Politics in the public interest

One of life’s many head-shaking ironies is that few things have quite so many unintended consequences as a good intention.

So, too, in politics, where reform -- the collective expression of a good intention -- often goes awry and, even more frequently, pushes the system in directions nobody could have foreseen. That subtext has made California’s first gubernatorial recall not only a fascinating and entertaining political drama, but also an unexpected laboratory in which the interplay between contemporary electoral politics and modern media can be examined anew.

Start with the reform that set this whole affair in motion:

Nearly a century ago, when Hiram Johnson and the other large-P Progressives fought for adoption of the initiative and the recall, their clear intention was that the latter be used against corrupt state officials, particularly those who were under the influence of the then-all-powerful railroads. The Progressives, moreover, had a fastidious horror of partisan politics and a prim faith in the efficacy of managerial government, which they believed was best left in the steady hands of native-born white Protestant men.

They would have been appalled to see their treasured reform appropriated by a single wealthy partisan and used against a governor who is accused not of corruption, but of policies and managerial decisions that the opposing party dislikes.

Let’s face it: Gray Davis may be recalled not because a popular movement waged a grass-roots campaign against him, but because a single wealthy Republican congressman, Darrell Issa, shelled out nearly $2 million of his own money to force an election on the question.

Imagine further the Progressives’ dismay were they to find that the current front-runners to replace the governor who may be recalled are a pro-labor, pro-Indian Latino pol and an Austrian immigrant.

History, however, is full of big, fat so-whats -- and this is one of them.

No matter how far this recall may stray from the Progressives’ original intent, it is producing precisely the kind of election contemporary political reformers dream of -- one in which overwhelming public interest produces saturation media coverage and, thereby, reduces the need to raise vast sums of campaign money from wealthy donors in pursuit of influence.

The turnout for California’s last general election was the lowest in history and, according to the Los Angeles Times Poll, fewer than 1 in 4 people said they followed the campaign closely. Since the recall was certified for the ballot, survey after survey has reported unprecedented levels of public interest in the race. In some studies, fully 99% of the respondents claim they are following newspaper and television reports on the campaign “very closely.”

“Even if some of that is statistical fudge,” said veteran Republican strategist and pollster Arnold Steinberg, “nobody who’s conscious can deny that, if you go into a barbershop, this is what people are talking about. Everywhere you go, it’s all recall, all the time. I don’t recall a political story in my lifetime that has had legs this strong on a daily basis.”

Said CNN political analyst William Schneider: “This is pure populism. People in California like it and they don’t care if the Eastern elites think it’s a chaotic circus.”

That interest has spurred an equally unprecedented level of what journalists like to call “coverage” and what political technologists call “free media.”

Tuesday, Robert Stern, the state’s leading campaign finance expert told The Times’ Dan Morain and Joel Rubin that because of all that coverage -- or free media -- his Center for Governmental Studies now believes total campaign spending on the recall will fall short of the $100 million projected only a few weeks ago. Because of the attention the media is paying to the race, Stern said, there is less need to spend the approximately $2 million a week it costs to blanket the state with a major advertising campaign.

According to Stern, “this is what reformers want: more free media, more interest and more discussion of an election.”

The extraordinary brevity of the campaign -- a little more than a month remains before election day -- and the peculiar nature of this recall also have so far combined to eliminate something else the reformers loathe: negative advertising.

Many students of American politics argue that the ubiquity of campaign advertising whose only purpose is to attack an opposing candidate is one of the things pushing down voter turnout in elections at every level across the country.

Negative advertising, however, usually takes a fair amount of time to put together. The campaign has to hire a staff to do it, then ads have to be written, produced and aired.

Alternatively, the news media has to have time to do serious investigative reporting, which then may be quoted in attack ads. This campaign is playing out at fast-forward and, so far, there hasn’t been time for either of these things to occur.

“The best way to do that kind of advertising,” said Steinberg, “is for the campaign to do the negative research itself and then go to friendly reporters and leak it to them. Once their stories appear, you can quote them in your ads. So far, we haven’t seen any of that in this campaign. The second way to go negative is to wait for the media to do honest-to-goodness investigative reporting and then quote it. So far, we haven’t seen that because time is short and the news media’s resources have been spread thin by the sheer number of candidates.”

Hard-edged investigative reporting may yet play a significant role in this campaign. If it doesn’t, “that would be a bad thing,” said CNN’s Schneider, “because the people may elect a governor they actually know nothing about. Keeping that from happening is one of most important roles the press plays in our democracy.”

In the meantime, he said, “what we’re seeing may not be what the Progressive reformers intended, but it is democracy on the people’s own terms, even if it looks like ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’ ”