"That vas then, this is now"

Republican morality and electoral politics

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

10/6/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/recallV.htm

I have a feeling that despite the fact that the polls close on the California recall election in about 48 hours, this won’t be the last essay I write regarding it.

For one thing, the vote is going to be close, if the polls mean anything at all. Knight-Ridder did a poll which concluded Saturday, and AP reported that voter sentiment was in favor of recalling Davis by a 54-41 margin. That might sound like it’s not very close, but consider this statement from a few paragraphs down from the lead:

"The percentage of people saying they would definitely vote to oust Davis, however, declined each day the poll was conducted, from 52 percent Wednesday to 44 percent Saturday. Those saying they either were probably going to vote for the recall or were unsure how to vote increased from 10 percent Wednesday to 24 percent Saturday."

The report on the poll didn’t break down how the shift was being reflected among the candidates, but I’m guess that a lot of the softening of support for recall comes directly from the hits Arnie has been taking over the past three days.

Five days ago, Gallup came out with a highly dubious poll showing public sentiment for recall had suddenly jumped to 63%. That was nine points higher than the most lyrically optimistic GOP poll, so most people paying attention dismissed it.

But it also noted Arnie jumping ahead of Bustamante, and that part wasn’t so easy to dismiss. Bustamante did an excellent job of self-destructing with his use of a campaign loophole that allowed him to take $3.1 million in uncapped donations by declaring them to be a part of his 2002 campaign. This struck people as a sort of a sleazy, lawyerish way of circumventing campaign law, probably because it was a sleazy, lawyerish way of circumventing campaign law. His support plummeted among Democrats, most of whom are sick to death of the "bribe my ass" nature of campaign financing. Bustamante sealed his fate by grandly announcing that he would return the money or put it to use fighting Prop 54. (54 is the Ward Connerly initiative to remove records showing systematic racism, so that like the people who claim no black churches in the south were subject to racist attacks in the 50s, people can say there is no racism because no documentation exists.) It turned out he returned only $71,000, a tiny drop in the bucket.

Lack of support for Bustamante didn’t translate to lack of support for recall, since the GOP had been trying to paint Bustamante as just a continuation of Davis. If anything, Bustamante’s drop in the polls probably meant more support for recall.

So the massive drop in support for recall seen over the past few days almost certainly has to do with the hits Arnie is taking. First, there is the sexual harassment thing. As of 2pm Sunday, a total of 15 women had come out and reported that at one time or another, Arnie had harassed them. Some were more recent than others, some more serious than others. Taken together, they revealed a pattern of contempt for women, an impression not alleviated by Arnie’s veiled reference to finding a role for Arianna Huffington in his next "Terminator" movie, which most people interpreted as a desire to stick Huffington’s head in a toilet. Arnie didn’t do well in the one debate he dared show up for, and spend most of it bickering with Huffington, a state of affairs that one late night TV host described as "sounding like a marital spat between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Colonel Klink."

Arnie tried to have it both ways, simultaneously disputing the reports while at the same time apologizing to the victims and women in general.

The "admiration for Hitler" thing strikes me as a last minute hit piece, campaign dirty tricks. Unlike his usually waffling answers that Arnie gives when challenged, he was direct and unequivocal in his denunciation , telling Peter Jennings, "Many of those things are not true. Like, for instance, I despise anything and everything that Hitler stands for." Then, too, outside of the one unsupported claim for the 1997 statement that expressed admiration for Hitler’s oratorical skills (which, by itself, seems fairly innocuous), there’s nothing else on the record that suggests Arnie ever had anything good to say about Hitler.

So, while I don’t want to see Arnie become governor, I don’t believe the Hitler story, and suggest everyone else not to use it, since it seems the sort of tactic we expect from the Republicans.

Speaking of which, they are promoting an old op-ed piece written in 1996 that suggests that Davis has a temper, tosses ashtrays, shouts and cusses, and so forth. Like the Arnie hit piece, it only has one source, and isn’t backed up anywhere else.

Another reason why support for the recall may be shifting is that the Democrats are bringing out all their big guns to campaign against the recall. Among others making statewide ads against the recall this weekend are Diane Feinstein, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barbra Streisand, and "the other President," Martin Sheen.

Finally, there are the legitimate, and genuinely disturbing, reports about Arnie. His campaign has pretty much consisted on nothing more than an insistence that he can "put California right if people only give me the chance," a claim unbacked by any of his plans.

There are the people surrounding him. Pete Wilson was bad enough, but Quackenbush’s staff? What are they going to teach him? How to rip off taxpayers? Eight million Republicans in California, and Arnie picked the least popular one, and several associated with the biggest crook in state government history, to act as his guides and mentors. That’s disturbing. Couldn’t he find anyone decent?

Then there are the meetings with Ken Lay and others who were involved in the rape of California. It’s a topic Arnie has been conspicuously silent about, even as he rants about the state deficit, much of which was caused by Enron, Radiant, and the others. Why can’t he speak out against the people who ripped off California for billions?

Strangest of all are the voters supporting Arnie.

Many are the same who whined for the past 11 years about Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes, real and imagined. But now, a new rule seems to apply: