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Desperation drives Davis to another unprecedented tactic In the winter of 2002, Davis realized that moderate Republican Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles, stood a good chance of wresting the governor's office from him that fall if he won the Republican nomination. So Davis launched a $10 million television advertising campaign to discredit Riordan among Republicans, the first large-scale drive ever conducted by an incumbent against a candidate in the other party's primary It worked. Davis got to run against financier Bill Simon and squeaked to a victory despite his own wide unpopularity. Now Davis is confronted with a recall petition drive whose organizers claimed to have 375,000 signatures "in the pipeline" as of May 30. They say signatures are coming in at the rate of 20,000 per day; they need only 897,000, and they have until Sept. 2 to get them. Those numbers leave no doubt Davis should take the recall seriously and he and his allies plainly do. Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein sent an anti-recall op-ed piece to many newspapers. Davis began raising serious money. And he dispatched a key aide, Steve Smith, from his government post as secretary of the state labor agency to head a group called Taxpayers Against the Recall. The first question was how the group would fight the recall. Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a Democrat opposed to the recall, provided a clue. "My guess would be that there will be thousands of Democratic volunteers who turn out and inform the recall petition carriers and those considering signing it of the facts behind the recall," he said. Well, not exactly volunteers. Working from the Sacramento offices of the California Professional Firefighters, a public employee union long allied with Davis, the new pro-Davis group immediately hired the state's leading initiative signature-gathering firms to circulate a counterpetition everywhere the recall petition carriers are working. Signature sheets for the pro-Davis "petition" look just like a regular initiative or recall signature sheet. Pro-Davis workers often station themselves near anti-Davis carriers, who get 75 cents for every valid signature they turn in. Most of the recall's money comes from Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of northern San Diego County, who plans to run as a potential Davis replacement if the recall qualifies for a vote. Recall backers don't like the scene all this creates outside supermarkets and at shopping centers. "But we expected it to come down to hardball," said Ted Costa, the initial organizer of the recall drive. "It has. "The Davis carriers ask people 'have you had a chance to sign the Davis petition?' They leave the impression with people that they've signed the recall petition, so voters then decline to sign the real recall petition when it's offered to them because they think they've already signed," Costa complains. "I believe that's fraud. For sure it's gutter politics." That's what Riordan and his supporters thought of the early 2002 ad campaign that destroyed his candidacy. It didn't help them. Meanwhile, those who sign the "Davis petition" aren't really signing a petition, defined by Webster as "an entreaty" or "a request" for something. All the Davis document says is that signers don't want the recall. Both sides say the proximity of the rival petition carriers could lead to confrontations. Both sides deny wanting anything like that. "No good comes from confrontation," Costa said.
"We have no intention to actively or physically interfere with their carriers," said Carroll Williams, a firefighters union executive and spokesman for the Davis committee in its early days. "The
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