Davis’ Drive Has Been Unswerving

In 1994, Gray Davis faced a major career decision. Fresh off a disastrous U.S. Senate campaign, his choice was to seek a third term as state controller or surrender that safe seat to run for the less powerful post of lieutenant governor.

He chose the latter, saying he wished to be “an ambassador of hope” at a time when California was economically flat on its back. But that was not really his motive.

For years, Davis had plotted his return to the governor’s office, where he had served as Jerry Brown’s chief of staff and, in Brown’s frequent absences, as California’s de facto chief executive.

Through much of 1993, Davis met with strategists and supporters, pondering his future. Some, like his wife, Sharon, saw the lieutenant governor’s position as a step down. As controller, Davis was California’s chief financial officer, a job he turned into a high-profile platform for environmental activism and abortion rights.

But Davis was convinced the lieutenant governor’s post was the best perch from which to reach the next rung, according to several of those involved in the strategy sessions. The office looked better on a resume. Fewer duties meant more time for politics. And winning a new office would be a validation of sorts after he had lost badly to fellow Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the 1992 Senate primary.

The job switch proved a shrewd one. Davis easily won the lieutenant governor’s race and four years later became governor. His title was a big asset, voters told his campaign researchers, conveying a reassuring sense of experience and Sacramento know-how.

The path he followed says much about the way Davis has approached politics and policy during his 25-plus years in public life.

Throughout, he has hewed to a handful of beliefs, including support for the death penalty and gay rights, that have not always been the most politically expedient positions.

As Brown’s top aide, Davis was vital to enacting environmental legislation and opening the ranks of state government to women and minorities. In the Legislature, he championed the cause of missing children, putting their faces on billboards, bus stops and milk cartons. As controller and then lieutenant governor, he fought offshore oil drilling and took on the tobacco industry when other politicians balked. His consistent moderate-to-conservative views predated the national Democratic Party’s own shift away from its traditional liberal moorings.

“He’s one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever known in state government,” said John Plaxco, a former aide. “He knows how to get things done in a way few people do.”

If he wins reelection Nov. 5, Davis will arguably be the most successful Democratic politician California has ever seen, winning three separate offices in five elections--all, so far, by big margins.

And yet, for all that, Davis’ voracious fund-raising, his clinical approach to issues and his constant eye on the next opportunity have created a widely held perception, in the words of one past advisor, that for him principle always falls second to political calculation.

“What motivates him is to win,” said Richard Steffen, who served as Davis’ chief of staff during his two terms in the state Assembly. “To get elected.”

Those who have worked closely with Davis at different times over the past two decades use identical words to describe him. He is a shark, a machine, the Stepford politician, a man who, for all his accomplishments, still rubs many Californians--and even many of his own aides--the wrong way. It was his “agenda” to become governor, former staff members say, not his dream.

Most of the criticism is said privately, a testament to the governor’s power and to fears of retribution. Working for Davis has been a rite of passage for a generation of California Democrats, many still active in state government and politics. Almost unanimously, they share the perception of Davis as someone more interested in self-advancement than substantive achievement.

“When we sat down to talk about his goals for the year, it was never how to make the world a better place,” said one former aide. “It was always, ‘What’s going to get me media attention?’ and ‘What’s going to please interest groups?’ ” important to Davis’ fund-raising. “That was the heart of discussions.”

Davis has long disputed the notion that he cares more about politicking than policymaking. “I enjoy governing,” he said in a campaign-trail interview four years ago, describing the fund-raising-and-chicken-dinner grind as a necessary burden. (Privately, aides go further, saying he detests the glad-handing and political pomp that other candidates find exhilarating.)

As for the ego salve of personal adulation, Davis said in Monday’s debate, “My job is not to win a popularity contest. It’s to lead this state.”

Despite several accusations of impropriety over the years, Davis has denied ever using his office for personal gain and vehemently rejects any connection between the money he raises and his official actions. “I make decisions based on what I think the merits are, and I’ll continue to do that,” Davis said last month as he signed the state budget into law.

Born in New York City, Davis grew up in a Republican household amid relative affluence until his alcoholic father squandered the family’s wealth. To help pay for college, Davis joined the ROTC and eventually spent two years in the Army, serving for almost seven months in the Signal Corps in Vietnam. The experience politicized him, Davis later said, when he saw much of the fighting being done “by people of color and whites who didn’t have college degrees.”

That consciousness of prejudice and privilege has been a constant through Davis’ public life. Steffen remembers his boss citing his elite education at Stanford and Columbia universities and his pledge to work so others had the same doors opened. “His rhetoric today about improving schools is consistent with what he’d said back then,” according to Steffen.

Gay activist David Mixner recalls Davis’ willingness to meet with gay groups during the Brown years, back when it was rare--and risky--for a politician to even utter words like “gay” and “lesbian” in public.

“He was extremely receptive, always returned our calls, and any meeting we requested we immediately got,” said Mixner, who later backed Davis in assorted races. campaigns. “Jerry Brown was the pioneer, and Gray Davis was the one who pushed him very hard on that.”

But even then, Davis showed the pragmatism--timidity, critics call it--that has come to be his political trademark. “If he thought something could get done, he would make the effort,” Mixner said. “If he thought it wasn’t doable, he wouldn’t waste his time. He’d be very direct: ‘It’s not going to happen this session, but here’s what we can do.’ ”

The caution that Davis showed then and now goes to the question of political leadership and, like the problem of the chicken and the egg, poses a riddle with no obvious answer. Is it the role of an elected official to summon people to move in a direction the politician sees fit? Or should leaders implement the people’s will, bowing to the sentiment that helped elect them in the first place?

To the governor’s critics, his baby-step approach is a failing that speaks to a single-minded devotion: to himself and his career advancement. “He never took a risk,” said a former political aide, one of several who cited Davis’ legislation to put missing kids’ faces on milk cartons as just the kind of inoffensive, publicity-grabbing initiative he sought out. “Everything he did was safe. After a while you begin to think maybe it’s just about getting ahead.”

Defenders say that shallow portrait of Davis is facile but misses a larger picture. “People don’t see him trying to solve a problem or grapple with an issue or figure out how to get from here to there on a policy question,” said Stephen Rivers, an entertainment industry consultant and former Davis campaign aide who remains active in Democratic politics.

“Those kind of efforts aren’t played out in public, and he’s not a charismatic sort of figure you see pounding the podium because he believes in this or that issue. So the superficial image focusing on fund-raising is what people focus on.”

Money has long been integral to the success--and occasional missteps--of Davis, who got his start in politics more than 30 years ago as a fund-raiser for Los Angeles mayoral candidate Tom Bradley.

After helping elect Bradley in 1973, Davis made his own run for public office, a failed bid for state treasurer. (Davis assailed the front-runner, Jesse Unruh, for prodigious fund-raising, at one point likening Unruh to a prostitute.)

After Unruh won the June 1974 primary, gubernatorial hopeful Brown tapped Davis as a fund-raiser for the fall campaign. After he was elected, Brown made the 32-year-old Davis his chief of staff.

“It was clear to all of us that ... was not Gray’s last stop,” said Bill Press, who worked under Davis as Brown’s director of planning and research. “He was politically driven ... and it was clear that he saw himself someday sitting in the governor’s office.”

Today, Davis demands utter obedience--and preferably anonymity--from his staff, going so far as to personally edit every press release issued by his administration and its myriad department heads. But as Brown’s top aide he could not have been more different.

He became a fixture on TV and radio, sometimes elbowing the governor aside, to make sure everyone knew it was his idea--not Brown’s--to plant the governor in a modest Plymouth as a symbol of government austerity.

Scrupulous about his image, Davis became known for calling Sacramento correspondents, sometimes repeatedly in one day, to edit and reedit his quotes, including the proper use of punctuation; once he berated a reporter who left him unmentioned in a story by scolding, “My name is not spelled a-i-d-e.”

Davis’ name even showed up on Brown’s reelection bumper stickers, though he later said they just happened to come back that way from the printer.

On a few occasions, however, he was frank about his aspirations, something most politicians try to hide. “I like to say everyone in the district is upwardly mobile, including their representative,” he told an interviewer after just one term in the Assembly, representing Beverly Hills and the Westside. Another time he acknowledged, “You don’t run for state office without some ambition or a healthy ego.”

In that first Assembly contest 20 years ago Davis established a pattern that would serve him well throughout his career, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to scare off a field of Democratic rivals. The tactic worked again four years later, in 1986, when he made his second try at statewide office.

He was sitting on $1 million in donations when state Controller Ken Cory announced his retirement just days before the candidate filing deadline. Thanks to his financial head start--and a bankroll that later swelled to a formidable $5 million--Davis handily won the Democratic primary and cruised to election in November.

Over the next eight years, Davis amply demonstrated his political skills and promotional savvy. The main duties of the controller are paying the state’s bills and keeping track of its books. But Davis turned the job into a soapbox for causes only peripherally related to his responsibilities, like coastal protection and abortion rights; he was a regular on the barricades outside family planning clinics.

Davis also came under criticism twice for allegedly mingling politics and policy. In the first case, he narrowly averted prosecution by reimbursing the state $28,000 for improperly using Assembly staffers and office equipment during his 1986 controller’s campaign. In the second, Davis was embarrassed by reports that he had named political cronies, personal friends and relatives of campaign contributors to highly paid jobs as state probate referees.

Davis denied any wrongdoing, but the charge of mixing fund-raising and favors would continue to haunt him as governor. At $100 million and counting, Davis has probably raised and spent more money than any politician in California history. But he lives modestly--home is a 1,000-square-foot condominium in West Hollywood--which underscores what Davis intimates say: money matters only to the extent it fuels his political ambitions.

It wasn’t campaign cash that cost Davis dearly the one time he strayed from his carefully plotted career path. Facing a reshuffled landscape resulting from term limits and campaign finance changes, he plunged into the ill-fated 1992 race for the U.S. Senate. The low point came in a single, desperate advertisement run near the close of the campaign. The TV spot, likening rival Dianne Feinstein to Leona Helmsley, the New York City hotelier and convicted tax cheat, infuriated women and many of Davis’ Jewish supporters. It took years--and repeated apologies--to live down.

And yet, while Davis has opened himself to charges of opportunism, his record shows a pattern of ideological consistency.

As far back as the Brown administration Davis spoke of slashing regulations and creating a more business-friendly environment, a theme he took up 20 years later in his inaugural address as lieutenant governor.

He supported the death penalty--even when most elected Democrats did not--and broke with many in his party by endorsing a constitutional ban on flag burning and national welfare reform legislation. Somewhere between the New Deal and the new millennium, Democrats got “off the track [and] people expected to be paid because they’re in a certain category,” Davis said in a 1995 interview. He urged his party “to honor work, reward people who work, speak to people who work.”

It was that pitch-perfect tone that helped Davis withstand the Republican wave that swept through California in November 1994. Davis not only hung on to win the lieutenant governor’s office, but also managed to pull more votes--over 4 million--than any other Democrat in America.

Among those who lost that day was Kathleen Brown, California’s Democratic nominee for governor and Jerry Brown’s younger sister. Davis had been prepared to serve another eight years as a Brown understudy before taking his own shot at the governor’s chair, advisors say.

But with her loss--and term limits forcing incumbent Republican Pete Wilson from office--Davis’ timetable was moved up.

In 1998, he was ready with a slogan tweaking his millionaire primary opponents--businessman Al Checchi and South Bay Rep. Jane Harman--and, felicitously, turning his own job-hopping into a virtue: “Experience money can’t buy.”

On election night Davis romped to the Democratic nomination, an intermediate stop on the way to a November landslide over Republican Dan Lungren. As he savored his primary win, the man who had built his success on a foundation of tactical maneuvers and stacks of campaign cash found a moment that transcended any price tag.

“My friends,” Davis told supporters in a glitzy Los Angeles ballroom, “this is truly an experience which money can’t buy.”

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About This Series

This week, The Times began a series of articles on the lives of the two major-party candidates for governor, Democratic incumbent Gray Davis and Republican businessman Bill Simon Jr.

Thursday: Davis’ upbringing and his tour of duty in Vietnam.

Today: His two-decade climb up the political ladder.

Saturday: His first term as governor.

A parallel series of articles on Simon will begin next week. State elections will be held Nov. 5.