...he's now doing for Grayout Davis.
Posted on 09/28/2003 4:42:29 AM PDT by calcowgirl
SACRAMENTO, Sept. 26 — Senator Dianne Feinstein was asked last month why she supported Gov. Gray Davis in his recall fight, when a decade ago Mr. Davis compared her to the jailed tax evader Leona Helmsley in a widely criticized campaign commercial.
"Lesson learned," Senator Feinstein said of Mr. Davis on the NBC News program "Meet the Press." Pressed further, she added: "I hope so. I believe so."
Ms. Feinstein, who defeated Mr. Davis in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary, now speaks confidently of him as a changed man, someone who has seen the error of his ways both as a candidate and as governor. But with the Oct. 7 recall election just around the corner, this new Mr. Davis is being put to the test, with nothing less than his political future hanging in the balance.
Trailing in the polls with time running short, the Davis campaign has shifted tactics, making Arnold Schwarzenegger, the leading Republican on the recall ballot, its target. Mr. Davis's challenge on Friday to debate Mr. Schwarzenegger, and a new television commercial raising doubts about the actor-turned-politician's competence to run the state, are telltale marks of the new aggressiveness.
"Politicians are either on offense or defense," one Davis adviser said, "and we have moved to offense."
The strategy is intended to rally the Democratic faithful around Mr. Davis and raise doubts among undecided voters about Mr. Schwarzenegger, who public opinion polls show is locked in a neck-and-neck battle with Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante, a Democrat, to succeed Mr. Davis should he lose the recall vote.
The unanswered question is whether Mr. Davis can take on Mr. Schwarzenegger without resorting to what many Californians regard as his natural political reflex — an unseemly knack for the underhanded — and thereby undoing the progress that Senator Feinstein and others insist he has made in winning back many voters.
"People's perceptions are that he is a nasty man who fights dirty," said Barbara O'Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University at Sacramento. "The strategy has been to deflect that and show a kinder, gentler Gray Davis. The decision now to challenge and attack Arnold is a markedly different strategy. It is risky. People will be reminded of the old Gray Davis they didn't like."
Mr. Davis's aides say they will be careful to make sure that does not happen. Peter Ragone, a Davis spokesman, said the anti-Schwarzenegger advertisements in production do not feature Mr. Davis. In fact, he said, there are no plans to put him in any advertisements.
"It is not under consideration," Mr. Ragone said.
Mr. Davis also continues to lean on other Democrats to do much of the heavy lifting. On Friday in West Hollywood, it was Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas and the latest of a long list of national figures to campaign at Mr. Davis's side, who played the drum roll leading up to his debate challenge.
Most every day, Mr. Davis's wife, Sharon, appears somewhere in the state to complain about the Republican "lie-producing machine," led by Mr. Schwarzenegger, that the Davis campaign says has set its sights on him. The campaign has even created a Web site, republicanliedetector .com, that depicts a G.O.P. elephant wired to a lie detector and cringing when the truth is told.
"It's gotten so bad that I expect any day now my husband will be held responsible for the fact that they cannot find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Mrs. Davis said.
The Davis camp has also been careful to frame its Schwarzenegger assault as having come in response to Mr. Schwarzenegger's own criticism of the governor, in television commercials and campaign appearances and during a debate here on Wednesday. When presented with that argument — "he started it first" — many voters say they would like to hear a reply from Mr. Davis's side, or so campaign officials say their focus-group research indicates.
"It now becomes an up and down vote on whether Arnold can do this job," a Davis strategist said. "That's a debate we think we can win."
But other Democrats not directly involved in the campaign suggest that Mr. Schwarzenegger's celebrity complicates the strategy. Like it or not, they say, Mr. Schwarzenegger and Mr. Davis are not held to the same standard by the public.
"Arnold has Teflon," said Kam Kuwata, a campaign strategist who has worked for Senator Feinstein. "He says he won't attack anyone, and when he does, he gets away with it. Gray has to play to a degree by a different rule book."
Mr. Kuwata added: "All of the polls that I have seen still show that Gray has a higher negative rating than positive rating. You have to be very careful about that."
Part of the difficulty for the Davis campaign is that the old Gray Davis is not that old.
Just last year, when he won re-election, Mr. Davis knocked off his Republican opponents with a flurry of commercials that critics say exaggerated their shortcomings, and that made no mention of his own record as governor. In particular, the attacks during the Republican primary on Richard J. Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles, made some of Mr. Davis's own supporters cringe.
"Riordan was unfairly blown out of the race," said Robert L. Gnaizda, the policy director at the Greenlining Institute, a San Francisco-based group that promotes services for low-income and minority communities.
Mr. Gnaizda said it was an open question how traditional Democrats, many of whom he said were hesitantly returning to the Davis fold, would respond to a sudden recurrence of Mr. Davis's mean streak. He suggested that Mr. Davis should let others in the recall campaign, like Arianna Huffington, who is running as an independent and who repeatedly clashed with Mr. Schwarzenegger at Wednesday's debate, do the dirty work for him.
"Davis would benefit by continuing to appear high-minded," Mr. Gnaizda said.
So far it is Mr. Schwarzenegger who has managed to stay above the fray, refusing to be drawn into a confrontation with Mr. Davis, though his campaign staff has taken some joy in poking fun at Mr. Davis for what they characterize as a madcap shift in tactics.
"Desperate men will say desperate things," said Sean Walsh, a Schwarzenegger spokesman, of Mr. Davis's sudden interest in debating.
In an e-mail message sent to reporters on Friday, the Schwarzenegger campaign quoted a Davis aide saying in last year's election that Mr. Davis did not have time to debate more than once because "the governor has to do the job the people elected him to do, which is be governor."
The message concluded, "Get back to work Gray, you have a week left on the job."
If in the next week Mr. Davis's own polls show that to be the most likely outcome, some people expect that caution will be abandoned. Mr. Gnaizda said a strong argument could be made that Mr. Davis would have nothing to lose by throwing his best punch at Mr. Schwarzenegger.
"There is a glowing lack of respect for Schwarzenegger, and that includes many of those who are going to vote for him," Mr. Gnaizda said. "People are voting for Schwarzenegger to get Davis out. This is not like the Reagan revolution."
...he's now doing for Grayout Davis.
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