Recall election shows too much democracy is dangerous

He insists that he's opposed to giving illegal immigrants driver's licenses not because they are, in fact, illegally in the United States, but because it would be a "security threat" to have licensed immigrant drivers who haven't been fingerprinted. He refuses to rule out raising taxes, even though California is suffering not from a revenue shortfall but from the consequences of a spending waterfall. In all likelihood, he would make the disaster that is California a bipartisan affair.

Since I don't have to live and raise my kid in California, the best outcome possible would be for Gray Davis to win the recall by the skin of his teeth, but only after carrying out his ongoing panderfest to the very last pander. As it is right now, Davis is signing scores of liberal bills that even he would normally oppose in order to shore up support from rent-seeking liberal interest groups.

It's a mortifying fire sale of the fraction of integrity the man had left. But it has the advantage of making the entire Democratic Party - including such national figures as Al Gore, Bill Clinton and the presidential contenders - sign on to the Davis bandwagon.

These concessions not only make it even more difficult for Davis to fix the state's problems, but also mean that Davis and the Democrats will own California's problems completely. Republicans and conservatives will have no fingerprints on the problems and, come the next election, they can run untainted for the governorship and all the way down the ticket. Indeed, it's entirely possible that should Davis stay in office, George W. Bush could actually win California in 2004.

Even though I'm against the recall, if I lived in California I would vote for the recall and try to run Gray Davis out on a rail. Why the double-standard? Because if I lived in California, I would have to vote for my immediate interests. And, besides, I never would have voted for Davis in the first place.

So if I lived there, I would absolutely vote for state Senator Tom McClintock. Not only is he a real conservative, he's the only conservative in the race. He grasps the issues with clarity several orders of magnitude greater than Schwarzenegger. But most important, he offers what the Goldwaterites called a choice, not an echo.

If we're going to have a recall at all, making this election a clear choice, not just between candidates but between parties, is the most important thing of all.