Voter Anger Still Resonates in California’s Campaigns

The television ad shows bedlam in the Legislature. Squealing lawmakers toss food at one another. A narrator urges voters to stop the “food fight” in Sacramento by passing a measure that would force lawmakers to “work without pay until they pass a budget.”

Another spot portrays the measure as a sham, but it, too, casts Sacramento in a harsh light. “They want us to make it easier for them to increase our taxes,” a woman sneers. She brands the measure, Proposition 56, “just another blank check for the Legislature.”

As California nears its first statewide election since the upheaval of the recall, the campaign season is shaping up as a scramble to capture what remains of the voter anger that carried Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger into office.

For Bob Huff, an Assembly candidate in the March 2 election, that means pledges to “blow off the lobbyists,” “end backroom deals” and “stop pampering state lawmakers” with cars and drivers.

Echoing Schwarzenegger’s vow to sweep special-interest politics from the capital, the Diamond Bar councilman calls himself “the only Republican who will clean house” in Sacramento.

“Recalling Gray Davis was a step in the right direction,” Huff tells voters in a mailing. “But the politicians in the Legislature are still not doing their job.”

Anti-establishment themes are most prevalent this year in Republican campaigns, but even some Democrats are playing to the voter unrest that fueled the recall.

Borrowing another favorite Schwarzenegger line, Democratic Assembly hopeful Richard Groper of Los Angeles tells voters in a mailing that “politics as usual isn’t working.” He calls for “less partisan bickering” and says it “doesn’t take an expert to see our system is broken.”

Among Democrats, said Groper strategist Fred Register, “there is certainly a strong vein of ‘What a mess,’ ‘Can’t they get their act together,’ and ‘I’m just sick of them all.’ ”

“Candidates who are not running with the blessing of any of the establishment are pretty well advised to tap into that,” Register said.

An open question, however, is whether voters’ appetite for upending the Sacramento power structure was sated by Schwarzenegger’s victory.

Don Sipple, who produces Schwarzenegger’s campaign ads, questioned the effectiveness of anti-Sacramento themes in the recall’s aftermath.

Polls show the electorate’s mood has improved since Schwarzenegger took office, with less pessimism -- especially among Republicans -- about California’s direction.

“They’re dealing with perceptions that may have existed last summer,” Sipple said. “The fact that somebody’s trying something doesn’t mean that it’s successful.”

Or as GOP strategist Jim Nygren put it: “The edge is wearing off.”

Yet Nygren -- who counts Huff among his clients -- said voters still “feel like the people in Sacramento are not paying attention to them. They got rid of the governor and they’re still not pleased with the Legislature.”

Reform campaigns have long been a staple of American politics, embodied most recently by maverick presidential hopefuls Ross Perot, John McCain and Howard Dean. Battling Dean this year in the Democratic presidential race, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry -- steeped for two decades in Washington power and money -- has cast himself as a fighter against special interests.

In California, popular resistance to political powers is a rich tradition, from the reforms of the Progressive era -- recall, initiative and referendum among them -- to the Proposition 13 tax revolt of 1978 and the election of Schwarzenegger.

This year, the reform themes in California campaigns draw on the sort of anti-Sacramento mood that drove voters to enact term limits in 1990, said Mark Petracca, a political science professor at UC Irvine.

“Here we are again, 15 years later -- we’re having the same argument,” he said.

That climate has led to television spots such as the food-fight ad for Proposition 56.

The main thrust of the ballot measure -- backed by organized labor -- is to lower the two-thirds vote requirement for passing a budget to 55%. As a practical matter, that would mean that tax hikes by the Democrats who control the Legislature could no longer be stymied by the Republican minority.

But the ad barely mentions that change, focusing instead on a minor, but for many voters more appealing, part of the measure: Legislators would be denied paychecks when they missed the state budget deadline. Democratic adman Bill Carrick, who produced the spot, said it reflected voter annoyance at “partisan gridlock.”

“We just tried to graphically portray it with a little sense of humor,” he said.

In legislative campaigns, the appeals to voters’ sourness toward Sacramento are manifested in glossy brochures piling up in Californians’ mailboxes. Even incumbent lawmakers are depicting themselves as champion reformers, at times dueling over who could best further Schwarzenegger’s agenda for change.

Orange County Assemblyman John Campbell (R-Irvine), a state Senate candidate, has sent voters a testimonial from Schwarzenegger. In it, the governor calls Campbell “a strong and sometimes lonely voice against the special interests” that dominate the Legislature.

Campbell, who reported donations this week from the insurance, automobile and farming industries, among others, draws on the campaign-money woes of ousted Gov. Davis to press the case further against his GOP primary rival, Assemblyman Ken Maddox of Garden Grove.

“Having lost the campaign to keep Gray Davis in office, big labor is throwing big money into Ken Maddox’s campaign,” Campbell tells voters in a mailing.

Maddox, in turn, strikes the anti-Sacramento theme in his own campaign mail.

“Not only has Campbell taken tens of thousands in political donations from unions himself, but one of the very first laws he tried to pass was a bill to unionize the employees of the state Legislature,” a Maddox mailer says. “That’s right -- a legislative employees union.”

In an Inland Empire Assembly race, Republican Bill Emmerson, a Redlands orthodontist, touts himself as a reformer who will abolish commissions “populated by political cronies” and repeal “special-interest-sponsored legislation” that wastes taxpayer money.

“Don’t be fooled,” his primary opponent Elia Pirozzi warns in a brochure that tells voters that Emmerson chaired a dentists’ political action committee that donated to Davis. “Gov. Schwarzenegger needs Republican legislators who will help him fight the special interests -- not work for them. Stop Bill Emmerson!”

Nygren, Emmerson’s campaign strategist, chuckled as he rattled off a list of Pirozzi’s own donations.

“He’s not the person he says he is,” Nygren said. “He’s a special-interest-funded reform candidate.”