Left coasters have always been suspicious of Texans-and especially now, when so many Californians believe Texas oil companies are reaping huge profits at their expense. The footage of Bush in a cowboy hat running on Los Angeles newscasts came across as a great big “Howdy!”
Bush has never seemed to strike the right tone in California. When he was campaigning here last year, Bush used to talk about being “a fellow Westerner.” I got what he was trying to do: evoke a shared sense of open space, entrepreneurial spirit and rugged individualism. Problem is, Californians don’t see themselves as “Westerners,” they see themselves as Californians. And they don’t feel any connection to Texas. “Californians think Texas is the Deep South,” says Garry South, political guru to California Gov. Gray Davis. “It’s an ‘awl’ state.” Oil, that is.
Bush not only doesn’t “feel the pain” of liberal Hollywood as Bill Clinton did, he disdains it. This White House does not watch “The West Wing.” In fact, they make fun of how unrealistic it is. Clinton, meanwhile, is still dining out with “West Wing” star Martin Sheen, who protests the death penalty.
“Culturally Bush is not comfortable with California,” says USC professor Sherry Jeffee, who attended Bush’s speech at the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “I think in the framework of the Bush administration, California is a foreign country. And they’re not big on foreign affairs.”
Bush and Davis have certainly not been speaking the same language when it comes to how to solve the state’s energy crisis. Davis has been turning up the volume for caps on energy prices for weeks, even traveling to Illinois-another afflicted state-to build support. On Tuesday, Bush returned fire. In his speech to the mostly Republican audience gathered for a luncheon at the Century Plaza Hotel, Bush explained his philosophical opposition to price caps. “Price caps do nothing to reduce demand, and they do nothing to increase supply,” Bush told the crowd of a couple thousand. “Blame shifting is not action, it’s a distraction.”
Davis sat on the dais politely listening to the president. He later said he was “honored” by the visit. Bush, too, said he was “honored” by Davis’s presence and he added a line to his speech, calling him “your good governor.” But the culture of nice didn’t change anybody’s mind. The 35-minute meeting between the two leaders that followed the speech produced one major breakthrough: Davis told Bush that he was going to sue the federal agency that regulates prices. Welcome to the most litigious state in the union.
My colleague Ken Fireman of Newsday said the meeting had the feel of a “U.S.-Soviet summit.” There was prespin, spin and postspin. The prespin started last week over just who came up with the idea for the detente meeting. The White House announced it, implying that it was theirs. But Davis’s people insist that the governor-on not hearing from Bush’s people-called Andy Card and asked for the one-on-one. They released a copy of the letter they faxed to the White House requesting the summit.
Once we landed in Los Angeles, there was-as usual-a lot of paper being handed out in the filing center set up for the White House press corps. There was one paper being handed out that interested me. It was a letter to Bush from some prominent economists, including Milton Friedman, opposing price caps. Davis’s folks, it turns out, had been handing out letters from their own economists in support of price caps.
After the meeting, the postspin began. It wasn’t as bad as during the presidential debates, but each side did call a press briefing-at about the same time, of course. I had to choose between Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, in the press filing center at 3:10 or Gray Davis himself upstairs in the Olympic Ballroom at 3:00. I chose Davis for a change of pace.
Davis and Bush don’t seem to have much of a natural simpatico. Davis is not known to engage in locker-room banter before interviews. He’s not exactly humorless, but it seems his parents named him Gray for a reason. Bush is famous by now for joking around. He even opened his speech on Tuesday talking about his cat Ernie, who was living with his buddy Brad Freeman in some swank part of town because he was too wild for the White House’s historical furnishings. “He loves L.A.,” Bush said of Ernie. “He’s dating. He has an agent. And for some reason, he looks 10 years younger.”
Davis was all business in his press conference. “I don’t think this is a matter of philosophy or ideology but a matter of law,” he said to counter Bush’s argument against price caps. Then he explained that the four power plants due on line this summer in California were first under construction back when the state had price caps. Clearly caps aren’t a deterrent to more production, he argued. I ran back downstairs to catch the end of Karl Rove throwing his own facts at reporters. “When the cap was lowered by this administration in California, what happened was, 3,000 megawatts of power disappeared from the state and was sold elsewhere,” Rove said.
Just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore spin, a reporter asked Rove why Bush hadn’t come to California sooner. Why California-the most populous state in the nation-was the 30th state Bush visited as president. Had it been political? Punishment because the state voted against him even though he outspent Al Gore here by $20 million? No, Rove said, they had been planning on coming in April, but China interfered. OK, but during China, Bush went to throw out the first pitch at the Milwaukee Brewers’ game and made a big deal out of keeping to his schedule. Was it really on the schedule or was there some revisionist history going on?
Garry South-who some describe as the Karl Rove of California-wasn’t going to be spun by the master. He was working the halls of the Century Plaza but reached me on my cell. “It’s a huge mistake for the president to come out here and bring nothing in hand,” South said. “Was this a legitimate trip or was this a C.Y.A. trip?” Noting my confusion, he explained further: “Cover your a-,” sounding more Rove than Rove. (Davis has recently hired Gore spin-room veterans Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane to help sell his point of view.)
Bush does seem to have been ignoring California. Some of his GOP buddies in the state started bugging him to get out here. It took longer than a lot of them thought it should. As one aide said to me only half-jokingly a few months ago, “They let us down.”
California also let Bush’s father down in 1992. But with the change of power in the Senate and a lot at stake in the House in 2002, this week’s trip to Los Angeles, did little to mend fences. As Bush was getting into his speech yesterday a young woman started yelling. Marla Ruzicka, 24, of Global Exchange-an activist group opposing Bush’s energy policy-unwrapped a banner reading “Price Caps Now!” that she had been wearing as a wraparound skirt. She stood up on her chair and started shouting “Stop gouging our economy!” One of her fellow lunchers ripped her banner down and five Secret Service agents swarmed on her and took her off in handcuffs. Bush never stopped talking even through two more similar interruptions.
Usually, protestors don’t get inside Bush events; they are relegated to the outskirts. One of my frustrations traveling in the fast-moving, tightly controlled press pool, is that we rarely get access to protestors or the proverbial “man on the street.” Last week in Cleveland, we went scurrying past a group of union protestors so fast I didn’t have a chance to read their signs. I just heard their chant: “You must be a clown to come to a union town,” they said.
In Los Angeles, I was not in the pool, and I had time to mingle with the crowd of a couple hundred gathered outside the hotel. There were the usual “Hail to the Thief” signs (and the variation “Heil to the Thief”), earnest Sierra Club representatives and outraged twentysomethings. There was a California flavor to the protest. Ron, a 22-year-old Bush supporter in a tie and 27-year-old Jeff, a Nader supporter with a skateboard, had this exchange: “Why don’t you move to France since you’re a socialist, dude,” Ron said to Jeff. “Why don’t you move to Germany since you’re a Nazi, bro.”
I weighed going back inside the spin room, but first I stayed a little longer in the sun.
