Right. So. Continued from yesterday.

Steve Lopez of the LA Times had an excellent column today that I do not have the energy to find and link to right now. I think it was there I saw it noted that Davis 'has an obsessive compulsive fundraising disorder.' Davis obviously want(s/ed) to be governor very very badly. I just can't discern any obvious unselfish reasons.

Bustamante used to be an aide to a state assemblyman, and when the assemblyman was term-limited out, Cruz was anointed his replacement, and eventually was term-limited himself, and so right now his musical chair reads "lieutenant governor". I don't see much passion from him; why government? Because it's there, and it's -hey!- kinda lucrative, cool. ...bleah.

And, of course, The Arnold. No offense to any Austrians in the audience, but I'm not sure how long I'll be able to listen to his accent on any given occasion. We'll see. I think it may just be that I'm so unused to hearing him outside of a movie, so hearing him in a political context is still giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance. Schwarzenegger is socially moderate, which is nice, but he ran his campaign entirely on personality and platitudes. When he announced, I thought it mildly entertaining, though annoying that he seemed to have kept Riordan from running, but I certainly wasn't going to vote for him; now, standing at the portable voting booth, I found my hole-puncher hesitating over the little black hole next to his name.

All the wide-open possibilities of the chaotic early days after the filing deadline had dwindled, once again, to choosing the best of a bad lot.

Root cause. That's what this recall is about. I don't buy the argument that it "isn't democratic"; the procedure was set up this way back around 1911, democratically to the best of my knowledge, and we've had almost a century to change it. It had never been used on a governor until now because I suspect the level of voter frustration with the visible options has rarely been as high as now. The politically minded take turns, play musical chairs with term-limited safely-gerrymandered seats in the legislature and locally and with lobby groups, without visibly doing much that is productive for the long term future of the state. Davis is a cozy participant in all of that, and so is Bustamante.

The hole-puncher hovered.

I have a sometimes disconcerting tendency to favor an interesting action of unknown result, as compared to inaction that brings business as usual. The historian and storyteller parts of me want to see what would happen, if.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't vote for Arnold, not directly. But I knew that would likely be the indirect result, as -- I voted for Peter Camejo, the Green.

I voted for Gore over Bush; I voted for Davis last time over Simon -- but I almost voted Green then too, except it was looking kind of close and I certainly didn't want Simon in there. Arnold... well, now we get to find out what will happen.

But if he does anything remotely like abolishing the Coastal Commission, I shall be very put out.

contents of the purple tricycle are copyright 2003 carrie lynn king unless otherwise noted.