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Davis Recall Qualifies for Fall Ballot The governor's advisors expect that Bustamante will ultimately decide to combine the election of a Davis successor on the recall ballot. Bustamante pledged to take no more than 24 hours to announce the date, and he scheduled a 10 a.m. news conference for today. Bustamante's choice of an election date will culminate a recall petition drive that began soon after Davis won a second term. In November, Davis beat Republican Bill Simon Jr., 47% to 42%, but within weeks, his popularity plunged as the state's fiscal crisis deepened. In February, the state GOP embraced a recall petition drive that posed little threat to Davis until Darrell Issa, a wealthy Republican congressman from the San Diego area, started paying professional crews to gather signatures. The recall campaign rapidly gained momentum from that point, with proponents submitting more than 1.6 million signatures to county election offices across California this month. On Wednesday, potential candidates were pressing forward with campaign plans despite the uncertainty over what form the ballot will take. State Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) filed papers to form an exploratory campaign for governor. He has run twice for state controller and lost. McClintock said his candidacy "looks very likely." He promised to "roll back the regulation and taxes that are choking our economy." Schwarzenegger, who was to travel to Mexico City today to promote his new "Terminator" movie, was nearing a final decision Wednesday on whether he would run for governor. His wife, NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver, has been cool to the idea, Gorton said. "His wife's concern — quite appropriately — is what effect this would have on their family," Gorton said. The only Republican already in the race is Issa. He called the recall's qualification for the ballot "a landmark for California." In a written statement, he pledged to put a stop to "business as usual in Sacramento" and said voters "must recall Gray Davis and clean up the mess he has made of our state." Republican consultant Sal Russo, who ran Simon's campaign against Davis last fall, would not say whether Simon would run on the recall ballot. But he said Simon had spent the last few months talking to his family, donors and volunteers about the possibility. "He's been doing the due diligence and it looks extraordinarily encouraging," Russo said. "We're confident that if he got in the race, he would win." Peter Camejo, the Green Party gubernatorial candidate who won 5% of the vote in November, also has said he would run on the recall ballot. As would-be successors to Davis assessed their options, the legal challenges played out in court. Lawyers for Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall, a committee organized by the Davis political team, had sought a court order to stop the signature count pending investigation of their claims that recall sponsors broke election laws by hiring petition circulators who live outside California. Late in the morning, a Los Angeles appeals court rejected that request. The committee's lawyers appealed immediately to the state Supreme Court, warning in legal papers that Shelley "could certify the recall for the ballot as early as tonight or tomorrow." "Unless this court acts, a recall election will be certified on the basis of hundreds of thousands of signatures gathered by firms that bused in out-of-state signature gatherers and instructed them to lie on the declaration that must be submitted with each section of the petition," committee lawyers wrote in court papers. But at 6:33 p.m., Shelley, a San Francisco Democrat, announced that recall sponsors had submitted nearly 1.4 million valid voter signatures on their petition for a special election, far more than the 897,158 they needed. |
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