Total Recall: Against Davis or for Republicans?

Gray Davis may never be able to make Sally Field’s fabled Oscar speech (“ ... I can’t deny the fact that you like me, you like me!”).

But he was elected governor twice, once by a 20-point margin and more recently by a mere five. Even so, as California flounders in a budget sump like a saber-toothed tiger in the La Brea Tar Pits, there are campaigns being mounted to recall Davis (didn’t we just have an election three months ago where everyone got a chance to kick him out?).

Shawn Steel is the Republicans’ state party chairman, and he sent out an e-mail asking fellow partiers to support a motion by his wife, Michelle, , that the GOP join the recall movement as a “once-in-a-century opportunity to remove [a] sadly flawed Governor.”

A recall, Steel pointed out, would teach “the arrogant Sacramento politicians that citizens are still the ultimate decision makers” and, on message to his riven state party, “as an added bonus, we might try to shoot our guns outside the circle instead [of] at each other.”

More to the GOP’s advantage, Steel says a recall movement would be a “natural unifier” for Republicans, and by putting Davis on the defensive, would “make California a more attractive territory for the 2004 election.”

(Davis is a safer target for Steel; when Steel recently threatened to try to recall any Republican legislator who voted to raise taxes to close the budget hole, his own party’s board of directors voted to censure him.)

And Howard Kaloogian, a Republican former assemblyman, has crafted a Web site, www.RecallGrayDavis.com, whose stated purpose is to enlist volunteers and to get enough registered voters’ signatures for a special recall election -- nearly 900,000. It appeals to “friends across the nation” and solicits “contributions to finance the recall effort.”

When it comes to the staff of political life, money, the California GOP has limped along behind the Democrats.

The recall is a tool of the progressive reforms of the early 20th century and needs cite no specific offenses, as other states require.

All recent governors -- the Browns, pere and fils; Ronald Reagan; George Deukmejian; and Pete Wilson -- faced some kind of recall; none succeeded.

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Alarmed Sound May Be Councilwoman’s Son

The alarm bells toll for ... whom?

L.A. City Council member Janice Hahn just led the council’s move to block a new LAPD policy to stop responding to the clamor of unverified burglar alarms (which amount to 92% of annual alarm calls, and a lot of police-patrol hours).

She has her own connection to the security-alarm business, which lobbied vigorously against the new policy. Her 21-year-old son, Danny, works as an installer for Alarm One in Orange County.

But Hahn spokeswoman Courtney Chelsea says that had nothing to do with Mere Hahn’s position: “She used [her son] as a sounding board, but I don’t think she has any type of love for the alarm company.”

Especially since Alarm One has told Danny that the company is oversaturated in Orange County, and he can either transfer to its Chicago office or take a hike to the unemployment office.

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Campaign Trail Crowded in California

Already, in early 2003, Democratic presidential possibles are racking up the frequent-flier miles between the Old Coast and the Gold Coast.

Last week, Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt, who passed the leadership of House Democrats on to California’s Nancy Pelosi, was the man of the hour, or two hours, at a fund-raiser at the Knoll, the splendiferous Beverly Hills digs of oil-and-movie mogul Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara.

Standing a couple of steps up on the grand staircase, Gephardt told the paid-up gathering (from $1,000 per guest to a $10,000 sponsor-sized check to his exploratory committee) that he considers Los Angeles “my second home.” He gave an abbreviated version of his stump-issues speech and took questions from the group, among them one of the Democratic Party’s biggest financial angels, entertainment mogul Haim Saban, whom Gephardt addressed by his first name.

On the list of supporters for the invitation to the kickoff reception were actor Michael Douglas, Motown music man Berry Gordy and “The West Wing” series creator Aaron Sorkin. Martin Sheen, who plays Sorkin’s president, has endorsed former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for America’s president. Dean has also been a recent beneficiary of L.A.’s generosity and hospitality.

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Disturbed by Peace’s Not-So-Wise Crack

Gray Davis’ finance director, Steve Peace, made the papers -- the Sacramento Bee in particular -- when he compared the state Assembly’s liking for such money sources as the vehicle license fee to “the crack cocaine of local government.” He added, “We can keep handing [money] to them -- but it’s not going to solve the problem” of how to pay for public services.

The president of the California State Conference of the NAACP took umbrage, and wrote to Peace to tell him so, in a letter CCd to the governor and the Legislature musing over “what imagery you were attempting to project.”

Alice A. Huffman wondered whether Peace’s remarks about the legislation proposed by Speaker Herb Wesson, who is black, mean Wesson “has a spending addiction similar to the one ‘his people’ have with crack cocaine. Perhaps in your eagerness to kill the bill you did not think through the racial overtones of equating his legislation to one of the worst drugs in society. I concluded that the search for a 30-second sound bite overrode your good judgment and sensitivity to the possibility of racial implications.”

Moreover, Huffman wrote, “ ... how can you intimate that searching for funds for local citizens for essential services is like a drug addiction? Are all urban citizens’ needs just an addiction?”

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Pols Still Paying for Raiders’ Loss

The Super Bowl is over, but the bets are still being settled.

Rubio’s Baja Grill, the Mexican food biz that began in San Diego two decades ago, helped Gray Davis pay off his losing wager on the Oakland Raiders by airlifting the ingredients of a fish-taco dinner to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for preparation by Bush’s “executive chef,” according to Rubio’s press release.

The Raiders’ loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers means a lot of California goods getting shipped Florida-ward, including:

California Sen. Barbara Boxer to Florida Sen. Bill Nelson: a big box of California almonds.

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown to Tampa Mayor Dick Grecoa: barbecued ribs from Oakland’s Everett & Jones, two cases of Brothers Brewing Co. beer and a gondola ride around Lake Merritt (Grecoa will have to come to the lake to collect that one, and when he does, Brown promises to “cook him dinner at my executive warehouse.”)

Until the Raiders choked in the Super Bowl, Brown had been cleaning up from the Raiders’ vanquished cities, with a box of New York mustard, and a Jack Daniel’s whiskey cake and a Bible from Nashville’s mayor.

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Bill Would Clear Out the Web of Deceit

Like bear poaching, Web poaching could soon be against the law. Fremont Democratic Assemblyman John Dutra wants to make it illegal to pinch politicians’ names to use for Internet addresses.

A Seattle group recently bought Web domains in the names of politicians, Californians among them, and used them to send Web surfers to sites endorsing things such as white supremacy and turning women’s breast milk into cheese.

The man who bought up those domains says he’ll be offering them for sale online, in hopes political activists will buy them, and he promises to give a quarter of the proceeds to the American Cancer Society.

Like about a hundred of his fellow politicos around the country, Dutra has felt the Internefarious sting of e-poaching, but his came during his 2002 reelection campaign, when his opponent bought Web addresses in his name and steered cybernauts to the opponent’s Web site.

California law already forbids using another person’s name, or its approximation, with “bad faith intent,” but Dutra’s bill would allow a $1,000-a-day fine and transfer ownership of the site to the one whose name is on it.

Comedians and 1st Amendment lawyers can relax: parody Web sites are protected.

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Points Taken

* Silver-level ticket to the inauguration of Gray Davis, governor of California, $10,000. Platinum-level ticket to the inauguration of Roosevelt Dorn, mayor of Inglewood, also $10,000.

* Modesto’s City Council has refused to ban concealed weapons from its meetings. Mayor Carmen Sabatino proposed the law after a councilman who is a retired sheriff’s deputy may or may not have brought a gun to a recent and rather intense public meeting. Will O’Bryant wouldn’t say whether he was packing, but he pledged that he wouldn’t arm himself at future meetings, and that was evidently good enough for his colleagues.(Sabatino says he’s about to get a weapons permit himself, but would never come armed to a council meeting.)

* L.A. Councilwoman Ruth Galanter will cut the ribbon later this month on a pet food bank in the San Fernando Valley, a service operated by the West Hollywood-based group PAWS/LA, which helps those with life-threatening diseases care for their pet companions. Galanter’s own two shelter-rescued dogs, Bobby and Seiko (Bobby, as in the nickname for the English police, Seiko as in “watch dog”) were old and ailing and had to be put to sleep last year.

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You Can Quote Me

“I don’t know if I want to give up the pay decrease I would take to run for the Senate of the United States. I love doing radio; it’s something probably I was born to because that’s where my father started. If I run for office in the future, that’s the future, but right now I am going to stick with the radio program and talking about Barbara Boxer.”

-- Michael Reagan, radio host and adopted son of Ronald Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman, speaking on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN program about taking a shot at the GOP Senate nomination in 2004.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@atimes.com. This week’s contributors include Robert Durrell, Matea Gold, Massie Ritsch and Beth Shuster.