Can Karl Rove and the RNC learn anything from the California Recall Election?

By Patrick Garcia  wesupport the vets  staff writer

It was like that historic Joe Lewis fight my Dad used to tell me about. Dad and his buddies had all gathered at our house to watch the fight on the tiny B&W TV with the magnifying bubble on the front to make the picture larger. They had just got their first beer and moved into the living room  to sit down and the fight was over. Joe had  Ko’d in opponent in the first thirty seconds of the first round! MSNBC didn’t wait for the ring bell—they announced Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor-elect at  8:00.01 PM Pacific time. The actor that everyone said had muscles but not political savvy had ko’d

The spendthrift Governor Gray Davis in just six weeks since he declared that he would “Make a change in Sacramento” on the Jay Leno show. Davis folded like a Hong Kong beach chair—he was toast and Arnold was in. It wasn’t easy but Arnold withstood the sludge of accusations about girls on his movie sets and even a guy that threw an egg at him on his first day of campaigning. Now there is a guy that would spit into the wind—I mean you have to be dumber than a brick to toss an egg at Arnold-right? If they caught the guy and brought him to Arnold , Arnold would probably just shake his hand. The guy’s hand would look like a Coors beer can that had been rolled over by Arnold’s Humvee.

Republicans like Carl Rove and the RNC are all atwitter with the win by Arnie. Even if GWB didn’t bother to come out to appear with the Terminator,  they wanted to make sure they quoted the right toadying words so credit would come their way. What they missed was the fact that this was not a Demo-Repub win.

It was a people win

. The people of California circulated petitions to make the recall because of the financial quagmire that  Davis had dropped them into following one of the biggest Enron fiasco’s on the books- contracts for energy and power to the state. While the recall movement was in the middle of  the process, Davis traduces Californians by brilliantly tripling the vehicle tax. Talk about a guy that is out of the loop-he never saw the silver bullet coming.  There was no political posturing by Republicans-the RNC probably wasn’t even sure Arnie was a party member when they looked at him on stage and saw all those  Knights and maidens from Camelot- Shrivers by the dozen. (There are five sisters and brothers including Maria and fifteen grandchildren  of Sargent and Eunice Shriver Kennedy) This is one son-in –law that probably never talked politics at the family Thanksgiving dinner I imagine.

What Carl Rove and the RNC and a Congressman by the name of Michael Bilirakis of the ninth district in Florida need to observe here is what happens when you rile enough people

I don’t know if there is a similar provision in the U.S. constitution like the one in the California constitution that enables the people to petition a recall. This was an historic event in California. No governor has ever been recalled by the people in  a state before. That didn’t keep this recall from snowballing from zero to  megawhamo in less than five Months- it can happen. When Bilirakis refused to sign the discharge petition of Democrat Jim Marshall to bring HR303 to the floor vote, the disabled veterans knew of his apocryphal partisan politics. They were angered. Bilirakis considered their anger innocuous and that of misbehaved children. His office had blue smoke coming out of the fax machine and the phone from veterans groups yet he continued to ignore their voice. Then, not unlike Davis when he levied the triple vehicle tax in the middle of the recall petition movement, Bilirakis instructs the Republicans in congress not to sign the petition for discharge as well. He halted the movement onto the floor and dashed the hopes of nearly 800,000 veterans that this bill would get the attention it finally deserved this year.  This is one guy that thinks that the castle moat will keep the vets from climbing the wall and  invading the ninth district of Florida with their voting suggestions to brother veterans. He thinks evidently that he is bullet-proof. Time will tell.

Republicans have a concern in the Senate also. With only a two vote majority margin they are looking at the retirement of Don Nickles of Oklahoma-chair of the budget committee as a  weakness in their strength  in the Senate after 2004.

This week there were rumors of a compromise being worked on for HR303. It would provide those retired disabled vets with twenty years service with the removal of the offset from their retirement. Something that they have been fighting for and is written into the HR303 text. But, as is (again) rumored, the compromise would also include a phase-in for those in the 50-100% disabled category with a 50% in the first year and then the remainder over ten years.

This “compromise” was like lighting a match in the dark garage to look for the gasoline can. When veterans heard the “rumor” they immediately decided that the administration was playing vet against vet and looking for a stall tactic that would take the negotiations past Veterans Day and perhaps not even with a closure this congressional session.

Starting approximately ninety days ago a group of veterans in Florida decided that they would organize a group of concerned veterans into a National political party. The group assembled an aggressive number of volunteers which quickly gathered the required essentials of documentation and other veterans and the Veterans Party Of  Florida (VPF) was officially approved by the Florida Board of elections on August 28,2003  If Carl Rove, the RNC and congressman Bilirakis can’t get the picture by now, they had better take their Kodak in for repair. Florida has the second largest population of veterans in the nation and the party, as of this date, has registered and been approved in five additional states

The recall vote in California was not Democratic or Republican. Perhaps the Demos could have made a better showing if they didn’t split their candidates and presented a stronger single candidate than the two they did but the outcry was from angered voters wanting recognition and voice. There were independents, moderates and green party voters all answering the call for a change.