QUESTION OF FAIRNESS

Gray Davis is far from popular. But with the recall campaign at its midway point, a substantial portion of Californians -- perhaps enough to save the governor’s career -- appear to have come around to the argument that the effort to oust him violates basic standards of fair play.

“I don’t think someone should be voted out of office because the voters don’t like them any more,” said Barbara Pavey, a Republican from Hollywood. “It’s petulant.”

That, in a nutshell, is what has become the main rationale against the recall: Even if you don’t like Davis, he has done nothing so terrible that it justifies such a drastic act. A recent Los Angeles Times Poll showed that the view had been embraced by roughly half of California’s voters -- mostly by Democrats, but by many independents and a few Republicans too. Davis needs to barely top 50% of the vote on Oct. 7 to stay in office.

“I think the tide is moving in our direction,” Davis said in a recent television interview. “I think people realize that a recall is an extreme reaction, should not be taken except in cases of criminality or in impeachable offenses or gross abuse of office, none of which exist here.”

Other arguments exist, of course. Many opponents of the recall cite specific issues on which they prefer a Democratic governor. Labor unions point to laws protecting workers, conservationists single out environmental laws, civil rights advocates point to measures that aid minorities. Other recall opponents say they flirted with supporting the recall, but decided that none of the candidates to replace Davis promised a clear improvement.

For most, however, the case against the recall rests on an elaboration of Pavey’s objection: The recall is baldly partisan; threatens the civility that allows American democracy to work; has become a “circus” that mocks the electoral process; is inherently undemocratic; and has exposed serious flaws in a nearly century-old law that had never before been put to the test.

The opposition reprises many of the arguments made against the impeachment of President Clinton. “That’s really what a recall is, it’s an impeachment,” said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who helped draft a proposed constitutional amendment that would revise California’s recall statute.

Just as in the Clinton impeachment, the recall campaign has aroused strong feelings and considerable bitterness on both sides. Many critics of the recall point out that the law allows citizens to attempt to recall an elected official for any reason, no matter how petty.

And just as in the impeachment fight, the perceived faults in the recall process have given many Democrats an argument for supporting a leader despite what they see as his fundamental flaws.

For many recall opponents, the vote should not be taken as a referendum on Davis’ record. Many agree with recall backers that Davis bungled California’s electricity crisis, spent the state into a $38-billion budget hole and devoted himself more to fund-raising than to governance. Their point: It doesn’t matter.

The governor broke no laws, and those who want to oust him had their chance last November, when he won reelection over Republican Bill Simon Jr., these recall opponents say.

“We elected him,” said Susan Gerson, 56, an independent in Pleasant Hill, in the San Francisco Bay Area. “It was not that long ago, and if these guys didn’t want him in, they should have done something then.”

Davis himself sketches the recall effort in starkly partisan terms, drawing a line directly from the Clinton impeachment to the current state campaign.

“This recall is bigger than California,” the governor said in a speech at UCLA last month that kicked off his fight for survival. “What’s happening here is part of an ongoing national effort to steal elections Republicans cannot win.”

This effort, Davis said, “started with the impeachment of President Clinton when Republicans could not beat him in 1996. It continued in Florida, where they stopped the vote count, depriving thousands of Americans of the right to vote” after the presidential election in 2000. It has continued, he said, in redistricting fights in Colorado and Texas, and in “this recall to seize control of California just before the next presidential election.”

Republicans and some others criticized Davis for those remarks. But they seem to have struck a chord among many California voters, especially Democrats. In a recent Field poll, more than half the voters who planned to vote against the recall agreed with the statement: “Republicans are engaged in a systematic effort to steal elections from Democratic officeholders.”

“Davis has got a point,” said Roy Jensen, 55, a carpenter and registered Democrat in the Bay Area town of Cupertino. Jensen said Davis was making the same point that Hillary Rodham Clinton, talking about the impeachment, made “about the vast right-wing conspiracy, and I think she was totally right.”

To date, no one in the Davis camp has offered evidence that the recall, engineered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), was planned or executed by the national Republican Party or the White House. But Davis backers say they don’t need proof -- they can connect the dots.

“After all,” said Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), “this is not a court of law. Politics is a dot-connecting business.”

Zack Exley, the organizing director of MoveOn.org, the left-leaning political Web site, said the “smoking gun” is the very lack of apparent action by top Republicans.

“There is no way Darrell Issa would have done this if he’d gotten a hint” that it wasn’t wanted by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay or the Bush administration, Exley said. “So this happened with the approval of the Republican administration, and the White House.”

Exley’s group is among a number of national and state organizations that have leapt to Davis’ defense, saying the recall is more important than the fate of a single governor. So far, 11 anti-recall political committees have registered with the secretary of state, including one for Republicans.

RepublicansAgainstTheRecall.com is opposing the recall for partisan reasons. One of its founders, Scott Barnett, a political consultant from San Diego, said he fears the recall will fracture the Republican Party, lead to the election of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante -- the only prominent Democrat on the ballot to replace Davis if the governor is recalled -- and damage GOP chances in future elections.

“We felt, and continue to feel, that this is a huge gamble for the Republican Party and President Bush’s chances of winning California” in the 2004 presidential election, he said.

That said, Barnett returned to what, for many recall opponents, is a second major point against the recall: that it would be a dangerous precedent that would undermine something valuable in the American political system.

“The most important reason we are opposing this is that this is bad for California and bad for politics,” Barnett said. “As much as we dislike Gray Davis, this will open the doors for politics of mass destruction. And it will set a trend for this nation.... It will become acceptable to recall a governor for political reasons.”

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein voices a variation on that theme -- that the recall is inherently destabilizing at a time when the state needs all the stability it can get.

“This is a time when our attention should be focused on working in a bipartisan manner to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, to fix our public schools, to increase public safety, and to restore California’s economy,” Feinstein said in a statement issued last month. “Sadly, the state is instead going to be engaged in an election that is becoming more and more like a carnival every day.”

This last point expresses the “circus” argument against the recall -- that the presence of 135 candidates on the ballot, many of them with little or no political experience, demeans the process and makes California a national laughingstock. It also, critics say, has created a ballot so long that it is guaranteed to confound some voters.

Davis’ campaign has sought to exploit that concern, running a television advertisement that says of the recall: “Newspapers are calling it a circus. ‘Millionaires, local gadflies, political mavericks, even a porn king.’ All running for governor -- because someone could win with as little as 15% of the vote.”

So far, however, polls suggest that those concerns are more troubling to politicians than to voters, even voters who agree that the likes of porn star Mary Carey and former child star Gary Coleman are probably not up to the task of running the nation’s most populous state.

One of the stickier objections to the recall is the assertion that it is undemocratic. Supporters of the recall hail it as an experiment in democracy. Opponents counter that Davis was democratically elected and should be allowed to serve out his term.

“This is just not how we choose our elected officials in America,” Exley argued. “There are a lot of tactics that could be used in government that would be legal, but which are not used. Because one thing about how our democratic system works is, it requires some restraint and some level of civility, and this is totally stepping outside of that.

“Another reason is that we’re going to get -- if the recall succeeds -- we’re going to get a governor who’s been elected by a tiny, tiny minority of the electorate. And so he or she will replace a governor who was elected by a majority of the electorate.”

In reality, Davis did not win a majority in his last election. He received 47% of the vote. Turnout for that election was little more than half of the state’s registered voters. The likelihood is, however, that whoever wins the replacement ballot on Oct. 7 will have an even smaller percentage of overall support.

The complaints about the recall have led some to charge that the 1911 amendment to the California Constitution that authorizes recalls is either outmoded or inherently flawed.

Those concerns prompted Ridley-Thomas and two other legislators to propose a constitutional amendment that would revise the recall.

The proposed amendment would effectively raise the number of signatures needed to get a recall on the ballot and would make the lieutenant governor the successor to a recalled governor, thereby eliminating the replacement election that has been so ballyhooed.

The proposal “has been dubbed the Anti-Circus Act of 2003,” said Ridley-Thomas. “We are saying that a century-old process needs review. And it has been tested in the current set of circumstances and proven problematic.”

His measure would change the number of signatures needed to get a recall on the ballot from the current requirement -- 12% of the voters who participated in the last election -- to 12% of registered voters. In the last election, Ridley-Thomas’ proposal, had it been in effect, would have doubled the number of signatures needed. The idea is simply to make it more difficult for a recall election to qualify in an era of professional signature-gatherers, he said.

As for the change in succession, Chemerinsky, the USC professor who helped Ridley-Thomas draft the proposal, said it seems more fitting to pass power to the lieutenant governor, just as an impeached and convicted president would relinquish power to his vice president. “The lieutenant governor doesn’t do a whole lot in our state,” he said. “We have a lieutenant governor precisely for the reason of succession.”

One thing the proposed amendment wouldn’t do is change the criteria for recalling a governor -- a change some critics have called for. Chemerinsky said the drafters of the proposed amendment considered more specific language, but eventually gave up.

“It’s very difficult to formulate those criteria in a way in which they would be a meaningful constraint on the recall process,” he said. “You know, look at the United States Constitution. It says treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors” are criteria for impeachment.

“What are high crimes and misdemeanors?” he asked. “It didn’t keep the House of Representatives from impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about sex with an intern.”

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Times staff writer Joel Rubin contributed to this report.