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Issa Banking on Big Payoff in Recall Drive But even Republican analysts give Issa slim odds of overcoming his conservative background on social issues. He has opposed legal abortion and gun control, for instance, which polls say put him at odds with most California voters. GOP consultant Allen Hoffenblum said Issa's foes are apt to defeat him by painting him as "part of the right-wing cabal, quote unquote." Still, by putting up the money to turn a Davis recall election from an improbable dream into a likely reality, Issa has galvanized the conservative base of a state party beleaguered by its mounting record of defeats. Issa's Rescue California committee is paying petition circulators to gather the nearly 900,000 voter signatures needed to qualify the recall for the ballot. The signature deadline is Sept. 2; if enough valid signatures are tallied, voters will decide whether to recall Davis and, at the same time, who would replace him if he is thrown out of office. Like other wealthy candidates, Issa has had trouble matching his own donations — both to the recall effort and to his gubernatorial committee — with money from others. On Saturday's campaign swing, he paid a private visit to real-estate titan David Murdock in Westlake Village. He told fellow passengers the meeting would take half an hour, but stayed for nearly two hours. "It was hard to get away from a meeting with someone throwing large amounts of money at you," Issa joked. "The problem was it's potential money." Regardless of his prospects for becoming governor, analysts say Issa appears to have touched off an historic campaign. "In California, sometimes there's a fuse lit, and at the end there's a big bang," said Don Sipple, a Republican media strategist. "This could very well be one of those occasions. The schism between the people of California and the politicians of California has very rarely been as wide as it is now. You get the feeling that there is increasing frustration among the governed with those who govern them." As he moved around the state, Issa tapped that frustration, most often by invoking the fiscal crisis that could lead to higher taxes and a vast rollback in public services, including teacher layoffs and hospital cuts. "If this was California Inc., then Chairman and CEO Gray Davis would be in jail," Issa told Republicans on Saturday at a party breakfast in the Santa Ynez Valley. He accused Davis of lying during his reelection campaign about the depth of California's fiscal troubles, a charge the governor has denied. The state's $38.2-billion budget hole is more than triple the governor's estimate during the campaign. To turn the state around, Issa called on Republicans to unite behind a single gubernatorial candidate, preferably himself, willing to "be hated, be hard, be difficult, be cantankerous" on budget issues. But while he insisted a recall election would force candidates to specify how they would solve the state's financial troubles, he offered no hint of what unpopular steps he might take as governor. On the drive to Orange County, he said California could survive the fiscal crisis without raising taxes. But he also said he would support tax hikes if voters approve them. Issa described the Davis recall as a "tax revolt," but called nonetheless for higher taxes to build more freeways; the state's gas tax would be indexed to rise at the rate of inflation to ensure highway spending does not decline.
Schools, Issa said, should be largely spared from budget cuts; he opposes teacher layoffs. But the state should "look at their pay growing slower than it has been in the
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