Dan Frisa
Monday, Oct. 6, 2003

LOS ANGELES – The mud is really flying on the Left Coast as the L.A. Times continues its single-handed, unprecedented effort to undercut and slime the campaign of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the race to replace embattled California Gov. Gray Davis, should he be recalled on Tuesday.

For the third time in as many days the Left Angeles Times has run front-page stories featuring accusations tainting Schwarzenegger from 15 women in total. The initial article sparked a huge backlash from many who saw the decision to run the story so late in an important campaign as unfair and underhanded.

As evidence of the strong negative reaction, accompanying each day’s new story has been another either analyzing the outcry or defending the decision to publish the allegations. In Sunday’s sidebar story, the Times admits to more than 1,000 subscription cancellations in protest of its actions.

Also this past week, both the New York Times and ABC News ran with erroneous accounts involving decades-old comments falsely portraying Schwarzenegger as sympathetic to Adolf Hitler. The N.Y. Times was forced to essentially run a “correction” detailing that the quote originally run was another Maureen Dowd-type doctoring job, which resulted in creating precisely the opposite meaning of the original quotation.

The impact on both the recall question and on the race to choose a successor to Davis are critical and varied, with voting to commence in just 24 hours.

Initial voter reaction seems to have caused a slight tightening on the recall question as indicated by the results of a Knight Ridder poll, released Saturday, which now shows a 54-41 breakdown favoring recall. This differs from the Field Poll results, taken before the first allegations were published, that yielded a 57-39 finding of support for the recall.

Of course comparing the results of different polls is unscientific and subject to misinterpretation, yet a trend does seem apparent if only as a broad litmus for where the electorate may be – in this case, a drop in the margin of support for recall by nearly a third (18 percent vs. 13 percent).

A similar downward correlation can be seen in Schwarzenegger’s lead over Bustamante, from a 10 percent to a 7 percent advantage.

While this may not necessarily be due to the allegations alone, and could also reflect some Democrats returning to their party affiliation as the race draws to a close, it nonetheless seems evident – given the tremendous exposure of the issue – that some Independent voters could also be rethinking their support for Schwarzenegger.

However, with little more than a day remaining in the campaign, Gray Davis could very well have made yet another major tactical error by so directly and harshly dealing with the explosive issue. It seems that the well of public dislike for the governor that has been filled over the years in part by his own heavy-handed negative campaign tactics could attach to him again now that he has boldly embraced the charges over the past two days.

Had he let the public reflect on the impact of the story without thrusting himself into the middle of it, the result might have inured to Davis’ benefit.

The problem for him is that those who reacted negatively to the Times’ decision to publish assumed that Davis had a hand in it; now those same voters are sure of it, which will only intensify their displeasure with him.

Now that the fallacious Hitler story has been exposed – not only by the author of the unpublished book but also by several makers of the film “Pumping Iron” – the public could view the sexual harassment allegations with similar suspicion: If one charge has been proven untrue, perhaps the other charges are also untrue since all of them were leveled together in the closing days of the campaign.

As for the other major candidates in the race, neither Bustamante nor McClintock has been able to successfully inject himself into the main of public discourse about the race; the Schwarzenegger issues have literally sucked all of the oxygen of public exposure away from them.

At this late stage in the race, in the remaining hours prior to the commencement of balloting on Tuesday, voters will still have to make two critical decisions: one, should Davis be recalled; and, two, who should replace him.

It is hard to see how California voters will consciously decide that they want to see and hear Gray Davis for another three years – and be subject to his brand of cash and carry and pander politics – especially following his very recent acts to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and the beginning of the imposition and collection of the newly tripled automobile tax.

Another potentially major factor in Tuesday’s results could be the votes already voted – to the tune of millions – by absentee ballot, which were cast well before the issues of last week were known. How those ballots were voted, and by which segments of the electorate, will obviously not be known until they are opened and counted. But their impact cannot be forgotten or underestimated.

Stay tuned for even more L.A. Raw in the final hours of the Left Coast Recall Roller Coaster.

Dan Frisa represented New York State in the United States Congress and served four terms in the New York State Assembly. E-mail: danfrisa@newsmax.com.

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

Editor's note:
Arnold fans – check out the new Terminator for Governor T-shirts – Click Here