It’s over, and we’re spent

California’s first gubernatorial recall has left very little unbroken crockery in the political analyst’s cabinet of conventional wisdom.

Take, for example, the electoral reformers’ longtime contention that one of the things propelling state and local candidates into manic fund-raising was inadequate attention from the press, particularly local television, which has become the American majority’s leading source of news.

According to this line of causation, the lack of “free media” -- which is to say, journalism -- not only forces candidates to depend on “paid media” -- which is to say, advertising -- but also opens the way to negative campaign spots, which disgust prospective voters, further depressing turnout. The impact of this sequence is magnified by what has come to be called the “permanent campaign” -- electoral cycles that stretch on interminably, increasing the need for funds, discouraging continuing news coverage, making possible more negative advertising and numbing an ever larger number of voters into sullen apathy.

Very neat. Very plausible.

Then along came the recall with its two-month sprint to election day, a Cannes-sized press corps, campaign war chests the size of Casino Morongo jackpots and presumably a turnout of a size unseen for decades.

Clearly anybody who believed that saturation news coverage would produce politics that had not been plucked from the deep pockets of the plutocrats and the special interests came away disillusioned.

“Everybody involved raised a lot of money, given the compressed election cycle,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick.

As of election eve, front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger reported raising more than $21 million, Gov. Gray Davis more than $16 million, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante more than $6 million and State Sen. Tom McClintock slightly more than $1.6 million. (As a point of comparison, Davis and Bill Simon raised and spent a combined $120 million in the last regular gubernatorial election. The most expensive gubernatorial race in history was the last go-round in New York, in which Gov. George Pataki and his challengers spent a combined $148 million.)

Still, given the campaign’s brevity, the recall’s totals are impressive figures, particularly since these four gleaned the lion’s share of the campaign’s unprecedented media coverage simply by showing up day after day. Why their frenzied dash for cash?

Veteran Republican pollster and strategist Arnold Steinberg thinks the rush for gold began when “Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was going to fund his own campaign and then didn’t. That forced everybody to get out and raise money, even though they probably didn’t need it because of the intensity of the news coverage. I’ve never seen a campaign covered so expansively and yet it had no impact on the amount of paid advertising that was purchased.”

Carrick cites what he calls “a lot of messy things,” including the undiminished role of “independent expenditure committees” set up by special interests allied with one or another candidate. Think, for example, of the television and radio ads sponsored by various Indian tribes and groups with ultra-high-minded names designed to preserve the fiction that they are not, in fact, controlled by the candidates. Nobody ever has come up with a way to regulate them that does not infringe on the organizers’ constitutional right to free speech.

Moreover, said USC journalism expert Martin Kaplan, all the recall candidates’ campaigns were directed by the usual suspects -- “political consultants, who have an important economic self-interest in fund-raising and conventional politics. They get paid a percentage, sometimes as much as 20%, of all the advertising they buy for their candidate. There’s just nothing in it for them not to raise and spend money.

“Since they’re responding to a business consideration rather than a political one,” Kaplan said, “the last thing they’re going to do is tell their guy, ‘There’s no need to raise money since we’re getting all this free media.’ ” As Steinberg puts it, “People who raise and spend money for a living have a vested interest in raising and spending money. Given the level of free media in this campaign, there just isn’t any rational reason for the levels of campaign spending we’ve seen.”

And what about that free media -- the wall-to-wall, sunrise-to-midnight news coverage that has made the recall a focus of international attention?

Kaplan and Carrick agree that, in the Democratic strategist’s phrase, “the media coverage was entirely driven by the Arnold factor.” The two differ, however, on the quality of the coverage.

“Broadcasters,” said Kaplan, “have given a heroic quantity of time to this campaign, but they have struggled to cover it as a substantive story rather than as a series of events. Print journalism did a terrific job up and down the state, which in my view makes it a tragedy that more people don’t read newspapers. In the end, this was a fully nationalized -- and internationalized -- story, involving not only California’s media, but also the national press corps, the cable networks and non-news venues, like the Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno shows.”

In Carrick’s less sanguine view, that’s one reason the news coverage as a whole fell well short of what the historical occasion required. “My sense is that we now have a media that has consciously organized itself to do more and more coverage of entertainment and culture and less and less of politics and government. Then, suddenly somebody moves over from the entertainment world to the political one and the not illogical result is the media frenzy that occurred, but it was the symbiosis of a dumbed down media and a dumbed down politics.”

According to Carrick, “the way the entertainment press clustered around this campaign actually subverted the efforts of the serious press to be substantive. It allowed Schwarzenegger to pursue a strategy of inaccessibility and to get away with it.”

So was the recall itself so novel and Schwarzenegger’s presence so unexpectedly overwhelming that there are no lessons to be drawn about future campaigns and their news coverage?

Not in Carrick’s view: “At the end of the day, I think we can conclude that, when it comes to covering politics, more is not better -- if it’s not of higher quality.”