Davis Charts a Democratic yet Centrist Course

Last March, when Gray Davis was a last-place longshot to win the governor’s office, he gathered his strategists to consider how to symbolically launch the campaign in a way that would define his candidacy.

Davis wanted to emphasize two issues--better schools and better race relations. So at an urban, ethnically mixed elementary school in San Francisco one morning, he stood before a giggling group of excited children.

“What kind of governor would I be?” Davis said to the adults gathered there. “Simply put, I would be very responsible with your tax dollars, passionate about education, committed to the environment, strongly pro-choice and death on violent crime.”

Having now completed his first week in office, Davis has come a long way from those early days as an underdog. But after presenting two major speeches and his first budget, he is still preaching the same message.

His inaugural address last week included a word for word repeat of the platform he outlined at the San Francisco school.

Davis also presented a status-quo budget--although it included a new education reform plan. He appointed two leading environmentalists to his Cabinet. And although he rejected 134 leftover appointees of former Gov. Pete Wilson--Davis retained many of the Republican selections for criminal justice positions.

“I think he is off to a good start and he is also off to the start he always said he would be off to,” said state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles). “There are some who think he should move faster. I am not one of those. I think he is keeping his word just as he said he would.”

Davis’ deliberate pace and predictably moderate path reflect the broad political coalition that elected him with 58% of the vote Nov. 4--one of California’s biggest landslide victories.

The coalition stretches from Democratic liberal groups--such as labor and environmentalists--to many of the independent and moderate Republican voters who had previously cast their ballots for Wilson.

Many of those so-called swing voters probably heard many similarities between Wilson and Davis this past week.

Except for race relations and perhaps the environment, the platform Davis outlined last March is substantially similar to Wilson’s policies on crime, abortion, education and the economy. And in his first week as governor, Davis continued to demonstrate a steady transition from a Republican to a Democratic administration.

The only significant policy changes he announced were limited to education, a new overtime pay rule and a law to ban assault weapons--which Wilson vetoed and Davis promised throughout the campaign to approve.

The budget Davis presented Friday was most startling for the fact it barely offered even a modest shift of spending priorities from the last Wilson plan.

With only one reference to his predecessor’s name, Davis said in his State of the State speech last week that he will continue many of Wilson’s programs, such as local grants for youth and teen pregnancy prevention programs, money for police and some of the former governor’s school plans.

The state Assembly’s minority leader, Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside), said he liked much of what he heard in the speech because “many of the reforms he mentioned are Republican reforms.”

The consistency in Davis’ policies has been an important signal to some of the state’s traditionally non-Democratic sectors such as business and agriculture within his broad coalition.

“With few exceptions, the governor’s State of the State address was consistent with chamber policy positions,” said Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce.

At the same time, Davis offered enough to traditional Democratic constituencies that they remain confident of an ally in the governor’s office.

“Everything Gray says is a Rorschach [test] to us in the Democratic Party,” said Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica). “I don’t know that all of us heard the same speech. . . . We tend to mix in our own thinking. I think it was a very Democratic--with a capital D--speech.”

Kuehl noted Davis’ emphasis on abortion rights, his stand against assault weapons, a pay raise for state employees and a law promising overtime after an eight-hour workday.

Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) also said she was heartened by the overall tone of Davis’ comments.

“If you noticed, there were no attacks on anybody,” she said. “I have sat through eight years where welfare recipients and immigrants and people of color and other groups have been blamed. [That] was such a change.”

Now Davis faces the challenge--perhaps one with historic consequences for California--of trying to bring the disparate groups in his coalition to the same table for the first time.

He begins with a new--but cautious--optimism in Sacramento. Everyone knows it is inevitable that there will be disagreements on some contentious issues and Davis will have to choose sides.

He made one such choice last week. With forecasts of a tight budget year, Davis decided not to spend more on education than is legally required.

Many observers had expected that he would exceed the minimum because California remains well below the national average in per-pupil spending, and Davis made expensive promises during his campaign for more books, computers and summer school classes.

But when he faced the choice of cutting the budget or raising taxes to give more money to schools, Davis chose consistency over a dramatic shift in the status quo.

Such caution has left some quiet disappointment among Democrats, officials say. But nothing so far has caused Davis to swerve from his centrist course.

Said Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles): “I think the election was a rejection of extremism--primarily from the right--but it was not an endorsement to move anywhere but the middle.”

Times staff writer Amy Pyle contributed to this report.