The New Republic

Gray Davis is facing a tough year. His reelection, once deemed near
certain given California's overwhelming Democratic tilt, has been
thrown into question by an energy crisis and a moderate,
well-known, well-funded Republican challenger. And considering the
boon that a GOP victory in the Golden State would represent for the
national party, expect the White House and the Republican National
Committee to mount an all-out effort-- la the demonization of Tom
Daschle--to savage Davis's reputation.But what's more surprising is that Democrats haven't really rallied
around their man in his moment of need. For many liberals, Davis
embodies the corporate centrism that has hijacked the party since
the Clinton era. "[A] minimalist governor in a state, and at a
time, of maximalist needs and opportunities," decreed American
Prospect Executive Editor Harold Meyerson. "I fear that there's no
telling how far right he'd go," says liberal State Senator John
Vasconcellos. The critics are correct that Davis represents a
troubling trend, but that trend isn't ideological. Davis's
scripted, timid, money-driven brand of politics isn't a function of
strongly held beliefs--when circumstances warrant, he just as
easily shifts left. It's a function of his background. Davis
represents the apotheosis of a new political breed that crosses
ideological lines: the staffer-turned-politician.

Once upon a time, the idea that working on a politician's staff
constituted a useful apprenticeship for elective office would have
been difficult to imagine. As recently as the 1950s, even top aides
were little more than glorified executive assistants. "Early on,
there was no such thing as staffers. Congressmen had clerks," says
American University political scientist Susan Hammond. "And, in
fact, their jobs were largely clerical." The real business of
electioneering was left largely to party and machine operatives.
When candidates needed money, they didn't spend hours schmoozing
with lobbyists at cocktail parties; they asked party leaders like
Sam Rayburn and Tom Pendergast to open their coffers. And when they
ran for reelection, they didn't take six months off to campaign;
they relied on their patrons to do the hard work for them. The
system may have been undemocratic and corrupt, but it served both
sides well. The big-city bosses and state party chairmen got control
over patronage and other parochial concerns. The legislators had
time to spend on broader issues and fewer concerns about the
immediate electoral implications of the votes they cast.

Thanks to campaign reforms and fractious intramural spats over
ideology, the parties and machines began to weaken and collapse in
the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, the expanding welfare state
meant politicians needed greater expertise in a broader range of
policy areas. For any individual pol, therefore, the demands of
both governing and campaigning dramatically increased. Legislators
responded by hiring more staff--in 1961 the average congressional
office housed six aides; today it houses 18. The staffers both
picked up the political slack left by the machines'
demise--enforcing message discipline, crafting images, raising
money--and tracked an increasingly complex and diverse set of
policy debates. The result was that, to a greater and greater
extent, the business of governance and the business of campaigning
were conducted from the same offices, often by the same people.

And since staffers ran this new system, it's little wonder that they
soon began seeking office themselves. In 1960, 15 members of
Congress had staff jobs on their resumes. Today 131 do, including
both Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (former legislative
assistant for Senator James Abourezk) and Minority Leader Trent
Lott (former administrative assistant for Representative William
Colmer). Former staffers have helped usher in the scripted,
processdriven, poll- obsessed political style that today defines
American politics. And no one personifies this style better than
Jerry Brown's old chief of staff, Gray Davis.

The political apprenticeship of Gray Davis began in 1973. Returning
from Vietnam, where he had repaired radar, he set out on the
partner path at a five- name Los Angeles law firm. But he couldn't
shake the memory of watching poor and black soldiers fight and die
in disproportionate numbers half a world away. "That struck me as
totally unfair," he told one reporter. Guided by this burst of
conscience, he steered away from his parents' country-club
Republicanism, quitting his comfortable job to volunteer his
services to Tom Bradley's insurgent campaign against law-and-order
Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty.

But if his choice of the black, liberal Bradley bespoke Davis's
idealism, his particular duties on the campaign suggested a nascent
streak of political realism. Under the tutelage of the financier
Max Palevsky, Davis became the campaign's finance director, mining
Palevsky's substantial Rolodex for donations. Following Bradley's
1973 victory, Davis mounted his own campaign for state treasurer--a
remarkably ambitious goal for a 31-year-old with a slight resum.
Davis was trounced in the primary, but the campaign brought him
into contact with his party's gubernatorial candidate, Jerry Brown,
and he quickly returned to the familiar role of campaign aide.
Arriving just after Brown's primary victory, Davis didn't initially
crack the inner circle--a realm reserved for far-out thinkers like
the French filmmaker Jacques Barzhagi and Small Is Beautiful author
E.F. Schumacher. But Brown understood that, given his well-earned
reputation for flakiness, he needed an anal-retentive
counterweight. And so, upon his election, Governor Moonbeam tapped
Davis to be his chief of staff.

Though Davis was certainly more fastidious and less bohemian than
his beret- wearing colleagues in the governor's office, he wasn't
any less committed to social change. He proposed a progressive pay
structure for his staff, "to provide some economic assistance to
the lower-paid employees in the office who don't get the
recognition that some of the others of us do." To drive the point
home, he took a 7 percent pay cut himself. Davis also exhibited a
candor that might surprise people more familiar with his current
political demeanor. In a mid-'70s conversation with the journalist
Orville Schell that he now surely regrets, Davis mused on the
record about going to see the skin flick Deep Throat after a
disastrous press conference. "In those days, Gray was human," says
the writer Joel Kotkin, who used to drink whiskey with him at a
Sacramento watering hole called The Broiler.

But spontaneity and idealism were not part of Davis's job
description under Brown; micromanagement and cynicism were. "His
job was to make the trains run on time," says "Crossfire" co-host
Bill Press, a former Brown policy adviser. "Jerry knew he needed
someone like Gray to handle the neglected details." Davis set the
governor's schedule, placated miffed legislators ("Gray has to eat
shit every day," a staffer told Jerry Brown's biographer Robert
Pack), and vetted memos and press releases for gaffes-- all the
while trying to prevent Brown's cadre of pseudo-intellectual
visionaries from distracting the governor. "He was the wet rag of
the staff," remembers one Brown aide. "It was clearly frustrating
for him that he couldn't assert more control on an operation that
was always flying off the handle." Nor was he universally popular
with his colleagues on the governor's staff, many of whom mocked
him as a tight-ass behind his back.

But while brown and his bull-session buddies daydreamed about
colonies on the moon and genetically engineered tomatoes, Davis
dealt with the administration's political survival. When business
lobbies threatened to finance a Republican challenger in 1978,
Davis called to reassure them that Brown wasn't a socialist. He
encouraged Brown to block a proposed tax rebate that would have
disproportionately benefited low-income workers, arguing that the
state couldn't afford it.

More than most of his contemporaries, Davis understood the political
zeitgeist. Describing the growing importance of television in Joel
Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz's 1982 book California, Inc., Davis
enthused, "[P]eople really care about who is Suzanne Somers's
favorite governor.... Who will Charlie's Angels endorse for
President? That question might well be a serious one." Indeed, it
was Davis who skillfully packaged Brown as the populist outsider
the post-Watergate era demanded. Taking Davis's advice, Brown
ditched his limousine for a blue Plymouth. And it was Davis who
broadcast the fact that Brown slept on a mattress in a small
apartment rather than living it up in the governor's mansion. "He
was very sophisticated about modern campaigning. He understood how
to handle TV and image," remembers Bill Boyarsky, a veteran Los
Angeles Times correspondent who covered the Brown era.

Even as Davis was managing Brown's image and reputation, he was
using his post to cultivate his own. Although he had a press
secretary next door, Davis took calls from the Los Angeles Times
himself. According to the Times, he'd call reporters back as many
as four or five times, constantly editing and reediting his quotes,
even down to the placement of punctuation. And when stories didn't
quote him by name, he'd raise hell: "Since when is my name spelled
A-I-D-E?" he once fumed. It worked. "Gray became a ubiquitous
figure. He was always in front of the cameras," says University of
Southern California political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe. "The
joke was that Gray was the governor."

Almost as soon as the Brown era closed in 1982, Davis set about
making that joke a reality. First he did a four-year stint in the
state assembly, where he won national acclaim for conceiving the
idea of placing photos of missing children on milk cartons. (Davis
managed to milk this for all its self- promotional worth:
Missing-children billboards across the state also prominently
featured his own name.) In 1986 he ascended to the office of state
controller and, in 1994, to lieutenant governor. Along the way, he
built the most extensive fund-raising network the state had ever
seen.

And, in 1998, he finally achieved his goal. "It's taken me
twenty-three years to traverse the fifteen feet from the chief of
staff's desk to the governor's desk," he joked. But his mind-set
hasn't made the move at all. Unhindered by a flaky boss or
resentful colleagues, he's governed the state like the ultimate
political staffer, with control over the smallest details. Davis
personally approves nearly every press release to leave his office.
Internal memos, he insists, must never waste expensive official
letterhead. If anonymous leaks from ex-staffers appear in the
press, Davis hunts down the perpetrators himself. ("He smells them
out," says Democratic consultant William Bradley.) And Davis has
tried to interview personally hundreds of administration
appointees, including mid-level ones. This penchant for
micromanagement may be one reason that, three years into his
administration, Davis had 87 judicial posts left to fill.

Whereas Brown favored near-endless internal debate, Davis stifles
the slightest dissent. "Nobody has their own agenda. There's only
one agenda. It's Gray Davis' agenda," Davis told his Cabinet in the
early days of his administration. When his environmental chief,
Mary Nichols, discussed withdrawing a court brief filed by former
Governor Pete Wilson in an obscure lawsuit over water rights, Davis
dressed her down as the Cabinet filed out of a meeting. He later
told reporters, "Their job is to think like I think." Nor is this
view limited to members of Davis's own administration. He once
blustered that the legislature's "job is to implement my vision."
On another occasion he suggested that his judicial appointees
should resign if their rulings contradicted his policies. "My
appointees should reflect my views. They're not there to be
independent agents."

But if there's an activity in which Davis most betrays his staffer
background, it's fund-raising. For most politicians, raising money
is an unpleasant necessity; for Davis, it's an obsession. According
to adviser Garry South, in campaign mode Davis has spent as many as
twelve hours per day in pursuit of donors. When he visited ground
zero last October, he tacked fund- raisers onto the trip. At the
end of the 2000 legislative session, when hundreds of bills waited
on his desk to be signed, a TV cameraman caught the governor
sneaking through the bushes to avoid cameras staked out in front of
a Sacramento fund-raiser's home. During one two-week period in
December, Davis took in an average of $159,000 per day in
contributions. (By contrast, New York Governor George Pataki, who
also faces a tough reelection, last year averaged $26,000 per day.)
Davis's $39.5 million war chest earned $900,000 in interest during
the first six months of 2001--almost enough to finance an entire
congressional campaign.

And while Bill Clinton's presidency may have popularized the
"permanent campaign," Gray Davis's governorship has perfected it.
No adviser wields greater influence over Davis's policies than
South, his chief political strategist. "As far as I can tell, he's
really Gray's only adviser," one Democratic consultant says of
South. The result is policy gimmickry that would make Dick Morris
blush. Because Wilson profited from a backlash against crime, Davis
has staked out an ultra-hard line on the issue, at one point
declaring Singapore, where first-time drug offenses routinely merit
hangings, "a good starting point in terms of law and order." The
state appeals court has reprimanded Davis for exceeding his
authority by intervening to prevent the parole of 40 prisoners.
When the state legislature, influenced by mounting evidence on the
inefficacy of "three strikes and you're out" laws, voted to study
the impact of California's version, Davis opposed it. And when
legislators of both parties unanimously agreed to eliminate
mandatory expulsions for elementary school students carrying
weapons or toy guns to school, Davis vetoed the bill.

In 1998, after polls showed education to be the issue foremost in
the mind of the electorate, Davis made it his "first, second, and
third priority" and convened a special session of the legislature
to pass his education agenda. There was only one problem: He barely
had any education agenda. Even teachers opposed his "crown jewel"
initiative exempting them from state income taxes. (Teachers feared
that Davis's proposal would foster popular resentment toward them,
which in fact it did.) Ultimately, Davis scaled back his proposal to
a $1, 500 tax credit. When the measure passed, Davis aides lined
the path from the governor's office to the press conference with
children plucked out of tours of the state capitol. "Great stage
managing," says Kotkin, "but without any ambition."

A year or so ago, California was booming, and Davis and his
hypercautious, hypercalculated political style seemed unstoppable.
Al Gore considered him for the second spot on the Democratic
ticket. Newspaper articles frequently mentioned him as a "potential
presidential contender." But then something funny happened: Crisis
hit. First, Silicon Valley tanked. Then came the state's energy
crisis. Unsurprisingly, Davis has reacted more aggressively to the
politics of the blackouts than to the blackouts
themselves--importing Gore's chief flacks, Chris Lehane and Mark
Fabiani, to help spin the problem his way. Davis even outwitted
Karl Rove, admonishing George W. Bush to his face at a joint press
conference last June. Before Enron became a household name, Davis
was blaming the crisis on Texas "energy cowboys," "snakes," and
"gougers." But, his shrewd p.r. strategy notwithstanding,
Davis--afraid of demanding painful sacrifices from either the
electorate or the electric companies--took months to propose a
remedy. And his solution failed miserably. Locking the state into a
lengthy, overpriced contract with Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern
California Edison, and other power producers, he did nothing to
address the underlying problem of long-term shortages. What's more,
his deal could send the state deeper into debt.

Then, in early November, Davis tried to get out in front of the
terrorism issue. An FBI memo warning of "uncorroborated
information" about attacks on unspecified bridges quickly morphed
into a grandstanding gubernatorial announcement about "credible"
evidence of impending strikes on four named targets. In his State
of the State address, Davis boasted shamelessly that "[n]o state
has done more than California to protect its citizens and vital
assets since the terrorist attacks." Last November Los Angeles Times
writer Mark Z. Barabak blasted Davis's response to September 11 as
"driven more by politics than by principle."

By January 2002 Davis's approval rating was at 39 percent, down from
60 percent one year before. And, as of last week, he trails his
likely Republican opponent, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard
Riordan, by seven points. The irony is rich. Riordan is, in many
ways, the anti-staffer. He spent most of his life outside politics,
winning his first election, as mayor of Los Angeles, at age 63. A
sort of cross between John McCain and Paul O'Neill, Riordan is prone
to statements like "Gosh, I don't have a clue how to answer that."
And he often seems to make up his highly unorthodox political
positions--support for gay civil union, for instance--as he goes
along. But Riordan's somewhat bumbling style proved popular in Los
Angeles because it underscored his authenticity and his
independence. And it sets Davis's bloodless maneuvering in stark
relief. Post-9/11, earnestness is in. At the very moment Davis and
his fellow staffer- politicians have reached the peak of their
power, the electorate, it seems, finally craves more.

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