Race Issues Color Views of State Recall Campaign

The callers on the radio talk show were fuming.

Gov. Gray Davis’ decision to allow illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses only rewards the people taking jobs from citizens, a man from Thousand Oaks said. The new law will entice more immigrants, who carry diseases like hepatitis and leprosy, insisted a woman from Irvine.

The angry buzz on a recent episode of KPCC-FM’s “Airtalk” -- a public radio show more commonly known for mild-mannered discussions about current events -- reflected a familiar, sharp-edged tenor.

Race is back.

Nine years after Proposition 187 tapped a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the 2003 recall campaign has pivoted on a series of racially charged issues, from the driver’s license law to a ballot initiative aimed at ending the state’s collection of some racial data.

The result: an electorate bristling with resentment.

Earlier in the month, an organized flood of callers effectively shut down some of the governor’s phone lines for two days with accusations that Davis favors Latinos over whites. One Los Angeles AM radio show urged listeners to physically block the border to keep immigrants out.

“I’m not opposed to Mexicans ... the ones who come here legally,” said Buena Park resident Ray Bright during a follow-up interview to a recent Times Poll. “There’s too many of them here.”

The atmosphere is starkly different from that of the gubernatorial campaign just a year ago, when Davis and GOP nominee Bill Simon Jr. steered clear of issues that touch on race.

This year, a confluence of forces has inflamed the political landscape.

A lackluster economy has boosted anxieties about the cost of immigration and the state’s burgeoning Latino population, symbolized by the candidacy of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who would be the state’s first Latino governor in 128 years. The candidates on the recall ballot, eager to increase turnout, are making both implicit and overt ethnic appeals. And the concentrated nature of the campaign has transformed usually subtle codes into blunt instruments.

“It creates an environment in which people need simple cues to understand what’s going on, and obviously race is a simple one -- and a powerful one,” said Frank Gilliam, director of UCLA’s Center for Communications and Community.

As a result, the 2003 campaign season has exposed sentiments about race in California that are always present, yet often unseen, experts said. Those feelings are not expected to dissipate, even if the election is delayed in court for several months. “You hardly had to scratch the surface on this election to get all this stuff to come flowing out,” Gilliam said.

This year’s election has returned again and again to the same issue that voters tussled over in 1994: the role of immigrants in California.

Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock have pledged to undo the driver’s license law and reiterated their support for Proposition 187, a measure that sought to end health and education benefits for illegal immigrants. McClintock told cheering delegates at the state GOP convention last week that he would work to revive the 1994 initiative, which was largely thrown out by the courts.

Davis and Bustamante, meanwhile, have portrayed themselves as champions of Latinos, seeking to boost turnout among a traditionally Democratic constituency. The governor’s approval of the driver’s license measure -- after two earlier vetoes -- was widely viewed as a bid to win over Latinos. Bustamante has repeatedly backed amnesty for undocumented workers.

The parties’ polar stances have fed a public mood reminiscent of 1994, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson ran television ads with grainy images of immigrants running across the border. “They keep coming,” warned the announcer.

But the rhetoric has changed since Proposition 187, which proved toxic for its Republican backers. Although the initiative drew wide support among voters, it also sparked a backlash among Latinos and powered a massive voter-registration effort, hobbling GOP efforts in the years that followed.

This time around, the prominent candidates have sought to alternately distance themselves from that campaign and invoke it, swapping accusations of prejudice.

Bustamante has said Schwarzenegger’s stances on illegal immigration prove he is “anti-immigrant,” prompting Schwarzenegger’s campaign to accuse the lieutenant governor of engaging in “wedge-issue politics.” At the same time, it had to fend off criticism of the actor’s appointment of Wilson, the most visible backer of Proposition 187, to help run his campaign.

Bustamante has been criticized for his college membership in MEChA, a Latino student group with separatist roots. McClintock, a GOP state senator from Thousand Oaks, compared the organization to the Ku Klux Klan, a charge Latino community leaders called offensive.

Davis triggered bipartisan criticism when he remarked that a governor should be able to pronounce “California” correctly, taking a swipe at Schwarzenegger’s accent. The state Senate condemned his statement and Green Party candidate Peter Camejo called it a “racist comment.” The governor eventually apologized.

But the most searing rhetoric has centered on Davis’ recent approval of the driver’s license law. Immigrant advocates say the legislation would increase road safety; opponents denounce it as political pandering that sanctions the presence of illegal immigrants and thus puts domestic security at risk.

“STOP The Illegals,” blares a Web site for a group of Republicans, backed by McClintock, that hopes to repeal the law. Both Schwarzenegger and McClintock received their most robust applause Saturday at the state Republican convention when they promised to repeal the measure, with a state referendum if necessary.

Barbara Coe, founder of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform and a co-sponsor of Proposition 187, said the reaction to the driver’s license measure is far more intense than the sentiments that propelled the passage of the 1994 initiative.

“People are not only outraged, they are terrified,” she said. Davis, she added, “is very willing to sacrifice the lives of American citizens in exchange for the votes of illegal aliens, criminals, drug smugglers and terrorists.”

Though some of the debate over the driver’s license bill reflects issues of law and order, analysts say the heated response is also indicative of a persistent unease about the state’s shifting demographics. Latinos now make up more than a third of the population, up from a quarter in 1990 and a fifth in 1980.

“It reflects the fissures in California’s politics and California’s society,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a Los Angeles-based group that studies Latino political trends. “We are a society in transition from an old cultural hegemony to a new one.”

Rather than uniting Californians, politicians are furthering a cultural war between conservative whites and the state’s expanding nonwhite communities, said Ward Connerly, a University of California regent.

“There’s a lot of anxiety about these changing demographics, and the more that candidates seek the Latino vote on the basis of them solely being Latinos, the more that anxiety is going to be fueled,” said Connerly, the author of Proposition 54, a ballot initiative that seeks to prevent the state from collecting some types of racial data.

The 2003 campaign, he predicted, “will be the biggest fear election of my lifetime.”

Last week, Connerly himself began running a radio ad in Los Angeles and Sacramento accusing Bustamante of supporting racial separatism -- retribution for the lieutenant governor’s decision to spend nearly $4 million from his campaign chest to defeat Proposition 54.

Race is frequently used to stir voters for one reason, political experts said: It works. In an oft-cited example, a television ad run on behalf of former President George Bush in 1988 featured a black inmate named Willie Horton. It was credited with helping torpedo the candidacy of Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis.

“There are people in the system who manipulate this, and there is a core group of people who will respond to it,” said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, an assistant political science professor at UC Irvine.

And the candidates play to the emotions of fear and pride. Schwarzenegger, an Austrian immigrant, has tried to distance himself from the anti-immigrant reputation that dogged Wilson -- and the Republican Party -- after the 1994 campaign. His aides note that he never brings up illegal immigration unless asked about it. Furthermore, he assiduously courts Latinos.

Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger tapped Wilson and the former governor’s political team to head his campaign, along with the consultant who developed the infamous “They keep coming” ad.

That move sent a strong message. In the Times Poll, half of the likely Latino voters surveyed said they are less inclined to vote for Schwarzenegger because of his association with Wilson -- while fewer than a third of whites felt the same way. At the same time, 29% of conservative Republicans polled said they are more likely to vote for him for that reason.

“It’s a way of saying, ‘I may be an immigrant, but I’m the right kind of immigrant and I won’t be soft on that other kind,’ ” Garcia Bedolla said.

Bustamante has drawn on his biography as the grandson of Mexican immigrants on the campaign trail, peppering his speeches with Spanish and touting his support for immigrants.

“Few groups of people are more exploited, intimidated, used and discarded as immigrants,” he said at a Fresno rally.

Though his ethnicity appeals to some voters, it worries others. A quarter of likely Latino voters in the Times Poll said they are more inclined to vote for Bustamante because he would be the first Latino governor in 128 years.

“He’s going to make history, and I want to be part of that history,” Fresno State student Lucy Covarrubias said at the rally.

But Roberta Crawford, an electronics buyer in Visalia, said Bustamante is focusing on immigrants at the expense of other issues. In a follow-up interview to the poll, the Democrat said that makes her less likely to vote for him. “To me,” Crawford said, “he’s only trying to go after the Mexican population.”

The divide hangs over the contest as it heads into what may be its final weeks -- if the courts permit -- when voters will be battered with a flurry of campaign ads bound to play off these anxieties.

“Race and ethnicity are far more of an issue in this state than people realize,” Connerly said. “California has become very, very fragmented. If we don’t come to terms with that, we’re going to have some problems.”

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Times staff writer Michael Finnegan contributed to this report.