Can't Buy their love

By Eric Pooley/Los Angeles

In the nasty three-way race for California's Democratic gubernatorial nomination, Gray Davis was supposed to be the roadkill candidate: a bland career politician squashed by two glamorous multimillionaire opponents--airline tycoon Al Checchi and Representative Jane Harman. Davis, the state's solid but uninspiring lieutenant governor, was ignored by pundits and written off by insiders who are convinced that California has entered the age of the "virtual campaign," in which elections are won and lost solely in the ectoplasm of television ads. According to this theory, Californians don't follow politics, and the local news media barely cover it--so hiring hot consultants and buying maximum TV time is all that counts. It seemed the primary would be a shootout between Harman, an astute but little-known politician whose campaign is based on equal parts of gender (57% of California Democrats are women) and wealth (her husband, audio-component magnate Sidney Harman, has given millions to her cause), and Checchi, a leveraged-buyout wizard who has already spent $30 million on the primary, a record for a statewide campaign. Checchi's commercials have been blitzing viewers since November; he hired Bill Clinton's pollster, Ted Kennedy's media man, a cadre of 29 policy wonks and even a platoon of temps to cheer at one of his speeches. "Davis is destined to finish third," Governor Pete Wilson predicted late last month in an interview with TIME, "simply because he can't compete financially."

But the bad news never got through to Davis--or the people of California. The latest poll by the independent Field Institute put Davis in first place, with 19% of the vote--even though half of those polled had never seen one of his commercials. Checchi was stuck in second place, with 17%, and Harman dropped from first to third, with 11%. The percentages are low because the June 2 primary is open to all voters; the Democrats will share the ballot with the G.O.P. candidate, state attorney general Dan Lungren, who is running virtually unopposed (and took 27% in the poll). To win the Democratic nomination, a candidate needs only about 25% of the vote.

"Every observer in the state was startled by Davis' resurgence," says Field Institute director Mark DiCamillo. That surge was triggered by the merciless (and often misleading) barrage of attack spots that Checchi leveled against Harman. Last fall, Checchi promised not to indulge in such negative tactics, but he abandoned his pledge as soon as his candidacy stalled. Though he succeeded in driving voters away from Harman, they migrated to Davis, apparently because Checchi's ads turned off voters (those who have seen a lot of them tend to have more negative views of Checchi) and because Davis has a history of service to the state. Sixty percent of Californians say they are more likely to vote for someone who has considerable political experience. It may be a quaint notion, but a track record--crafting legislation, hammering out consensus, listening to interest groups and collecting chits--still counts for something, even in the virtual wonderland of California. And Davis is right when he argues that the 5 million or 6 million people who will vote in the June 2 primary--of the 33 million in the state--are particularly sophisticated on this point.

The rap on Davis--that his first name summarizes his style, that he's a publicity hound and fund-raising robot whose chief accomplishments are getting elected and showing up for work--isn't entirely deserved. He can be a soporific speechmaker, but he can also be incisive. It is true that he has spent 23 years dialing for dollars and inching toward the Governor's office--as assemblyman, controller and lieutenant governor--only to find two rich interlopers standing between him and the nomination. "I don't relish running against the 313th-richest man in America," he says, "but when I look at what I could be up against"--Senator Dianne Feinstein, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, former Representative Leon Panetta--"I feel fortunate to have drawn the opponents I did." With his small, mild eyes and a high forehead crowned by a retro sweep of (yes) gray hair, Davis knows he'll win no points for style. But he insists that Californians don't want their politicians to be celebrities. "The most charismatic candidate has lost the last four gubernatorial elections," he says, pointing to former L.A. mayor Tom Bradley (in 1982 and '86), Feinstein ('90), and former state treasurer Kathleen Brown ('94)--Democrats all. The Republican victors in those races--George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson--were every bit as gray as Davis. "Given the history," he says with a chuckle, "I've decided to hold my charisma in reserve."

Reserve comes naturally to Davis. His father, a Time Inc. ad-sales executive in the 1950s, was an alcoholic who fumbled away the family's nest egg. Davis saw his parents' marriage dissolve and sought refuge in duty, persistence and order. After graduating from Stanford and Columbia Law School, he served in Vietnam, became an aide to Bradley and rose to prominence as the 32-year-old chief of staff for California's last flamboyant (and Democratic) Governor, Jerry Brown. The two could not have been less alike: Brown, a geyser of good and bad ideas, and Davis, the bone-dry counselor who helped Brown focus and ran the show when he was away on his failed presidential bids in 1976 and '80. Always less liberal than Brown (Davis supported the death penalty; Brown opposed it), he moved to the center as California politics turned right in the 1980s. And he racked up enough modest achievements--getting asbestos out of the schools, preserving environmentally fragile land, putting pictures of missing children on milk cartons--for the Los Angeles Times to describe him as "intelligent, capable, politically principled and genuinely interested in using government as a tool for the betterment of others."

Ambition sometimes got the better of Davis. After his 1986 race for controller, he paid $28,000 to settle charges that he used state workers and phones for long-distance fund-raising calls. He raked in donations from Wall Street firms that handled state bonds and pension funds, a shabby practice that was legal at the time but that has since been restricted by the SEC. And in 1992, running against Feinstein in a hopeless Senate primary bid, he put up an ad comparing her to hotel queen Leona Helmsley, a convicted tax evader--a move that got Davis hooted out of the race. "A couple of blemishes," he says. "Are people going to hold that against me?"

They will if Checchi has anything to say about it. As soon as Davis moved ahead in the polls, Checchi tried to take him down with TV spots: one blasted him for "trading cash for favors" as controller; another trumpeted an audit critical of him in the job. The first misrepresented Davis' role, and the second didn't mention that the audit was discredited by two state reports. What the spots really told Californians was that despite his promise of a fresh approach to politics, Checchi was resorting to the same, tired, attack-dog techniques. "I don't think my spots are negative at all," says Checchi, sounding like any other pol. "They are comparative."

The pity is that Checchi was free to run a different kind of campaign, to use his $750 million net worth for something other than the old slash-and-burn. If he had, this might be known as a race between three smart people trying to grow into a job that seems a few sizes too big for any of them. Instead, it's just another slimefest.

Checchi started out on a classier course. He has a substantial mind and a record of achievement in business. Before announcing his candidacy, he spent a year studying the issues and traveling the state, talking to academics, officeholders and citizens--just the kind of retail politics that was supposed to be obsolete. "If people like the way things have been going in California, they should vote for Davis or Harman," he says. "If they think government is broken, they should vote for me."

His agent-of-change pitch might have played well in an angry year like 1994, but in 1998 most Californians think the state is on the right track. These days, 62% are fairly satisfied with the much maligned state legislature. That's why Checchi found his opening among those who haven't enjoyed the fruits of California's economic boom: working-class whites, blacks and Latinos. "When Checchi saw that, he moved left, talking about Bobby Kennedy and embracing a traditional liberal agenda," says Harman strategist Bill Carrick. Checchi's early ads didn't mention that he was a Democrat and seemed designed to poach Republican voters from Lungren. But now Checchi is offering a welter of costly programs--$1 billion for 10,000 new cops, $3 billion for housing and urban assistance, $6 billion to bring public-school spending up to the national average, and more for tax credits, pre-school and crime prevention--all without a tax increase. He says he would pay for some through budget surpluses and a 10% cut in bureaucracy (never mind that future surpluses are earmarked for a reduction in school-class size and that California has the fewest state workers per capita). The rest would be "self-funding"--new cops cut costs by preventing crime. This is speculative accounting at best, but Checchi wants Californians to trust his skills. "We haven't had people interested in managing the government," he said at an event last month. "I am interested in managing it. Setting budgets and objectives--that's what I do."

Checchi's management skills have been coming under attack by Davis, who is buying heavy TV time to slug away at Checchi's stewardship of Northwest Airlines, which he acquired in a 1989 leveraged buyout. Checchi portrays his time at Northwest as a classic "white knight" tale--spent reforming management and saving the airline--while Davis says Checchi's takeover saddled the company with so much debt that he drove it to the brink of bankruptcy. There is truth to both claims: Northwest is healthier now than it was before Checchi came along, but during the recession of 1992 the company teetered on the precipice until $800 million in union givebacks and a $320 million state bailout steadied it. Both sides agree that Checchi wants to do for California what he did for Northwest. The question is, which story line will the public believe?

A new Davis ad whacks Checchi for failing to vote in four recent California elections, but Harman has so far refused to sling mud with the boys. "Mr. Checchi can waste his money attacking me," she told the camera in one commercial. "I'll spend my time on real problems." It might have worked--if she had been ready with a coherent plan for the state. But she wasn't. A former political aide, lawyer and lobbyist, Harman has spent most of her adult life in Washington. She entered the race late because she saw an opening after Feinstein decided not to run, but wasn't up to speed on the issues and spent months offering little more than platitudes. She was for better schools (the hot topic this year), more jobs, less crime and "digital" leadership based on "horizontal" decision-making. Harman is sharper than that, but hasn't often proved it. At a women's political caucus in Concord last month, her appeal was so generic and gender-based--breast-cancer research, abortion rights, child care, and her signature wrap-up line, "May the best woman win"--that some in the audience were left shaking their heads. "She was asking for my vote because we're both female," said Ginny Perez, a plumber who was taking a cigarette break after the speech. "That doesn't work for me. What I heard sounded like a TV commercial. And I don't vote for a commercial."

Davis is gambling that there are enough voters like Perez left in California for a poor man to win at a plutocrat's game. If he prevails, Harman and Checchi--like Michael Huffington, the state's failed millionaire Senate candidate of 1994--will have learned that California campaigns aren't so virtual after all.