Patrick Mallon
Monday, Sept. 9, 2002

The Farce That Is Sacramento (9/3)
A Democratic Party Art Form – Inventing Voters (8/26)
Tammany Hall's Next Target – Simon's Faith (8/16)
California Governor's Race: Defying the Lies as Bombs Fly (8/9)
Stealth Agenda Trumps Academic Success in Schools (8/2)
Simon Survives Attacks, Davis Cons for Cash (7/26)
Paralyzed From Facing Reality (7/19)
California: Wanted! An Ethical Governor. Apply Within (7/15)

Campaign war chests, blowhard consultants, money for commercial ad buys, lobbyists, hangers-on, BS artists and PR shills. All lined up, chugging along, getting fat on a bankrupt state. Tired of this unoriginal garbage yet?

Apparently many voters are, and strategists from both parties are baffled over what to do. The glut of media choices – network TV, cable, talk radio, the Internet – has made it far more difficult to effectively target campaign messages and expenditures, and to circumvent the truth.

And what can either candidate say without prompting hoots of derision? Both Davis and Simon are so disliked that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the candidates grow "even more unpopular with voters as the campaign progresses."

This condition reveals something far more perilous for Davis. For months he has saturated the airwaves with unanswered attack ads. He's the captain. This is his ship. The Democrat incumbent protection plan built into the California media is finding it harder and harder to cover the governor's tracks.

Yet still it mercilessly pounds away at Simon over gay rights, calling for him to step aside to let someone else run, blaming dwindling financial support on an awkward campaign, calling him the worse of two toxic candidates.

The cute rationale goes something like this: When Davis disregards his duties and fails his constituents with impunity, it's "Oh well, that's Gray being Gray, but wouldn't Simon be worse?"

Now how in the heck would these wizards know that?

When Simon gaffes: Pull the plug, flat-line, write in Riordan, time to call it quits. Much of the laughably one-sided reporting on this race is wishful pro-Davis self-gratification masquerading as objectivity.

More people are paying attention to that man behind the curtain, much to the consternation of Davis apologists.

New York Times Flags Trouble Brewing on the Tube

In a development with national implications, but especially so in a notoriously indifferent state like California, the New York Times reported this week that TV commercials in political campaigns are losing sway.

"Campaign strategists said the efficacy of TV spots has been blunted by the ability of voters to fast-forward past annoying hard-edged attacks."

They said they were also worried about the advent of a new digital recording technology that lets viewers filter out ALL advertising with a stroke on a keypad.

To think, the nerve of some TV viewers to tune out, ignore and erase all the handiwork of master manipulators. Outrageous!

Thousand Lose Jobs, but Immune Government Workers Thrive

No patronizing TV ad will change the grim economic reality in California. Thousands have lost their jobs in the tech sector collapse. Read any business-friendly legislation signed by the governor lately?

Last we heard there's a bill on his desk to reduce textbook weight so students have lighter backpacks.

USA Today described the pressure workers are under Thursday in "Job Hunters Pull Up Roots." "In August of last year, Elizabeth Davis lost her job handling event planning for Sun Microsystems. Everything else followed.

"She could no longer afford her apartment in the trendy North Beach district of San Francisco. The job market was so bad her friends were forced to survive on unemployment, but Davis couldn't get by on that little. So, after seven years in California, Davis packed up and left.

"It still breaks my heart," says Davis, 33, "I knew in order to live, I had to move."

Be sure there are many more to follow.

Not so for government employees. The LA Daily News described a study completed by the California Budget Project stating that average wages for the high-water years of 1989 to 2001 rose 1.4 percent.

"Government workers, on the other hand, fared much better. Their salaries jumped a staggering 12.4 percent – same jobs, same work, more money."

With the help of ever-demanding unions insatiably screeching for more money, heedless of the economy, 250,000 state employees enjoy the siesta-inducing incentive of competing with no one.

When California legislators passed a poison-pill budget, calling for "shared sacrifices," they pushed the governor to reduce the number of government employees. Ever tried to get rid of a government employee?

Davis an Invention of Jewish Power Brokers in West LA

Internationally recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends, Joel Kotkin wrote about Davis in "The First Jewish Governor?" back in March.

"He is, on paper, a Catholic, but his political career has been shaped, and largely financed – as much as any statewide politician including our two Jewish women senators – by the Los Angeles Jewish community."

According to the article, Carmen Warshaw, once a Democratic national committeewoman and huge donor to Jewish causes, professes to having groomed the ambitious Davis more than 30 years back. From the beginning, she could see two distinguishing traits – cold-blooded ambition and an appetite for cash.

Davis first won elective office as an assemblyman in 1983, "from a heavily Jewish Westside district that normally would send a landsman to Sacramento."

"Gray went to more bar mitzvahs and weddings than most rabbis," recalls a former aide. "He didn't do it because he was Jewish – he isn't – but because that's where the money was."

Today, Warshaw sees a man with only passing concern about being a good or just governor. "Don't ask me, I'll be vomiting," she half-joked when asked about how she felt about her former protιgι's rise. "I am the one who put him into politics and I am now scared to death he could become president."

Dumbed-Down and Cynical Voters Shouldn't Be Blamed

Prognosticators now see this election producing record low turnouts. It matters little that Davis cannot legitimately persuade voters with compelling arguments or proofs that he has improved the lot of Californians.

And that's the point. It doesn't mean anything as he's not being judged by his performance, but by the perceived ineptitude of Bill Simon.

Run that through again: PERCEIVED ineptitude. Now some of that perception is earned, but the bulk is illusory, yet ceaselessly repeated, over and over, by a media just doing its job: Trashing any and every conservative, every Christian conservative. And it is not based on common sense or reason; otherwise, it would hold up under examination and debate.

However, unless Simon stops coming across as a timid milquetoast and a bumbler, it's humanly impossible for campaign foot soldiers to go door to door and advocate this candidacy with a straight face.

California voters who have participated in initiatives in the past have witnessed their hard work and passionate efforts to make their voice heard destroyed by indifferent and corrupt politicians and judges.

The state is so far left that any conservative grassroots movement that runs counter to liberal Marxist policies, despite huge majority margins, automatically runs into a tree shredder of Democratic Party obstruction, or the autocratic disqualification by a single judge.

Several weeks back, Bill O'Reilly said it best about voting in general. He said that 75 percent of voters are clueless, and the other 25 percent are informed, aware and participatory.

Perhaps this explains why the minority viewpoint seems to carry so much sway in public dialogue. Their ferocious advocacy and 24/7 in-your-face overwhelms and dominates the surf-dude "whatever" attitude of the indifferent and listless.

Others, who can see the corrosive pandering to illegal immigrants and other "victims," have plainly given up, conceding that their voices, and votes, mean nothing. How not one single California politician cannot, for instance, address vote fraud, and the lack of any identification requirement at the polling place, is a testament to their own personal resignation.

Time to Have Some Fun

So, for anyone interested in "Government Favors at Auction Prices," you can go to E-Gray (http://www.e-gray.com/). After all, if Sacramento is for sale, one might make a bid oneself.

And don't look now, but with voter frustration at an all-time high, Green Party candidate Peter Camejo could have the same effect Ralph Nader had on Al Gore (likely costing Gore the 2000 election when he took 2 percent of the Florida vote).

Camejo, a left-wing activist, has come right out and called Davis "a coward" for refusing to participate in gubernatorial debates that include Bill Simon. Camejo told a good joke last week at the Sacramento Press Club:

"How do you get Gray Davis to change 180 degrees in two seconds?"

"Tell him the check bounced."

This race is far from over and far closer than some apparatchik up in San Francisco wants you to believe. I'll bet you were wondering how the American Heritage Dictionary defines "apparatchik."

From the Russian apparat. 1. A member of a Communist apparat. 2. An unquestioningly loyal subordinate, especially of a political leader or organization.

Keep the faith in something more than gray skies and depression. Much of what you read in the "mainstream" is an invention, and wrong isn't right.

See next article in series: The Tide Is Turning

You may e-mail Patrick Mallon at patrick@newsmax.com.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
California Governor's Race

A product that might interest you:
David Horowitz shows "How to Beat the Democrats"