According to Adam Nagourney of the New York Times, Bill Clinton has provided California Governor Gray Davis with an interesting way to look at the movement to recall him from office. Here is how the Clinton-coached Davis put it in the August 19 kickoff of his anti-recall campaign:

 

This recall is bigger than California.  What's happening here is part of an ongoing national effort to steal elections Republicans cannot win.

 

It started with the impeachment of President Clinton, when the Republicans could not beat him in 1996.  It continued in Florida, where they stopped the vote count, depriving thousands of Americans of the right to vote.

 

This year, they're trying to steal additional congressional seats in Colorado and Texas, overturning legal redistricting plans.  Here in California, the Republicans lost the governor's race last November. Now they're trying to use this recall to seize control of California just before the next presidential election.

 

Al Sharpton, who is a lousy presidential candidate but an excellent phrase-maker, calls the GOP's strategy, "Let's do it again until I win."

...in assessing the components of the Clinton-Davis message, we have one yes, one maybe, one yes and no, and one mostly yes. The chair therefore rules Republicans more or less guilty as charged of conducting "an ongoing national effort to steal elections Republicans cannot win."

It's undeniable that the departure from the orderly tradition of reapportioning congressional seats once every ten years was brought about by Republicans.  until Republicans starting redrawing political maps in Texas and Colorado, no state legislature had second-guessed a decennial redistricting for purely political reasons since the 1950s. This is completely unprecedented in modern political history.

 

Clearly, it's disruptive and poisonously partisan to redraw congressional districts every time control of a state legislature shifts from one party to another. But you can't really say it subverts democracy. Quite the opposite: It empowers democracy too much. Allowing a momentary change in the popular will to force unwarranted changes, though bad government, is nonetheless democratic government.  It's democracy on steroids, which can be just as harmful as democracy subverted.

Is it anti-democratic? No, in the limited sense that the gathering of recall petitions is a democratic process. Seen in this light, California's recall mechanism is another example of democracy on steroids. In a more meaningful sense, though, it is anti-democratic because if Davis is removed from office, it's entirely possibleindeed, likelythat he will be replaced by someone who received fewer votes than Davis did in last year's election.

1. Bush had fewer votes for President but the Supreme Court, filled with his father's appointees, settled the matter in his favor, in matters concerning a state where the process was screwy, and controlled by his brother and his Brother's friends like that Harris woman.  There was a work-around.  Losing the election didn't matter.  Bush got the office. 

2. Clinton was reelected twice and the work-around for that election was impeachment, which almost worked.  Well, the man did lie, under oath, about that blow job.  If Clinton had been thrown out, losing the election to him wouldn't have mattered.  He'd be out of office.

3. The business now going on in Texas?   The 1990 census led to redistricting, as happens ever ten years with the census data in every state when the numbers are crunched.  Texas has enough Republicans in the state legislature to redistrict again this year, an extra time without any new census data, and thus eliminate six or seven Democratic districts.  Unusual, but why not?  No one thought of it before, I guess.  The Democrats in the Texas legislature ran off twice, once to Oklahoma and this time to New Mexico.  No vote was possible without a quorum.  But Tom DeLay, the top Republican in the US senate has asked the Justice Department (Ashcroft) to intervene and arrest the Democrats and bring them back.  There is then a work-around to get more votes outside the normal processes.  The Justice Department has not decided, yet, if they can really do that.  I assume the telephone lines will be active in Washington this weekend.

4. The California recall - what to do about an election where a Democrat, Davis, beat a Republican, Simon, with more votes, just last November.  There's a work-around here too.  A Republican operative, Issa, privately funds a recall campaign and pays for the gathering of the signatures.  The election is voided and we almost certainly get a Republican governor, who, given the 135 names on the ballot, can be elected with as little as ten percent of the vote.  Davis has to get over fifty percent to stop the recall and stay in office.  A pretty good work-around voiding the previous election of nine months ago.  Damned clever.