E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Version

August 19, 2002, 9:00 a.m. Simon Down for the Count? He’s only begun to fight. By Jonathan Wilcox

ot for the first time, the liberal media has California all wrong. And for the umpteenth time, California Republicans seem prepared to believe it.

In reality, the California governor's race remains Bill Simon's to lose, and absent major mistakes, he will win.

For the last ten weeks, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Sacramento Bee have been mounting a rat-a-tat drumbeat: The Simon effort is faltering, stumbling, failing.

Simon is a successful businessman, but this is now viewed as political baggage. Add in a Los Angeles jury's recent verdict against Simon's investment firm (and others) in a case involving a failed business partnership.

Simon's campaign is in disarray, changing campaign managers and trimming staff.

The White House is troubled, complete with on-the-record (but on-background) warnings about when the president's men will abandon the Simon effort.

Finally, the New York Times chimes in with the ebullient headline "In California, Blue Skies Fade for Republicans."

They wish. The reality on the ground is quite different, and a majority of California voters have long since decided they're open to not having Gray Davis as governor for four more years. And there is little that his $50 million war chest can do to change this dynamic.

The reasons for this are obvious, but curiously missing from the campaign dialogue.

Davis was elected in 1998, when California's good times were rolling, and the state's coffers were full with capital-gains revenues from the dot.com bubble.

Instead of growing the economy, he grew the state bureaucracy, hiring tens of thousands of new employees and sending the bill to the private sector, which then tanked and dragged down the state economy long before September 11.

The man comically described by E. J. Dionne as "America's best political consultant" butchered the state's electricity crisis, making panicky decisions he seeks to reverse or non-decisions he pretends did not happen. Davis alone saddled California with massive debt because he bought electricity at an all-time high and is selling now at an all-time low.

Even with substantial Democrat majorities in the state legislature, he can't even get a budget passed, which the law requires be done by July 1. Today, the state-budget deficit is nearly $25 billion — an amount equal to one-fourth of the state budget itself.

This is not complicated stuff, but it might as well be the Riddle of the Sphinx to the press corps. For eight weeks, they hounded Simon to release his personal tax returns, and the campaign stalled. As a follow-up, the verdict against Simon's firm was splashed across newspaper headlines, and the campaign staggered.

The inevitable result: The White House has said it may "walk after Labor Day" and always-say-die Republicans insist they told-us-so all along.

All this fails to grasp fundamental truths: Gray Davis hasn't been an effective manager — he's been a disaster. He's not a likeable leader — his profanity-laced tirades are public record. He has no plan for a better future — by a two-to-one margin, Californians think the state is heading in the wrong direction.

Still, Davis should be feared, if for no other reason than his indomitable will to win. The joke goes that his personality is like his name. Get it? Wrong. A pompadoured junkyard dog is more like it.

In a debate about California's failing schools, snarled freeways, crumbling infrastructure, job-killing regulations, and diminished quality of life, Davis is road kill. So he's waging the campaign by other means. This will not sustain until November.

Additionally, making campaign assumptions during the dog days of summer just won't hunt because voters haven't begun to form their inevitable judgments. And in California, television is king and print coverage (even the finest op-eds) matters little.

Remember, from the end of the March primary through much of the summer, "best consultant" Davis spent millions on television ads praising himself — and plunged in the polls. A similar drop can happen again.

Like the boxing fan he is, Bill Simon knows that taking punishment goes with the territory. He's been the underdog before and now must resolve to counterpunch. Hard.

The calamity that has been the Davis administration will not go completely overlooked by the California electorate. And when that happens, as it surely will, the battle will be joined.

Gray Davis's thin skin is legendary. It's my suspicion he has the glass jaw to match.

— Jonathan Wilcox is a communications consultant who was the chief speechwriter during the Bill Simon for Governor primary campaign.