Five Myths About the Recall

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly. Posted August 14, 2003.

It's time to tune out the bleating elites and vacant talking heads whose doomsday warnings about these exciting times raise questions about their sanity. They need to spend more time with their de Tocqueville, who could have warned them that here in America nothing is more chaotic than democracy itself. Let's debunk five myths about the recall.

Myth No. 1: The recall election is a circus.

It's a circus only to the degree that cynical, shallow media make it so. Especially the electronic media in which the ringmasters are the TV news directors -- a species that wouldn't recognize a "serious" election if it fell on their empty heads. We're now going to get civics lectures from a bunch of ratings whores who long ago traded in their Sacramento bureaus for freeway telecopters?

Every election cycle attracts marginal and aberrant candidates, and the media usually ignore them after the one or two initial and totally predictable soft features. Angelyne, Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt et al. loom so large in this election only because the telephoto lenses remain so tightly locked onto them.

The L.A. Times (and other major metros) have also helped promote the circus theme, giving undue attention to the carnival candidates. A strange twist, as this is the same Times that barred Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader from the presidential debate it organized during the 2000 campaign. Times management argued at the time that Nader wasn't a serious enough candidate to warrant inclusion. Nader's mistake, apparently, was to not have Gary Coleman chauffeur him down to Spring Street in Angelyne's pink Vette.

Myth No. 2: The recall election will throw the state into chaos.

Whenever encrusted elites lose control of one of their processes, they always warn of chaos, catastrophe and dire consequences. Only they are wise enough to guide our lives. Nothing strikes so much fear into their manipulative little hearts as when the hoi polloi spin out of control -- out of their control.

An election in which pliant, predictable candidates are handpicked in backrooms and bankrolled by special interests, in which the victor comes to power through a $75 million campaign of slash-and-burn TV ads with a record-low turnout, well, thats just one more serious and orderly round of balloting, were supposed to believe. But let just any dumb bastard citizen off the street run for office, totally beyond the reach of the party and lobbyist elites, and that is a sure sign that California is sliding into the sea. What has the establishment so panicked about this election is hardly the threat of chaos. It's rather the unpredictability of the process and its outcome. Imagine electing some candidate that hasn't already been bought and paid for. The horror, the horror.

We're told the recall is a hijacking, a coup, the illegitimate overturning of a legitimate election; ultimately, we're warned, this is the unwashed and witless electorate running riot. Pundits beware: This "circus" election is likely to generate a bigger turnout than last year's "official" contest. A staggering 90 percent of voters say they plan to cast ballots on October 7. In a recent Gallup Poll, almost 70 percent of likely voters said they want to oust Gray Davis.

Those who continue to insist this recall is a sham perhaps ought to take the advice Bertolt Brecht once gave the East German regime: Maybe the government should dismiss the people and elect a new one?

The latest apocalyptic warning from the panicked elites is that with more than 100 names on the ballot, it could take 10 minutes (!) for a voter to go through and maybe 40 hours for some small counties to tally. As a reporter, I've been to more than one country where people braved jail and gunfire in order to vote, or even to just suggest an election should be held. Somehow I think the republic will survive if a lengthy ballot makes a few Californians late to Pilates classes on Election Day.

Myth No. 3: Organized labor is the force behind progressive politics.

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