The happiest man in California

— Gray Davis was in front the TV cameras tonight, smiling a grin so large the light reflected off his teeth damn near blew the cameras out. Davis is happy because his $10M gamble paid off: he gets the honor of running for re-election against a card-carrying member of the idle rich, Bill Simon, who’s never run for office before, let alone governed, and whose political playbook appears to have been written by Dan Lungren, the biggest statewide loser in California politics in the last 40 years.

Davis’ gamble might not have paid off if he hadn’t had the help of George Deukmejian, the nearly-senile former governor who was one of Lungren’s major backers in 1998 and appears to have already forgotten about that race. All Davis has to do is keep the lights on until November and we’re going to be saying “Governor Davis” for another four years. You’d think all these folks in the core of the paleocon wing of the Party who profess to love Reagan so much would practice the 11th Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican”), but the spirit of idiocy is alive and well, fueled by such things as the Free Republic web site, a de facto agent of the Davis campaign.

Simon benefits from the bad press against Riordan, and from the fact that he’s an unknown. One measure of his viability is the election returns from his home, Los Angeles County, where people presumably know him better than they do across the state (did he go anywhere and actually speak to real people during the primary?) LA County Republicans favored Riordan 48.2 to 41.6, so it’s going to be a long, uphill climb for the winner-by-default.

Voters rejected Prop 45, a gimmicky gambit to ease the constraints of Term Limits on the legislature, a flawed initiative that would have been a step in the right direction nonetheless. Voters don’t trust politicians, but at least experienced ones had a prayer of keeping the lobbyists in check; since TL was enacted, the normally chaotic state legislature has degenerated into a sad joke, which we saw last year when the power crisis hit the state. The legislature was still in tutorial mode when the weather eased and the crisis ended.

Republicans have a half-decent chance at three statewide offices, with Dick Ackerman running for Attorney General against the extremely unlikable Bill Lockyer, the articulate tax hawk Tom McClintock running for Controller against unknown Democrat Steve Westly, and solid Keith Olberg up against flakey Kevin Shelley of Frisco for Secretary of State. Lt. Gov. nominee Bruce McPherson is out of the Riordan mold, and Democrat Bustamente is one of the dimmer bulbs, so that’s a promising race as well. Other than the Big Office, November may not be too bad.

The only close races are three Assembly seats, one in Frisco between Leno and Britt. The defeat of the term limits extension means that Willie Brown will be going back to Sacramento to take John Burton’s seat, and to assume the leadership of the Senate, while Burton will run for mayor of San Francisco as he enters his twilight years. The irony of this is that Willie was the main spectre that motivated Californians to pass term limits in the first place, and all it’s accomplished is the creation of a third-rate legislative body with Willie more firmly in charge – two years from now – than he ever before.

Another odd campaign reaction is paleocon elation over Condit’s defeat. Yeah, I know, he had sex with that woman, and maybe had her snuffed, but the winner, Dennis Cardoza is in tight with the Gay lobby in Sacramento, and he’s most certainly up to cleaning Republican Dick Monteith’s clock in November. Monteith is one of the weak sisters that the party had to cover for and donate money to in order to keep some numbers in the Senate, but he was ineffective and unimpressive; the kind of guy that staffers laugh about. Paleocons should have walked precincts for Condit, because he’s the only breathing Democrat Monteith could have beaten.