washingtonpost.com
Little Fanfare, Few Fans for Ousted Davis
Resounding Defeat Tied to Governor's Lack Of Loyal Constituency
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 9, 2003; Page A17
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 8 -- Gray Davis stayed home Wednesday. On the day after, he let other politicians handle the whys and wherefores and what's nexts and cocooned himself in his West Hollywood condominium with his family, the first governor to be removed from office in California history.
By midnight on Saturday, under state law, he will have to sign or veto 250 bills sitting on his desk. Staff members said he would do some of the work on those Wednesday. "But I'm not sure when he'll be back in Sacramento," said Steve Maviglio, Davis's press secretary. "Soon, I imagine."
Everyone near him was giving the governor plenty of room to mourn.
Defeat happened sooner and uglier than anyone in the "No on the Recall" campaign had imagined. True, throughout the weird nine-week campaign, the recall side had always had the edge. But some of the polls over the last week predicted it would be close. Instead, it was a blowout. Tuesday night, campaign aides privately confessed that as the dismal exit polls began to pour in by mid-afternoon, hours before the polls closed at 8 p.m., they had stopped hoping for a win and set their sights on a decent, close loss.
If Davis was shocked, after a 30-year career in politics without losing a single election until now, he hasn't said so. But more than once during the brief campaign season, he would tell a crowd: "Why would anyone want to recall me?"
The energy crisis, the state budget deficit, Davis's relentless fundraising, his kowtowing to big donors such as the prison guards union and Indian gaming, raising state college tuition and the tripling of the car tax -- all those things helped a Republican-hatched recall effort grow into the mass movement of angry voters that forced Davis from office 11 months after he was reelected to his second term. But so, too, the conventional wisdom goes, did Davis's personality.
"He was really unable to connect with people," said State Sen. Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica on Tuesday night at Davis election headquarters here at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. She added what became the Democrats' mantra Wednesday: "This was not about the Democratic Party, after all, this was about one man."
Davis, 60, a career politician who had no children, no dogs, no cats, no notable hobbies and no lovable eccentricities to endear himself to constituents, apparently has no friends in Sacramento, either, from the looks of things. At the Biltmore Tuesday night, the A-list Democrats who always show up at their campaign headquarters during important elections were notably absent. There was no Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi, no Jerry Brown -- his old boss -- or Willie Brown, no state Democratic leaders, no marquee political names at all.
California's Democratic Party Chairman, Art Torres, gamely showed up. So did Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez (and whom Davis, in one of his last-ditch attempts at courting the liberal base of the party he had all but abandoned, appointed to the University of California Board of Regents). But among elected officials, only a few local legislators, who blended into the much larger group of television reporters, male and female, in dark power suits, spent the few glum hours before Davis's 10 p.m. concession speech waiting for the inevitable.
The funereal scene at the Biltmore -- where John F. Kennedy gave his acceptance speech after winning the Democratic nomination in 1960 -- was largely peopled by weeping, angry campaign workers. Several broke down utterly during Davis's speech, especially when he said he had warned his wife and mother "that this is a no-crying zone on this stage. They can cry later."
In Sacramento Wednesday, Davis's close-knit staff cried, too, Maviglio said. Of his 2,700 appointees, 1,100 of them are at-will employees -- hired at the pleasure of the governor, and sure to be fired by the new one so he can have his own at-pleasure staff. Maviglio, one of 192 members of Davis's personal staff who will be out of work in a month, said he and the others remained loyal and proud.
"I can tell you that everyone who's worked for the governor is honored and proud of what he's been able to accomplish," Maviglio said. "They can't recall the governor's achievements on many fronts -- education, the environment, health care. It's sort of -- what's the word? -- ironic, that he gets defeated for this."
At the Biltmore, Davis made sure to outline his proudest moments as well. "We have focused on the schools, achievement scores are up five years in a row," he said. "We have 300,000 more scholarships a year for deserving students. . . . We've provided health care for 1 million children who didn't have it when I became governor, and I'm proud to have signed legislation that will extend health care to working Californians, 1 million of them, starting in 2006."
Maviglio said that "despite a few extremists in the recall camp who said they want nothing done," the state constitution and Davis's own ethics demanded that he try to tackle a large number of tasks and projects in the next few weeks.
"We're going to have to prepare a transition that usually takes two and a half months and do it in a few weeks," he said. "We have a lot of parole requests to look at, for example."
Davis's press office had a habit of faxing half a dozen or more news releases to reporters every day. Wednesday, it seemed sure that there would be more, if not many more, from the governor to come. |
