California's Bad Karma

Politics in California has become a dismal proposition. The state is so large that most politicians have given up on the standard ceremonies of the stump. There is little human contact, few town meetings or door-to-door work; there are simply too many doors. The prevailing wisdom among consultants is that you run in California by raising a lot of money and putting it all on television. The public has reacted to these soulless exercises with disdainful apathy; Californians tend to be more interested when the state's nutty kernel of political extremists put some hot-button initiative--about race, immigration or taxes, inevitably--on the ballot. Indeed, there is a weird karmic genius to the current electoral gimmick, the movement to recall Governor Gray Davis from office. It has turned politics itself into a ballot issue--with Davis in the dock, representing a system run aground.

The standing joke about Davis is that his personality reflects his name, but Gray is darker than that. He is, in fact, an exemplar of all that is awful about latter-day California politics. He is not incompetent, but he has governed without much creativity through a succession of crises--the rolling electricity blackouts of 2001 and the subsequent high-tech economic implosion. His greatest political skill seems to be an uncanny ability to raise money. He has used this cash to buy television ads, most of them quite vicious.

In his 2002 re-election campaign, for example, Davis violated one of the few rules of postmodern politics. Instead of staying out of the opposing party's primary, he invaded it by spending an estimated $10 million on ads denigrating the more moderate--and therefore more threatening--candidate, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, who eventually lost to an inexperienced conservative, William Simon. "The general election was the nastiest ever," says Dan Shnur, a Republican political consultant. "More money was spent and a smaller percentage of people voted than in any gubernatorial election in state history."

After his narrow victory, Davis promptly announced an astonishing state budget deficit of $38 billion. This wasn't entirely his fault--the recession had caused capital-gains tax receipts to plummet from $17 billion to $4 billion--but Davis had not been honest about the looming disaster during the campaign, and instant karma got him in the form of Darrell Issa, a millionaire paleo-conservative Congressman who bankrolled the successful recall petition drive.