PREPARE HIS TERMINATION PAPERS

A Bad Hand: Gray Davis deals for casino support (Bill Bradley, JULY 18-24, 2003, LA Weekly)

Backed by the tribes in the past, Davis angered them this year by trying to get them to help with the state budget crisis by sharing more revenue from their burgeoning casino operations. With them balking and, alarmingly, talking with recall advocates, Davis backed off. He signaled his acquiescence by attending the opening of a new Morongo casino in the Southern California desert, site of an earlier meeting between Indian casino reps and recall champion Congressman Darrell Issa, in early May, then released the May revision of his budget, which dropped the heavy revenue demands on the tribes.

Recall-campaign coordinator David Gilliard says the Indian casino interests stopped talking with the recall forces right after Davis made his May pilgrimage to the Morongo casino. But Davis may have been alarmed by Bustamante getting center stage at the CNIGA summit. Bustamante was the last of the potential Democratic candidates to say he doesn?t intend to run to replace Davis in a recall election. Many expect that statement not to hold.

In any event, Democratic sources say that Davis is turning to the casino tribes to help defeat the recall. "We're taking a hard look" at helping fund the drive against the Davis recall, confirms Howard Dickstein, attorney for a half-dozen of the casino tribes. [...]

Democratic insiders buzz angrily about Davis being taken to the cleaners by signature-gathering firms that sold them on a meaningless counterpetition drive, which not only failed to block or even delay the recall-petition drive, but also wasted more than $1 million on a purported 1.1 million unverified signatures expressing vague support for Davis' positions, for which gatherers were paid a dollar a head. Davis campaign officials won't say exactly how much they spent on the effort, which was designed to siphon off enough workers to delay the recall's qualification. "A complete failure," a ranking Democratic adviser calls it, "and Gray no longer has that kind of money to burn."

Even if he survives somehow, it can't help the Democratic presidential nominee in '04 to have the most important state in the Blue column in such disarray. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 18, 2003 2:29 PM