangers in their homes, but unusual times call for unusual methods. This woman, unreachable by phone, is herself a clue to a mystery: how did California go so quickly from order to chaos? Republicans say it's because Gray Davis caused and then covered up the state's financial crisis. Democrats claim the attempt to remove Davis from office just six months after he was legally elected is a right-wing conspiracy. Both are obviously wrong. What we have here is a crime of passion, committed by the people upon their ruler. It demands an investigation.
I find Charlotte Goland's home behind a tall hedge, hidden from the street. No sign of life. It is Dave Gilliard's fault that I'm here, peering through some stranger's window. Gilliard is the Sacramento political consultant hired by U.S. Representative Darrell Issa to gather the signatures necessary to put the recall of Gov. Gray Davis to the voters. Issa promised Gilliard he'd give him whatever it took -- about $2 million, as it turned out -- and Gilliard made it happen. Throughout the summer he supervised, in what passes for a skyscraper in downtown Sacramento, an entire floor filled with college students opening mail and sorting signatures. He didn't ask people for money, but money poured in anyway, in heartbreakingly tiny amounts. So when this bigger check landed on his desk, it was the amount ($2,000!) that first caught Gilliard's eye. Two grand -- he now noticed the woman's name, Charlotte Goland -- was the biggest unsolicited donation he'd received so far. Then Gilliard saw the mailing address: Wilhaggin Drive. The lady lived next door to Gov. Gray Davis.
In California, the governor's residence is not a mansion, just an upper-middle-class house, one of 13 similar houses that encircle a small, communal pond in the neighborhood of Lake Wilhaggin. At length I get up my nerve and ring Charlotte Goland's doorbell. A small dog yaps, then spastically hurls its body against the door. For the longest time I hear nothing, and then comes a shout: ''Ugly Edna!''
A woman, white-haired, in a bathrobe, opens the door but just a crack. She's clearly more worried about my getting in than in Ugly Edna's getting out. I explain that I've come to find out why she paid $2,000 to get rid of her neighbor. She breaks into a big smile and throws open the door. ''Because I don't like him!'' she booms. ''Want to come in and talk about it?''
Charlotte Goland is 79, elderly without being old. She's tall and straight, and she laughs enough for two. She apologizes for the bathrobe -- she has just had a pacemaker installed. It had never occurred to her to get involved in politics. She doesn't care all that much about the state's $38 billion budget deficit, for instance, though she agreed it would be nice if it didn't exist. In 79 years, she tells me, she has never once given money or put up signs or passed out literature or encouraged politicians in any way.
But that morning in May, when she opened the form letter asking her to sign a petition to recall Gray Davis, she felt a little shiver of delight. Unlike most everyone else in California, she took the time to read the fine print at the top, along with Davis's rebuttal at the bottom, the stuff about how this was the work of right-wingers and was going to cost the taxpayer millions of dollars. She signed it instantly, and then she wrote out the check for $2,000 and slipped it in the return envelope. She didn't tell anyone about it -- not even Claudia, her daughter, who lives next door.
Charlotte cannot quite put her finger on why she so despises Gray Davis. She met him in 1999 when he moved into the governor's house. The Lake Wilhaggin association gave a welcoming party for Davis just as it had for his predecessors. Charlotte tried to make small talk with the governor at the party but finally gave up. ''He's a cold cookie. . . . Wooooo-eeee,'' she says. ''Never changes his expression. Deadpan-like.''
For five years now she has watched the man come and go. He passes by in his limo, windows always up, without ever once saying so much as hello. ''Maybe I'm stubborn,'' she says. ''But I've got such a violent reaction to the man. It's a gut reaction. I don't like him. It's intuitive. I'm not really sure this feeling I have for him would be as strong if I didn't live here next to him.'' She motions to the pond out her back window. ''You'd never see him out there. He just goes in that house and shuts the doors and closes the curtains.'' She says she doesn't believe there is a trace of originality in her view of Gray Davis; the neighbors she knows all share it. ''You ought to talk to some other people here,'' she says.
I ring another doorbell, another lunatic dog barks and hurls itself against the door.
''The Deukmejians,'' Claudia Goland says, as she sinks into her deep sofa, after she has locked her mongrel in the bedroom. ''God, they were wonderful people. She drove an old Cutlass. Didn't give a damn. Had two dogs. They'd have us over at least once a year, for Christmas brunch. Mimosas, all kinds of things. And Pete Wilson,'' she continues, ''he's a nice man. She's very junior-league president -- and there's nothing wrong with that. They had parties, just like the Deukmejians. She loves to sing. They'd get us all out in the living room with the piano and sing show tunes. They lived here. Every evening they'd take walks. And then this guy comes in.''
There is no need to ask whom she means.
''The only other sign we see of him is when they bring out his dog sniffers. Yes! Can you believe it? We've now got dogs sniffing for bombs. They run around every house getting all the dogs riled up.''
''Does everyone around here have a dog?''
She thinks about that. ''Jenny Ferguson has a Lab and a retriever. Cheryl Osborn has two little yapper dogs. . . . '' She goes on listing them. ''I guess most of us do have dogs, now that I think about it.''
''Does the governor have dogs?''
She hoots her mother's hoot at the absurdity of the question. ''He's not the dog type,'' she says.
Claudia, too, has sour memories of the welcoming party that the association gave Gray Davis. ''The first thing out of his mouth was, 'We need a new governor's mansion.' That man is like'' -- she searches for the word -- ''paste,'' she finally says. ''Like gray paste. Not one ounce of charisma there. I thought you had to have charisma to raise money. How the hell does he raise all that money?''
Like her mother, Claudia has a genius for finding things that amuse her. But the only time she finds amusement in Gray Davis is when she recalls the gay couple who moved into the neighborhood. The two men had no curtains, and their guest bedroom faced the governor's front door. One day the governor's social secretary called the head of the association to inform her that the governor's security cameras -- no one even knew Davis had them -- had caught the two men . . . well, Claudia doesn't know how to say what they were doing. ''Fornicating,'' she finally says. ''They were fornicating, let's just say, for the governor.'' She stops. ''I don't want to give you the wrong impression. They were very nice people. They went out to walk their dogs all the time. I guess they were trying to make a point to the governor.''
The Joy of Chaos
ne delightful thing about the movement to chuck Gray Davis out of office is that so many people in so little time have come to suspect they might be the next governor. One hundred and thirty-five candidates paid the $3,500 and collected the 65 signatures needed to earn a place on the ballot. More than 500 went to the trouble of filing papers, most of whom were disqualified for one reason or another. In Santa Clara County -- the only one I checked -- 10 people asked for the papers for every one who filed them. If, say, 5,000 people went to the trouble of getting the papers necessary to run for governor, how many hundreds of thousands considered it -- if only for a moment? The 135 candidates have been treated as a small, distinct class of freaks, but really they are only the few who took that last little mental step. Here is another clue to the mystery of California democracy: a lot of Californians clearly believe that, to run this state, they don't need political experience.
Other than that shared hunch, the candidates don't have much in common. They can be classified only by motive. A few jumped in to stop the recall; by entering they thought they could help to make the whole thing seem ridiculous. At least one of these, Bill Prady, producer of hit TV shows (''Dharma and Greg,'' ''Good Morning, Miami''), figured the race offered him a chance to satirize the entire political process. (''If I finish anywhere but last I will view it as a victory. If I get more than 100 votes, I'm going to view it as a mandate from the people to lead.'') Some are in the race to advance their careers outside of politics -- the porn star Mary Carey, for example. Another dozen or so candidates hope only to advance a single issue -- witness the father's-issues writer Warren Farrell, who traces many social problems to his belief that feminism has been too successful.
But by far the biggest class of candidates are those who are in this race to win. Among them are maybe 40 practical people -- doctors, engineers, small-business owners -- who suffer from what might be called the Ueberroth syndrome: when they look in the mirror they see the best person they know to fix things that are broken. Jon Zellhoefer is one of these candidates, but by midsummer he, and many others, had become a bit disillusioned with the process. Zellhoefer had begun to feel that lesser-known candidates like himself weren't getting a fair hearing. The odd thing about this is that there have been more than enough news media to go around; you can't find a candidate who hasn't been interviewed by ''The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,'' featured in The San Jose Mercury News, tracked by a Danish film crew or studied by a panel of South American political scientists seeking deeper lessons about democracy.
At any rate, Zellhoefer had an idea: get a bunch of candidates together to complain about it. The first meeting he arranged drew in 12 candidates and attracted little attention. The next one, on an aircraft carrier in Oakland, pulled in more than 40, along with some press. Sixty candidates were invited to the third meeting, which must count as the largest such assemblage in American history. They gather one Sunday morning in early September at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, observed by reporters and several TV cameras.
Zellhoefer opens the proceedings by saying a few words about how he hopes the group, which ranges from socialists to libertarians, will ''come up with a unified strategy that we can all accept.'' He simulates a stately tone and refers to everyone by the honorific ''Candidate.'' Once he establishes the tone, he cedes the floor to Candidate Cheryl Bly-Chester.
Whatever else she is, Cheryl is a gamer. The other candidates have tended to wait for the world to discover them -- and it has! -- but Cheryl, who has kids and a job, has been everywhere. I'd turn up at the big rallies for Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there she'd be, in the middle of the thing, passing out her literature. At one of these, I asked her how she felt she was being treated. ''Reporters stick their mikes in my face,'' she said, ''and say, 'You're not going to win, so why are you running?' I never tell them what I actually think.''
''What do you think?''
''What's in my mind when they ask me that is: 'You are going to be so embarrassed when I do win.' ''
She told me that when she learned how easy it was to get on the ballot, she reacted instantly. She had all these ideas for California, and yet had never run for public office. But then when the recall got under way, she said to herself, ''Put up or shut up, Cheryl.'' She sat down and wrote up her qualifications, and, she says, ''it looked like I'd been training to be governor my whole life.''
Her qualifications are impressive. She is impressive. In every respect but one she seemed perfectly sane, and so I could not believe she was serious.
''Who do you really think is going to win?''
She adjusted her tone, as if she was now ready to have a free and frank exchange. ''Honestly?''
''Honestly.''
''Honestly, I think I'm going to be the next governor of California.''
Cheryl now asks each candidate to rise and describe his constituency, real or imagined. Candidate Roscoe, for instance. The owner of a chain of tobacco shops, Ned Roscoe is a libertarian who sees his base as those Californians who smoke cigarettes. ''I'm the special-interest candidate,'' Roscoe begins. If this were Old Maid, he'd be paired with Candidate Renz, a bar owner who opposes taxes on alcohol.
''Finally, honesty,'' says an immaculately groomed man across the table. I noticed him immediately when I arrived. He is not like the others. He alone does not seem interested in being mistaken for a man of the people. He wears big gold rings and a neatly pressed suit. He dresses like a man who wears cologne.
''But on Oct. 8,'' Roscoe says, ignoring him, ''I know who is going to be governor.'' He pauses for dramatic effect. ''Myself.''
''Finally, lunacy,'' the well-pressed man says.
Again he is ignored. The candidates speak without serious incident for a full 10 minutes, then Gino Martorana, who owns an Italian restaurant outside Fresno, labors to his feet. Gino begins innocently enough. He says that he hopes the group can ''show that there is civility in politics. Show that we're honestly and sincerely concerned about the state of California.'' He praises his fellow candidates for their willingness to mix it up. ''The elite consider themselves above the fray,'' he says. ''They think of us as. . . . ''
''Commoners!'' someone shouts.
''Even though we say 10 times more . . . ,'' someone else chimes in.
Gino agrees, but he also has one actual political view he feels compelled to express, something he seems to think they all can agree on. ''This giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens . . . ,'' he begins, and then he is off on a rant to the effect that Gray Davis should be pistol-whipped for pandering to Latinos.
''Are we here to hear your views?''the critic with the gold rings shouts.
''I only have one view,'' Gino says. ''I think I'm entitled.''
''But that's not appropriate. . . . ''
''I'm entitled!'' Gino says.
''I'm not here to listen to this!' the critic shouts. His name, it turns out, is Ron Palmieri, and he claims to be ''the first openly gay candidate for governor in American history.'' But he isn't running for votes. He strongly opposes the recall and is running to make the point that everyone else running, and especially everyone in this room, is an ignorant fool. Gino, still standing, listens quietly to what Ron has to say, then blinks and, as if nothing has happened, continues: ''Let's put it this way. For thirty-five hundred bucks I want to say what I got to say to somebody.''
For thirty-five hundred bucks I want to say what I got to say to somebody. A lot of heads nod at that one. Before the first openly gay candidate can strike back, Cheryl leaps in. ''The whole purpose of this . . . ,'' she calmly begins. Cheryl is the leader here. You can see her thinking: I am proving by the manner with which I hold this group together my ability to do the job they all seek. But Gino's insistence, coupled with the revelation that among them is a Gray Davis supporter, has the room in an uproar. Cheryl shouts over the din: ''Who agrees with Ron about the recall?'' Amazingly, five hands go up. ''O.K.,'' Cheryl says, ''we should look for common ground of pro- and anti-recall people.''
''I don't think a consensus is desirable or possible,'' says a new voice. It was Logan Darrow Clements, ''the first objectivist candidate for governor, as far as I know.''
Candidate Zellhoefer, glancing nervously at the television cameras, rises to offer a proposal. ''As a group,'' he says, ''we will approach Governor Davis and say we are going to volunteer as an advisory committee. You're going to play ball with us. We're going to play ball with you. But it's going to be a different ballgame the next few years.''
''The power of this group is the power to say whether Davis stays in or stays out,'' another candidate says. ''That's a given.''
Even Ron seems to like the drift of this. ''Good!'' he shouts. ''All of you get together! Get out of this race!''
But then they start to argue again, until Cheryl stops them. She suggests that they come up with a few ''proclamations,'' points of agreement they can tell the press. Candidate Diane Templin (American Independent Party) likes the sound of this, and begins. ''A: address the constitution.''
''What's that mean?'' Ron says. When no answer comes, he adds, ''What do we need sound bites for that don't mean anything?''
''We need an A, B, C and D,'' Templin says. ''What's your A?''
''No A,'' Ron says.
Zellhoefer, who has just sat down, stands up again. He has an A. ''A: I would like us to say that after this election we are all going to run for office again.''
I expect the whole bunch of them to burst out laughing, but they don't. Only Ron does. ''Ha!'' he shouts. ''Ha! Ha! I'm not running for office. I'm going back to Bel Air.''
Ten minutes later, they are done. They line up as if for a class photo, facing the media, and recite the four principles they have agreed upon: A) We will document what we have learned and we will not go away. B) A balanced budget will be good for California. We have the experience in this group to balance the budget. C) We have the experience and determination to clean house. D) Elections are about more than winning and losing. They are about the free expression of ideas in a democratic society.
They also agree to meet again.
Gray Davis Is Human
ike just about everyone else, I assumed that the recall had been the work of crackpots, and that the crackpot in chief was a man named Ted Costa. He runs a small organization, called the People's Advocate, out of a few dusty rooms behind a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on the outskirts of Sacramento. The People's Advocate is known for its belief that people shouldn't pay any more tax than absolutely necessary, but that belief is as much tactic as principle. ''Taxes are the umbrella,'' Costa explains. ''You can interest everyone in taxes.'' His real goal is not to eliminate taxes but to torment politicians. STOP THE CROOKS FROM TAKING YOUR MONEY just happens to be the most likely rallying cry to which Californians might respond.
The funny thing about this is that Costa himself has no apparent interest in money. He draws a modest salary, dresses with no obvious goal other than to avoid walking around naked and drives a Ford so decrepit that it is exempt from the state's car tax. The Danes have filmed him on his front lawn beside his 2,000-pound statue of Lincoln, and the papers have reported that the morning he filed the papers to recall Gray Davis, Costa fed his chickens and peacocks. But his wife bought the statue, and the birds are hers, too. What's genuinely eccentric about Costa is that, of necessity, he has erected a political organization on an obsession he himself does not share. ''There aren't a hell of a lot of people like me out in society,'' he says.
Few of the candidates care to look too closely at the founding spirit of the revolt, but in the founding spirit there is another clue: it's less about any one issue, or even any broad agenda, than it is about the way in which professional political people conduct their affairs. For weeks after the 2002 gubernatorial election, in which Davis defeated the Republican Bill Simon, Costa carried around an article by a syndicated columnist named Tom Elias. Only a third of the people eligible to vote had actually done it, Elias pointed out. Davis had won with nearly 1.5 million fewer votes than he had in 1998. The voters' absence wasn't apathy, Elias argued, it was a silent protest, outrage waiting to happen. So one morning in early February, Costa went on a local radio talk show at 5 a.m. to say he was collecting signatures to recall the governor. Five minutes later people started pounding on his door. Within an hour there was a line that went around the corner of people willing to sign anything to get rid of Gray Davis. Representative Darrell Issa saw the rich vein of ore Costa had unearthed with nothing more than a pick and shovel and realized that $2 million of his car-alarm fortune was a small price to pay for the claim.
The animating spirit of that day is rapidly becoming something like the Californian conventional wisdom. And yet now that the serious campaign is under way, that spirit, and its best friend, go largely ignored. The morning after Schwarzenegger entered the race, for example, Costa, the man who made the race possible, called his campaign office and left a message. He's still waiting to hear back.
Still, Costa seems philosophical about it all. ''That's the way revolutions always work,'' he says as we take our seats at the first debate and wait for Davis to take the stage. ''Did you ever see one where the people who start it, finish it?''
As no one else was paying him much attention anymore, and as his car probably wouldn't have survived the 70-mile journey, I drove Costa to the debate, being held in Walnut Creek, outside San Francisco. For 30 minutes before the debate, the governor takes questions from voters and journalists -- hasn't done that in a while! -- and generally does what he can to appear human. He smiles and tells little personal stories and behaves as he hasn't for the last five years. It's hard not to feel a bit sorry for the guy. He's running millions of dollars of TV ads against the recall -- in which he does not appear by face or name. The pro-recall people, by contrast, say that Davis's personality is their greatest asset. ''All you have to do is put Davis's picture up there on the TV, and his numbers drop,'' Dave Gilliard says.
So long as the state was rolling in dough from the Internet boom, no one paid too much attention to who Gray Davis was or how he led his political life. Then came the bust, and suddenly he was evil. His many troubling acts -- spending $10 million to drive Dick Riordan from the 2002 Republican primary, his sensational ability to get people to pay him to do business with the state -- were newly exposed. The excuse for exposing them was the budget deficit -- which no governor could have avoided. When Cisco and Intel employees cashed out, the entire Legislature was happy to use the state's cut of their capital gains to hike spending and cut taxes. Davis's crime was the crime of the entire society: an inability to foresee that the Internet boom was a bubble. He's the political equivalent of the Wall Street Internet analyst, one of those characters who must be blamed even if he didn't exactly cause the problem.
Now all sorts of people who should be on his side are turning against him. Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco, for instance, keeps telling reporters that Davis has no friends . . . and by this he does not mean political allies. He means no friends, period; and Davis hasn't been able to turn up evidence to the contrary. For five years now, it appears, he has had no emotional tie with anyone in California, with the sole exception of his wife. He has used money as a substitute.
For Ted Costa, this emotional void between ruler and ruled comes as manna from heaven: a tool to be used to generate animosity toward the governing class. The most loathed politician in American history -- so said polls this summer -- is a gift that keeps on giving. Hence the odd sensation I have as I watch Costa watch Davis: he feels some affection for the man. He listens politely for the most part, and when Davis is finished, Costa says: ''He's a mysterious guy. He doesn't have personality enough not to like him. He's just there. Do you know who his political hero is?'' I don't. ''Alan Cranston,'' he says, and laughs. ''Who has Alan Cranston as his political hero?'' Ted Costa's hero is Sam Adams.
The debate that follows, though delightfully contentious, reveals one thing the candidates have in common. Even Schwarzenegger, who ducked the debate, shares it. Every candidate polling at better than 2 percent says boldly that, when he is governor, if necessary, he'll go directly to the people and pass spending and tax plans as initiatives. What, then, is the difference between the governor and Ted Costa? Only that Ted isn't waiting; he's already thinking where next to strike. Repeal the car tax? Overturn the new law granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants? (''You could use that to reform the whole D.M.V.,'' he says.) He feels spoiled for choice.
A Freeway Civics Lesson
could have been driving to interview Sharon Davis, the governor's wife; or maybe I was just out looking for someone who knew someone who knew Arnold Schwarzenegger. Wherever I was going, I wasn't going fast. I was stuck in Los Angeles rush-hour traffic, letting the radio surf itself. It was then I stumbled upon another clue to this political mystery: a talk show. Two guys hollering into the ether. You paused for that? you say. Yes I did. Something about their tone made me want to listen.
First Guy: ''Earlier in the show we went after the Issa campaign manager because he made some crack about Michael Huffington saying that. . . . ''
Second Guy: ''He doesn't think California's ready for a bisexual gubernatorial candidate.''
First Guy: ''Well, guess what? Those kind of remarks are why Republicans lose elections in California. Because they have a bizarro obsession on sexual politics.''
These guys agreed that Republican politicians ought to leave people alone. They also seemed to agree that the guy who paid to put the recall on the ballot, Darrell Issa, needed a beating. The tone was right-wing radio. The content was something else. Issa's campaign staff, they said, had been calling in to complain about their coverage.
END OF PART ONE |
