With 'Undecideds' Like Me, This Recall Is a Fool's Game
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Michael Kroll, Posted: Oct 01, 2003
Editor's Note: Polls can't capture the tortured minds of many Californian voters just days before the state's recall election. High stakes and the many voting combinations on the ballot mean a tough call for voters and pollsters alike -- and, for the writer, a closet vote for the governor.
With days before the California recall, my sweaty palms make calling this election a fool's game. I can't be the only one who's wavered back and forth recently, but I still feel the need to unburden my soul: I just may have to be a closet voter for Gray Davis.
Until now, I've wanted to be a principled voter in the recall election, setting myself apart from all those anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-tax, pro-Prop. 54 Republicans who are holding their noses to vote for Schwarzenegger. For them, the taste of a Republican in the Statehouse trumps the principles they wish that Republican stood for.
The principle that has propelled me to support the recall has not even been broached directly in this campaign: the ancient concept of justice. Our governor's eye-on-the-polls approach to the subject, his near-blanket denial of paroles even when the state parole board recommends them, and his I-never-gave-it-a-thought endorsement of the death penalty (and his refusal to consider seriously petitions for clemency) makes him derelict in his duty, as I interpret his duty, and therefore appropriate for recall.
If I stuck to my principles, I'd probably vote for Green Party candidate Peter Camejo after voting for the recall, which had been my intention from the beginning. But, as it turns out, I'm no better than those pro-Schwarzenegger-but-I-wish-I-could-vote-for-McClintock Republicans I hold in such contempt.
I don't like Davis any more now than I did 10 minutes ago, but Cruz Bustamante, the only Democrat on the ballot, is sinking like a stone in the polls. That fact likely leaves the state in the future hands of either a body-building action hero who runs a business (and thinks that what is good for business is good for California), or Davis.
I have never been polled. I have no way of knowing how many other wannabe-principled voters like me are about to toss principle overboard and change the dynamics of this election.
I could, of course, rationalize such a shift by proclaiming fealty to a different principle, that of preventing the thugs who hijacked the last election from doing it yet again. It galls me to have to factor national politics into my calculus. I wish I could focus solely on issues of importance to California, but I am convinced that this election recall is part of a larger Republican strategy that emanates from Karl Rove and the White House to aggregate their power. Thus, their Machiavellian machinations are a California issue. I hate being a pawn, manipulated by a smiling, but unseen puppet master living in Washington, D.C.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is, like President Bush, only a pretty-boy front man, a stalking horse, for a collective of monied interests that want to pay less and get more, at the expense of those who pay more and get less. The powers behind the face endanger every social program in the state, from education and housing to health care and environmental protection. The stakes are high.
So comes my dilemma, and that of the other 20 percent of Democrats who have, until now, supported the recall. Do I follow my initial inclination to stay "pure" by sticking to principle, thus virtually assuring the decimation of what little is left of the social programs that I believe in? Or do I enter that closet-like voting booth, look furtively over my shoulder, and cast my ballot for Governor Davis, in the hopes of staving off the worst effects of the let-the-rich-rule crowd that is salivating to take over while also throwing a monkey wrench into the larger Republican agenda that we are not supposed to know about?
Like those unprincipled Republicans who'd like to vote for McClintock but won't, I too can taste what it will mean to have a Republican in the Statehouse. And, like them, the taste excites me to want to throw my principles overboard, and vote against the recall. With just days to go, I'm already holding my nose.
PNS contributor Michael Kroll (mkmitigates@hotmail.com) works with juvenile hall writers for The Beat Within (www.thebeatwithin.org), a PNS project.
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