Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Gray's Leap

Friday, June 1, 2001

I do not often disagree with my friend Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform. I believe he is tactically correct but strategically wrong when he assails California Governor Gray Davis for using taxpayer funds to pay for Democratic hired guns.

Davis is using public funds - $180,000 of them - to hire Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, late of the Al Gore organization, to help shape public opinion on California's energy problems.

Obviously, no taxpayer in California, can be thrilled about this contract. Republican members of the State Legislature should follow the lead of Republican Senate leader Jim Brulte who said, "If the governor wants to hire political attack dogs, that is his business. But the appropriate funding would be the Governor Davis Campaign Committee, not the taxpayers of California."

So, tactically Grover is correct. This is a misuse of taxpayer's money.

But, strategically, it appears that Governor Davis, like Wile E. Coyote, has fallen off a political cliff and is grasping at anything he can on his way down.

A California Field Poll released last week showed Davis' job approval having plummeted from the sixties to 42 percent. 51% of Californians don't think they would vote for him again.

If, like Davis, you realize the side of a mountain is racing by you very quickly, the Acme Political Spinning Parachute Company, in the person of Lehane and Fabiani, starts looking pretty good.

But here's the strategic error in his thinking. Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani are adherents of a type of politics which has gone out of style. As an example: As soon as President Bush's folks called to arrange a meeting with Davis, Lehane and Fabiani tried to maneuver things so that individual Californians would be in the meeting to tell the President how difficult things are.

Karen Hughes and Karl Rove might have been born at night, but they weren't, as the saying goes, born LAST night.

There was no way they were going to agree to have lackies hand-picked by Lehane and Fabiani wagging their collective fingers in the President's face in front of the national press corps.

The public is justifiably tired of the politics of the 90's in which blame had to be assigned to someone for everything which happened. And the game was to blame the other guy first, fast, and often.

Meeting with the President of the United States - at least meeting with THIS President of the United States - appears to have the effect of soothing troubled waters. Following their meeting, Davis, according to John Marelius' piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, said "The meeting was cordial, informational, businesslike."

Davis wants Bush to impose price ceilings on wholesale energy prices. The President won't do that because it will have the effect of having energy, which is already in short supply in California, sold at higher prices elsewhere.

Price controls are a trap which will not gain President Bush any friends in the Governor's mansion in Sacramento, but which will inevitably lead to the Federal government taking control of the entire energy value chain - from the well-head to the light bulb in the lamp next to your sofa.

Consumers are complaining electricity costs too much, so the electric companies' prices must be controlled. Electric companies will complain they are paying more for natural gas, so natural gas prices will have to be controlled. Natural gas companies will complain they are being charged too much for transmission, so transmission costs will have to be controlled.

The Davis-Lehane-Fabiani team have fallen victim to one of the classic blunders in politics. The most famous (as enunciated by Vizzini in 1987) is: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." The second is, "Never re-run the previous election."

Davis' spending $180,000 on them will do nothing to solve the energy situation in California. That's the bad news. They will, however, continue operate in the politics of the 90's producing a sound which is jarring and out of synch with the voters of 2002. Which is the good news.

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