Calm at the Eye of the Storm

Gov. Gray Davis sat in his campaign office in West Los Angeles, reading scribbled updates from aides and phoning supporters.

A few hours earlier, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the San Francisco Democrat, had ruled out a run in the recall election, inspiring enormous relief in the Davis camp. Then, as rumors circulated that a pair of Democrats were poised to put their names on the Oct. 7 special election ballot, a political bombshell struck: Arnold Schwarzenegger was launching a Republican candidacy.

“He was surprised, but he’s a seasoned enough professional that he just doesn’t ride the roller coaster on these things,” said Davis campaign manager Larry Grisolano, one of those with the governor at the Pico Boulevard office on Wednesday evening.

“In politics, you learn to expect unusual things to come your way, and he rolls with them.”

After a dizzying week, the 60-year-old Davis confronts an uphill struggle that seems to rival, if not surpass, his improbable 1998 feat when he came from last place to win the Democratic nomination for governor and then the election.

By all accounts in the Davis camp, the governor has taken the surprising news of Schwarzenegger’s entry into the race, and the less surprising Democratic candidacies of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, in typical Davis style: calm, dispassionate, disciplined and focused on what he needs to do to defeat the recall effort.

A few weeks ago, as the recall campaign gained momentum and talks over a state budget remained deadlocked, “he was a little down,” said David Doak, a longtime Davis campaign advisor. “He’s pretty steady, but you could tell.”

Now, though, “I think his mood is better since he has sort of confronted this thing and said, ‘Let’s go get ‘em,’ ” Doak added. “This guy is not a quitter. He may not always look it or act like he’s tough, but internally he’s tough.”

In a conversation with at least one aide, Davis told a joke that drew comparisons of his seemingly hopeless political plight with that of Democratic President Harry Truman, whose defeat was widely -- and erroneously -- predicted heading into the 1948 election against Republican Thomas Dewey.

In the two days since the Schwarzenegger news broke, Davis has held political discussions by telephone with former President Clinton. Recently, the two have been talking three or four times a week, aides said. They met for about 40 minutes in Chicago on Monday, where Davis sought and received commitments of financial and logistical support from the AFL-CIO.

Schwarzenegger’s bombshell and Bustamante’s decision to get in the race whipped the news media into a frenzy on Wednesday. But the response was more measured inside the suites of the Davis headquarters, aides said.

In white shirt and tie, Davis spent several hours cloistered in his office there, calling state senators, advisors and supporters and meeting with Grisolano and others. Davis tried but failed to reach Senate President Pro Tem John L. Burton (D-San Francisco), a frequent Davis critic.

Art Pulaski, leader of the California Labor Federation, talked briefly with Davis and found him as calm “as he always is.”

“He was like, OK, new reality,” said Steve Smith, who is directing the Davis campaign.

While Davis was phoning around the state, Smith and other campaign officials were calling and fielding calls from supporters in the labor movement, environmental groups, women’s organizations and other groups.

Occasionally, Smith and others would slip Davis notes, letting him know the latest news and rumors they were hearing about other Democrats getting in the race, he said.

“At one point we were all using our cell phones because the incoming calls were just burying our phone system,” Smith said.

Davis left sometime after 9 p.m. His campaign staff worked the phones, plotted strategy and prepared talking points for Thursday media appearances by supporters until around midnight, said Peter Ragone, communications director for the Davis campaign.

Before leaving the office, Ragone -- who handled press relations during Andrew Cuomo’s failed gubernatorial campaign in New York and Al Gore’s Florida recount effort -- called his wife in San Francisco and summed up the day.

“I’ve had a lot of extraordinary days in politics. This one might have been the most extraordinary of all,” he recalled saying.

While the media frenzy continued in Los Angeles, Davis aides met in the early evening with about 50 administration officials, including resources secretary Mary Nichols and appointments secretary Michael Yamaki, at the California Nurses Assn. offices in Sacramento to bolster morale and answer questions.

“It was pretty sober, but with bursts of feistiness,” said Davis spokesman Steven Maviglio, who attended the meeting. “People were still in shock over Arnold’s announcement. There were shouts and yells like, ‘We’re going to fight this.’ People who worked for this guy for five years are beside themselves that all their hard work could be reversed because the governor made some difficult decisions that made him unpopular.”

While throngs of television cameras and screaming fans converged on Schwarzenegger’s Thursday appearance at the Norwalk offices of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, where he took out papers for his candidacy, Davis attended the memorial service for slain Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Stephen Sorensen in Lancaster, answered questions from reporters and addressed the California School Employees Assn.’s annual conference in Anaheim.

Back at headquarters, Doak set the day’s tone during the senior campaign staff’s morning strategy call: “We’re going to beat this thing,” he growled.

Much of Thursday’s campaign analysis focused on how the changed set of candidates would affect voter turnout, a crucial element for Davis, who must push the “yes” vote for a recall below 50% to keep his office, campaign advisors said.

As Schwarzenegger kept up his media blitz on morning TV talk shows Friday, Davis spent much of the day on the phone, seeking campaign donations and discussing health and environmental issues with his Sacramento advisors.

On Friday night, Davis talked about his mood in a taped interview on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

“It’s not a lot of fun,” he said of the effort to recall him from office. “But I try not to let negative emotions consume me, because I am privileged to be the governor.”

For all the talk of Davis’ impending political demise, there was no sense of panic in the governor’s inner circle.

“People’s moods run the gamut,” Doak said.

“I think people who are maybe closer to the stuff every day, it goes up and down. I’ve always been confident we’re going to win. You get a lot of these campaigns where you don’t see any way where you can get where you want to go. This one, you look at it and there’s some things out there you can say that move people.”

No one was suggesting that Davis would easily escape his predicament, but the campaign’s message in public and private was that, even with other Democrats on the ballot, Davis could achieve the 50% “no” vote he needs to defeat the recall.

To Davis strategists, Schwarzenegger is a less potent threat than Feinstein or former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who took his name out of contention Thursday.

They also propose that the more crowded the candidate field gets, the better Davis looks as a rational choice.

“Gray’s been written off and underestimated his entire political career,” said Garry South, the governor’s longtime campaign strategist.

“He has persevered through lots of adversity. I think he has a very good chance of beating this recall, which happens to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. He is a very tough competitor and he doesn’t give up.”