Enter the recall. Davis strategists rightly anticipated high conservative turnout. The way to win, they decided, was to energize the party's base and boost the flagging Latino vote. A desperate Davis announced that he would sign SB 60, a driver's license bill then up for consideration in the legislature. Call it his last mistake.
It hit every Davis sore point. Davis had vetoed similar bills on the grounds that they required no background checks on those applying for America's gateway document. He'd noted that "a driver's license was in the hands of terrorists who attacked America" on September 11. He also feared lest the state give legitimacy to escaped criminals.
Facing political extinction, however, Davis was ready to sign on the dotted line--and, he let it be known, he would sign unconditionally, even without a background-check provision. Davis faced a recall because voters suspected that he would sell them out to save his own sorry skin. And he had just confirmed it.
It was a move, according to the Los Angeles Times poll, to which 38 percent of Latino voters were strongly opposed, while nearly three quarters of state voters overall disapproved. So the message was wrong, and the math was wrong.
But California Democratic party chairman Art Torres couldn't see it. He repeatedly tried to undermine Schwarzenegger by reminding voters of the actor's ties to Wilson, the evil purveyor of Prop. 187. As Wilson noted on election night, Schwarzenegger's overwhelming victory proved that he and 187 are good politics.
Shameless pandering to Latinos failed to pay
off. Yes, Latino turnout grew, but Latinos didn't behave as a monolith. While Torres and other Democrats thought they owned the Latino vote, only 54 percent of Latinos voted against the recall; only 52 percent voted for Bustamante.
And while newspapers were suggesting that support for Prop. 187 might hurt Schwarzenegger, it was Bustamante who tanked, with a mere 32 percent of the vote in a state that has 44 percent Democratic registration.
Bustamante began the race refusing to distance himself from MEChA, a radical student organization that proposes Latino separation. At the first candidates' debate, when asked if there were a single state benefit that he would deny to illegal immigrants, Bustamante didn't name one. Later, in answer to the same question, Bustamante told the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that he would deny illegals the right to vote and passports--that was it.
As pollster Frank Luntz told me at a pre-election press conference for his client Arnold Schwarzenegger, when Davis signed SB 60, "That was the beginning of the end of Cruz Bustamante."
Debra J. Saunders writes a nationally syndicated column for the San Francisco Chronicle.
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