The California Election - 10 October 2003

California spoke last Tuesday and what California said will not be known until we find out whether the recall procedure is an extension of democracy or a mockery of it.

One thing we can be sure of already about the electoral landslide in the most populous state in the union (33 millions) - the state whose economy is larger than that of all but four existing nations, the state which time and again has signalled a change in the direction of popular prejudice - is that the rise to its governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the joke it was in the beginning of the recent headlong campaign of, wait for it, 135 candidates.

Before we think over the election let's remind ourselves who the Californians are and what the recall procedure is all about.

Two years ago the ethnic majority of California tipped over from white to coloured.

That's to say just under 50% of its population is white, just over that is Latino, black or Asian ("Oriental" is not an acceptable word any more).

And when I say acceptable I'd like to recall the permissible changes in my American lifetime of the proper word for what so late as the Second World War were called, without offence, either Negroes or coloureds.

And then if there is a decisive date of change it has to be May 1954 - what a celebration in prospect next spring - when the United States Supreme Court pronounced the historic ruling about the plight of an eight-year-old Negro girl in having to cross a railroad track and walk two miles to a black school, since she was not allowed to go to a nearby white school.

The day of that ruling - the case of Brown versus Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas - was the beginning of racial integration in the political and social life of America.

Certainly from that time on there arose a lyrical cry among the Negro people - "black is beautiful"!

And for the next 30 or 40 years black was the correct word. Negro - or worse "nigger" - had become so unspeakable that to this day all public figures, when they want to indicate an impermissible vulgarism, refer to "the N-word".

But after a decade or two blacks themselves seem to want a more specific, grander nomenclature. And "African American" was, you might say, demanded, if not required in formal speech and writing.

When that happened I couldn't help recalling the funny, awful day in the middle 1940s when my old friend and mentor, the most famous talent in American journalism, Mr HL Mencken, one day wrote in a chapter of his memoirs about his hometown Baltimore about fond recollections of the local "African Americans" - a usage that caused an uproar in the Negro community of more cities than Baltimore.

In fact the most prestigious of all coloured national organisations - the NAACP - the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People - brought to the floor, at one of its conventions, a resolution damning and blasting Mencken as a "bigot", "fascist" and, I believe, the new villain: "racist".

The California ballots were printed in seven languages. One of them was Eskimo.

You'll see by now that, if all generalisations are false including this one, very few generalisations can be made about the character of a Californian.

What we can say with confidence is that California has 58 counties and that for the better part of a century the southern-most counties vote Republican, though not the largest city, Los Angeles.

The northern counties - taking in the northern, say, 400 miles - are invincibly Democrat, including certainly the city of San Francisco.

The figure that's important to memorise is that in last Tuesday's election only about 50% of the qualified voters voted. So half of the registered Californians aren't interested in politics or don't care enough about domestic matters, no matter how fervently they may worry about foreign policy.

Now exactly what is this procedure of recall?

I ought to re-sketch an account to listeners who missed the history of it that I did almost two months ago and which several authorities have told me had not been seen or published elsewhere.

Well, to my great surprise when I started to bone up on the word and the custom, I found that recall came into being just 100 years ago in Los Angeles, then a city of only 50,000 that was so rowdy and ill-governed - one murder every day - that the city fathers decided on a drastic step.

They found time and again that they'd elected to an influential city post so many men who turned out to be crooks or grafters that they voted to write in an amendment to the city charter authorising a special election to be held after a certain number of voters had signed a petition to throw out an elected official and replace him before his elected term had expired.

Governor Davis was in only the first year of his second term. And the main charge against him is that he's responsible for the largest deficit of any state.

I should say it's a moot point whether a governor - or a president, for that matter - should be held responsible for the health or sickness of the budget.

But it's long been the assumption of the American voter that he is - just as in American football when a team keeps on losing matches you fire the coach.

Herbert Hoover was in some ways a very good president. Many of the fiscal and financial reforms adopted by Franklin Roosevelt were thought up by Hoover. But Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression set in on Hoover's watch and he was ignominiously fired.

After Los Angeles had the recall idea a century ago, it was put into the state constitutions of three or four western states where cattle rustlers, crooked lawyers, claim jumpers and other miscreants were rampant.

When news of this experiment got to Washington it was debated. But not for long.

President Theodore Roosevelt brought his great authority to declare that it was a quick fix, an easy way of venting political revenge on elected officers, an actual evasion of the democratic process.

The chief argument against it indeed was memorably stated by Alexander Hamilton more than a century earlier when the founding fathers were writing the Constitution.

The great question was: on what grounds could a president be justly impeached?

After some strenuous legal wrangling Hamilton held out for a minimum charge of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours.

By applying a lesser standard, he said, the president would hold his office at the whim of the Senate.

While many today - governors around the country, governors with heavy deficits, which is most - are wincing at the California result, there are influential Democrats already thinking of working up a petition to recall Mr Schwarzenegger if he turns out to be as inept as they fear or hope.

When I first heard this I thought it was a late night television joke. But within 24 hours of the result Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and probably the most popular politician in California, said that the recall Schwarzenegger petition should be held in abeyance.

Many serious politicians - Republicans and Democrat - were blithely convinced before last Tuesday that Mr Schwarzenegger (who the Democrat's state leader says hasn't a clue about how to govern) would at best sneak in by a hair's breadth majority.

Well, a landslide was a painful puzzle, especially after the disclosure by 15 young women that they had been intimately groped and fondled by the famous movie muscle man.

Not too many years ago the first proof of that sort of behaviour would have produced the hasty withdrawal of a candidate.

As it was, Mr Schwarzenegger shouted out loud that he had done bad things in his past and he apologised to all the ladies. The accompanying groupies cheered him loud and long.

Perhaps the sexual harassment charges came in too late. Perhaps in our decaying civilisation not enough people care whether or not a governor or a president has any moral authority at all.

Anyway it made no difference whatever to the result and the predicted defection of the women's vote didn't happen.

There is, however, a general agreement, irrespective of party, that Schwarzenegger's landslide was an angry vote against the men, the people in power, who cannot seem to lead us out of our continuing woes - the economy, joblessness, corporate greed - the usual impatience every 30 years or so at not getting the war over by Christmas.

In a simpler word, a strong vote against incumbents.

Some thoughtful, if pessimistic, people see in the Schwarzenegger triumph a darker vision.

He has admitted to his early admiration of Hitler, especially of Hitler's power to rouse a despairing, poverty-stricken people and lead them on to visionary heights.

The thing he most admired about Hitler was the "Fuhrer princip" - the strong leader principle. Schwarzenegger wants to be that strong leader.

So we must wait and see whether in the course of his governorship we shall see democracy invigorated or the emergence of the first American fuhrer.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.