California conservatives plan to unseat their governor - and Arnie is in the wings, reports Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
'Political intelligence test - name these politicians," Shawn Steel challenges me, pointing to four framed photographs on the wall of his lawyer's office in Rolling Hills, the exclusive ocean-side community on the Palos Verdes peninsula south of Long Beach.
The two pictures on top are of his heroes, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Beneath hang images of his least favourite people, Hillary Clinton and Fidel Castro. "That's the next president of the United States," I say, pointing to Mrs Clinton, much to his amusement.
Shawn Steel is the immediate past chairman of the California Republican Party and a hardcore conservative. He fondly recalls visiting Ireland as a Republican aide to help prepare for Reagan's presidential visit in 1983, a task that involved drinking sessions with Con Howard of foreign affairs and encounters with "Irish commie" demonstrators.
He is now at the epicentre of a political earthquake in California that could have repercussions across the US. "I started it," he says proudly, about the feverish movement to recall the joyless Democratic governor, Gray Davis, which will end on October 7th with a ballot that could see a Republican challenger such as movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger or former Los Angeles mayor Dick Riordan being elected in his place.
"I was talking to Melanie Morgan on December 30th," he says, referring to the morning host on the conservative Talk Radio KSFO 560 in San Francisco. "She said: 'Shawn, what can we do about this?' And I said: 'There's some discussion about a recall.' And Melanie said: 'That's a brilliant idea.' I can get 200,000 signatures in the Bay Area alone."
They were chatting on air about the prospect of tax increases threatened by Davis, who had just been re-elected and had announced that California's budget deficit had soared to $21 billion. (Today it is $38 billion, more than all other US states combined, barring New York). The collapse of the dot.com bubble that powered California's economy in the 1990s was more to blame than Davis for the deficit, but Republicans are having none of that.
"There is a quality-of-life crisis here in California," Steel tells me, hooking a thumb into trouser-braces adorned with the words "Beware of . . ." and pictures of dogs. "We have an outraged middle class. Businesses are leaving California because of poor infrastructure, inadequate schooling and mandated paid leave. We have the biggest workers' compensation in the United States; that alone would justify a recall. We are going to end up with just a wealthy Hollywood crowd and an immigrant community."
Such complaints were firing up dozens of conservative talk-shows, says Steel, settling in at his desk piled high with files from litigation he does on behalf of doctors, and overlooked by a poster saying "Attack Iraq". "Talk radio is the big new communications network," he says. "In California, you have one million conservatives talking to each other on a daily basis. So suddenly the phone-lines light up at this idea."
It was, for conservatives, an idea whose time had come. Ted Costa was also listening to talk radio. The 62-year-old head of an anti-tax group called People's Advocate had decided that the time for talk alone was past. As Americans were watching the space shuttle disintegrate over Texas on the first Saturday in February, he began drafting a petition to recall Davis. Under California law, if he could get enough signatures it would force the state to ask voters to recall Davis and select a successor from a list of candidates.
Shawn Steel, then still the California Republican Party chairman, went to see Costa in the offices from which he operates behind an all-night Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in a suburb of the capital, Sacramento. "Ted Costa works on a shoestring," he says, marvelling at what he found. "He drives a 20-year-old car. He took me to lunch in a McDonald's. I hadn't been to a McDonald's in years."
Costa, a self-described "wacko" dedicated to ousting incompetent or corrupt officials, told him the recall could work, even though Davis had been re-elected just three months previously, because he was in a tailspin in the polls.
Steel agreed. On the following Wednesday, Steel, Costa, Melanie Morgan and state assemblyman Dennis Mountjoy went to the Governor's offices in Sacramento and handed in the recall petition with an initial 65 names.
By virtue of being the first, Costa became the owner of the recall, the "original proponent" with sole authority to authorise the submission of signatures. Steel's signature went over a text giving the reason for what they were doing: gross mismanagement of California's finances. The move struck a chord in conservative communities all over California, nowhere more so than in Orange County, the affluent slice of suburbia and permanent sunshine south of Los Angeles that produced Richard Nixon and that seceded from LA in an anti-tax rebellion.
There, dislike of Governor Davis, a pro-union machine Democrat whose personality matches his surname, runs deep. Almost everyone I talk to at the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa expresses distaste for the governor, mainly because of his budget cuts, his tripling of car tax, and - a common theme - his passive response to the 2000-2001 power crisis that has left Californian householders paying outrageous electricity bills.
Some people think the recall is a waste of money but almost everyone has a grouse against Davis. Queuing for fries and soda, construction employer Ron David complains about the car tax, while teacher Nicole Barera tells me that she had not got a raise due last year.
In the centre of the vast fairground, June Cain Miller, a white-haired talk-show host with orange-painted fingernails, is broadcasting her conservative religious views from an open-air Radio KRLA 870 booth, against a background of fairground music and teenagers screaming on thrill rides.
"I started the recall idea on my programme," the 71-year-old grandmother assures me. "The liberal media has labelled us right-wing wackos, but it didn't take a whole lot to get this thing moving, with e-mails and calls."
She claims Davis and the Democrats are ruining California. "We are a hand- out society, we are a state full of underclass people, and people are sick and tired of being overtaxed," she says. "His solution to everything is more taxes."
While the recall idea was endorsed by right-wing talk radio, the organisers still lacked the money to get it off the ground. None was available from Republican Party coffers. The top strategist in the White House, Karl Rove, believes Bush would have a better chance of taking California in 2004 if Davis was allowed to twist in the wind. He and the President are ignoring the recall.
"I encountered stiff resistance from our so-called party leaders," says Steel, who was censured in December by California Republicans for referring to President Bush's California emissary Gerald Parsky as "Darth Vader" and for threatening to recall any Republicans who voted for tax increases. "But we have no power; these were leaders of a losing minority. I challenged them. I said: 'Let's take a chance!'"
For a couple of months it looked as if the recall idea would go the way of 31 previous unsuccessful attempts since the measure was made law in 1911 (when Californians felt the need to kick out politicians in the pocket of powerful railroad barons). Then along came Darrell Issa, and everything changed.
"They were a bunch of right-wing crackpots until Issa came in," says Nick Velasquez of Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall, set up in Sacramento by Davis loyalists.
Issa was a little-known two-term Congressman from San Diego with deep pockets and a shady record. In 1972, he and his older brother were accused of stealing a sports car in Cleveland, and in 1980 they were arrested in San José for allegedly staging the theft of Issa's car and selling it to a dealer.
In neither case were they prosecuted, nor was there any charge when Issa came under criminal suspicion in 1982 when his company was damaged by a fire that occurred shortly after insurance cover had been increased.
After these scrapes with the law, Issa went on to make a $100 million fortune selling car alarms. His recorded voice is familiar to countless owners of Viper alarm systems that warn would-be car thieves: "Please step away from the car."
To back the recall effort, Issa formed a group called Rescue California and pumped in $1.7 million of his own money to pay $1 per signature to petition- gatherers. Less conventional methods were also employed by recall proponents. Mobile phone users got messages saying, "Please call Jen", and found themselves listening to a recorded recall ad. Soon the number of petition signatures required by law, 897,158, was reached, and they kept pouring in, eventually reaching a total of 1.6 million.
It was not an altogether altruistic move. Issa declared all along that he wanted to replace Davis himself. He set up headquarters at Orange County's John Wayne Airport to campaign on his pro-gun and anti-abortion record. Up until this week he was the only declared candidate.
But much more attention has centred on a hulking man who once posed for nude photographs and skipped his father's funeral to attend a body-building competition. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said to be privately charming and politically smart, signalled his intention of running for governor of the world's fifth-biggest economy by telling a laboured joke about how he had forgotten the name of the Governor of California but he was sure he would recall it shortly.
The 55-year-old action star, whose Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opens in Ireland next Friday, is an unlikely favourite for the Republicans. He is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control, and has a Kennedy clan member, Maria Shriver, for his wife.
All of this makes Republicans a bit nervous, says Shawn Steel. But the Terminator is a fiscal conservative, very rich (worth more than $300 million) and one of the best-known celebrities in California, all of which which gives him a head-start. He already has a political team, led by Republican strategist George Gorton, who has taken part in other improbable elections. In 1996, Gorton was one of a small, unpublicised team of American advisers to Boris Yeltsin who claim credit for Yeltsin's 3 per cent election victory - by getting him to go negative against the Communists.
Austrian-born Schwarzenegger speaks English with a heavy accent - he's in "cho bisniss" - which has prompted jokes about the need for subtitles if he debates another possible candidate, writer Arianna Huffington, who has a pronounced Greek accent.
The actor has established some political credentials by campaigning around the state last year for Proposition 49, a measure to expand after-school programmes, and he has lent his name to Republican campaigns. He has no executive experience, but that didn't stop another California actor, Ronald Reagan, becoming governor (and president).
Being foreign-born, Schwarzenegger cannot, however, go on to become US president. Or can he? In the 1993 movie, Demolition Man, set in 2026, Sandra Bullock is bringing Sylvester Stallone up to date after he has been frozen in time for 30 years. She mentions Schwarzenegger Library. The dialogue is as follows:
Stallone: Hold it! The Schwarzenegger Library?
Bullock: Yes, the Schwarzenegger library. Wasn't he an actor when . . ?
Stallone: Stop! He was president? Bullock: Yes, even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at that time caused the 61st amendment, which states that . . ."
Stallone: I don't want to know.
Shawn Steel sees Schwarzenegger - a neighbour - as one of four likely "excellent" candidates. "He has hired a good Republican team," he says. "He has shown he is serious."
He says he saw Schwarzenegger stand for 45 minutes in a hot parking-lot taking questions (that's serious).
"But," Steel says happily, "anyone could blow this thing open."