Gray Davis Quietly Rises as Other Political Stars Fizzle

The focus group had reconvened not long after Election Day--the day that Gray Davis pulled more votes than any other Democrat in America, more than Mario Cuomo and Ted Kennedy combined.

And one man in the group whose vote was among those 4 million tried to remember why.

“I voted for this Davis,” he allowed at last, “because I can’t remember anything he did in his years in public office that really made me mad.”

The newly minted lieutenant governor of California repeats that remark with something between abashment and pride: In a state where political super novas--most recently Kathleen Brown--have been known to dazzle and then explode, the star candlepower of Gray Davis has been shaded but steady.

A guy who doesn’t make people mad is a guy who survives, who gets elected. Over and over.

In two decades, Davis has advanced from Tom Bradley’s mayoral campaign and Gov. Jerry Brown’s chief of staff to the Assembly and the state controller’s job, and now--after a couple of failed statewide campaigns for treasurer and Senate--the lieutenant governorship.

And today, with Pete Wilson off on a European vacation, Gray Davis, 52, is the acting governor of California.

Been there, done that. When Jerry Brown was slogging the presidential trail, Davis was all but acting governor. Sacramento hands gleefully recall the slapstick episode when Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Curb raced to the Capitol in excess of the speed limit to appoint a judge before Brown returned to California airspace. Davis promises no such surprises.

“I don’t believe in what I’ve termed Pearl Harbor politics,” he says.

Yet Gray Davis may be the only man keeping Pete Wilson from packing his suit bag for a national campaign. On a Sunday interview show not long ago, Wilson was asked whether his Democrat second-in-command made him reluctant to run for President.

As Davis watched, Wilson thought and said, “No, I’m not too concerned about it. He doesn’t have too much to do.” Davis turned to his wife, Sharon, and said, “That is a big mistake. He should give me a lot to do rather than let me sit around and plot and scheme.”

In the month before Davis took the oath of office, he had already harvested more headlines than his predecessor--remember his predecessor?--had in four years, because he didn’t literally take office. In one of those Medici moments that generate frantic courtier gossip, Wilson booted Davis out of the Capitol building where a lieutenant governor has been in residence since Reconstruction. Wilson needs the space, his people said.

So Davis is moving out of the 3,950 maroon-carpeted square feet of the first-floor lieutenant governor’s office, across the hall from Wilson’s suite of offices.

Some handicappers say it’s a gratuitous move on Wilson’s part. Davis shrugs it off as political architecture.

“They don’t want me kind of poking around, because I can probably just sense, seeing who walks in the governor’s office, what’s going on. . . .,” he said. “But the reverse is true--you come to see me, they see whoever walks in my door.”

Is he a man who bears watching? The looks he gets from Republicans on the first floor these days say, “Is that guy still around? Didn’t we beat you somewhere along the line?”

Last fall, the GOP was so busy taking out after Jerry Brown’s sister that they all but ignored his ex-chief of staff, the guy who 20 years ago ordered up the fussy-blue Plymouth out of the state fleet, creating in an instant the symbol of Brown’s “era of limits.”

So it was that on Nov. 8, Gray Davis--Stanford ‘64, Bronze Star in Vietnam, near-scratch golfer, the guy with the distinctively weird, wheat-in-a-high-wind hairstyle now gone gray--ended up practically flying under radar to become the 4-million-vote Democratic standout in a Republican tsunami.

The corpse of Election ’94 is still warm but that doesn’t stop the gossip. In four years’ time, against some strong comers, could the tenacious Gray Davis--who shares with Pete Wilson a short, bland-sounding name and a want of charisma--become the first white male the Democrats have fielded for governor since . . . Jerry Brown?

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He ran for this job to become “Al Gore West” to Kathleen Brown’s Bill Clinton--Clinton, whose picture adorns a side table in this office he is leaving, and whose “new Democrat” policies Davis embraces.

In both his inaugural address and his response to Wilson’s “State of the State” message, Davis has been sounding conciliatory, almost Republican, in his talk about public safety, regulatory streamlining, economic development, welfare reform--and he is not apologetic.

“My wife ran a four-person public affairs firm. She gave four people the chance to make a living, worked her tail off, never made a penny herself, deluged by forms, fees, all the nonsense. It became abundantly clear to me that government in the broadest sense of the word is not really rooting for small business to succeed. They’re still in a time warp, believing somehow we’re still in the 1960s and ‘70s where we can beat up and be hostile to business and there’s no consequence--but there is consequence.”

“Government is business’ partner, whether they realize it or not, and we will do better if business is better.”

Indeed, he’s volunteered to Wilson to lead the effort “to streamline the regulatory process,” but “when you talk about paring back the (environmental) standards, that’s where I get off the train.”

As UC regent and state college trustee, he aims to “marry up the research and intellectual capital of our universities with our business needs.”

None of that makes him one whit less a good Democrat, he says: Somewhere between FDR and now, “we’ve gotten off the track, (and) people expect to be paid because they’re in a certain category. I think if the Democrats honor work, reward people who work, speak to people to work . . . they can become the majority party.”

From his talk-show studios in Oakland, Jerry Brown regularly faults most Democrats for having not a dime’s worth of difference from Republicans because, he says, they’re all bought and paid for by the same corporate dimes.

“I don’t say this personally about Gray. It’s true about Clinton, true about Democrats in general. You can’t take Gray out of the overall crisis in the Democratic Party. . . . There’s no real distinction between the money going to Davis and the money going to Wilson.”

Davis is “not gonna do anything to hurt Pete Wilson. He’s gonna be quiet as a church mouse. People say Pete Wilson would never be allowed to turn (California) over to a Democrat--wrong. They want the White House, and they’d be glad to exchange Gray Davis in Sacramento for Pete Wilson in the White House.”

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For all his endurance--a political tortoise in a field of hares--Gray Davis has never been the most popular figure in the Democratic Party. He is a ferocious fund-raiser, a man with a long memory and a sometimes short temper. He smiles as he quotes former Sen. Alan Cranston: “ ‘I only have one skill--I can pick weak opponents.’ ”

Says one ranking Democrat, “Gray will never inspire the kind of passion Kathleen Brown did, but he gets everybody’s respect and support by the fact that he is so diligent and persistent, and he can raise money, and he’s always there.”

Richard Steffen, who worked as Davis’ Assembly chief of staff, evaluates his success:

“He pushes the envelope. He gets the maximum amount of coverage by the media in anything he does,” like the “deadbeat dad” issue.

Knowing he is not the heartthrob of the party, Davis several times may preface a remark with “You may not believe this” or “I know this is not credible,” as when he talks about feeling “less yearning and grasping” than he was as a younger man:

“I know this is not credible. I’ll just say it directly: If I have four good years and felt a couple of things I talked about came to pass, I would be delighted and prepared to say that was a nice career. If something else happens (‘something else’ here meaning the governorship), that’s fine, but I couldn’t have said that to you 20 years ago. I probably couldn’t say that eight years ago. It’s the process of getting older and hopefully a little wiser.”