Now Davis Faces His Real Challenger

With the surgical precision of a hired assassin, Gov. Gray Davis crept into the Republican gubernatorial primary and performed a gangland-style execution on the candidacy he believed to be his most potent political threat.

But now that Dick Riordan is sleeping with the political fishes, did Gov. Soprano ensure his own reelection? Or did he leave himself open to a retaliatory hit that could take him out in November?

For a clue, look to the state’s budgetary woes.

During the primary, Davis spent $10 million on attack ads against Riordan, contributing significantly to the former L.A. mayor’s defeat in Tuesday’s GOP primary.

But while California’s political community focused on the problems faced by the front-running Riordan, challenger Bill Simon quietly established himself as a disciplined candidate who may be in a better position to give Davis a serious run in November.

Not that Davis won’t try to head Simon off. He’s already painting Simon as an ideological extremist, citing Simon’s position as a pro-life candidate as proof that he’s outside of the state’s voting mainstream. But so eager is Davis to repeat his 1998 campaign, when he rode the abortion issue into the governor’s office, that he appears not to have noticed the shift in the state’s political landscape over the past four years.

Back then, California was experiencing an economic boom, the state was running record budget surpluses and violent crime had fallen dramatically over the previous eight years. Now, however, the state faces a serious recession, a continuing energy crisis and the largest budget deficit in California history. Because of the extent to which these issues combine to dominate news coverage of state government, it will be much more difficult for Davis to convince voters that abortion is the single issue that should decide their vote.

Setting the agenda will be Simon’s greatest challenge and the key to his election. If this election ends up being about abortion and gay rights, Davis will be reelected. But if Simon can focus the debate on California’s economic recession, energy crisis and record budget shortfalls, then he’ll become the state’s next governor.

This won’t be easy. Davis is an experienced and determined campaigner whose strength is his ability to keep on message. Last year, at the height of the state’s energy crisis, the governor even had to be persuaded to include some references to the prospect of rolling blackouts in his State of the State address when all he wanted to talk about was education.

Between now and the election, Davis must somehow get past the huge obstacle that the state’s budget deficit presents him. One needs only to look back 10 years, when former Gov. Pete Wilson saw his public approval ratings fall to subterranean levels over the months-long delay in adoption of the state budget.

Wilson had two years before he faced reelection, during which California’s economy and his own political prospects rebounded. Davis will have a month or two between the solution of this year’s budget crisis and the final stretch to the November election. If the budget is balanced with a tax increase, that won’t be much time for the voters to forget--or forgive.

Meanwhile, Simon’s task will be to continually remind voters that the state’s economic health--not abortion--is the issue on which they should base their decision.

Throughout his career, Davis has succeeded by making the race about his opponent’s shortcomings: Al Checchi’s money, Dan Lungren’s extremism, Dianne Feinstein’s finances. So his natural instinct will be to frame this campaign around Simon’s position on a single issue on which Davis thinks Simon is vulnerable.

Davis would like nothing better than not to have to face voter anger over California’s triple-threat crises: the state economy, energy and the state budget.

The challenge for Simon is to resist this effort. He must convince both pro-life and pro-choice Californians that Davis’ obsession with abortion--over which the California governor, in any case, has no real control--suggests that Davis is trying to distract voters from a discussion of his failures in office.

Dan Schnur was communications director for former Gov. Pete Wilson and for the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. John McCain. Last summer, he served as an advisor to Riordan’s gubernatorial exploratory committee.