He’s Gone Through the Recall Wringer

Oh, the ridicule, the shame.

And that’s just in being a candidate these days for governor of California. Imagine what it must feel like to be an officeholder jilted by the same people who once plied you with votes.

Carl Schwarz knows exactly what it feels like. Forget ridicule and shame. More like shock and dejection.

In 1987, seven years after being the leading vote-getter in a Laguna Beach school board race, Schwarz and two other members were vanquished in a recall.

Their ouster stemmed from a decision in 1986 to let the high school football coach continue without pay after his arrest on cocaine-related charges. Heeding an impassioned plea from the coach’s doctor, the board majority thought letting him keep his job would help in the coach’s court-ordered drug rehabilitation.

Schwarz, the board president and deep into his second term, remembers spending election night at the Laguna Hotel, expecting to be retained. Instead, he lost by 223 votes -- the smallest margin of the three targeted members, but turned out just the same.

“Not only was the handwriting on the wall,” Schwarz, now 66, says of that fateful night, “but the wall has fallen in on you and you’re Humpty Dumpty.”

The vote capped a year when Schwarz’s emotions had hopscotched from denial that constituents would even consider such a thing, to anger and outrage that they were actually rounding up signatures, and finally to a tenacious will to fight back. He laughingly likens his mood to one of Clint Eastwood’s movie characters who said of the opposition, “I’m going to hunt you down.”

Schwarz, who’d won his second term unopposed, characterized the recall’s early days to “feeling like you’re the target of a lynch mob. There’s this mob emotion and psychology that’s not listening to reason.”

But as recall forces galvanized, Schwarz remembers thinking, “This can’t be happening. Why me? I’ve been such a great board member. Out of a thousand votes, I’ve got to get nailed on one?”

Schwarz took on petition-gatherers outside Laguna Beach supermarkets and around town, forcefully arguing his case. He couldn’t believe they were thinking of dumping him after what he thought was seven years of conscientious public service.

Schwarz wonders if Gov. Gray Davis isn’t thinking along those same lines -- that, as one man, he isn’t responsible for all that plagues California these days. A Republican, Schwarz opposes the Davis recall on numerous grounds.

As the reality of defeat sunk in, Schwarz had a curious reaction. Rather than try to get even, he got philosophical. A college political science professor, he describes the immediate post-recall period as one of maturity and emotional growth.

“After a while, when you get elected and have the power of the gavel and then have the power of the vote, you get a certain sense of imperium,” he says. “Maybe even arrogance, that ‘How dare these people question my judgment.’ ”

And although to this day he thinks he made the right decision in giving the coach another chance, Schwarz says, “I could have been much more humble and open to the dialogue and the concerns of people, because they were not vindictive, not bad people. They were just concerned about their kids.”

Schwarz’s recall story has a twist. He plunged back into community affairs and in 1990, three years after his ouster, he ran for school board and won.

And today, nearly 16 years after that night of rejection?

“It’s not fresh in my mind,” he says. “It’s not a thorn in my side. It is not something I linger over or am agonizing about or am in any way angry about.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.