Gray Davis, Closet Wacko
Published October 03, 2003
The most disturbing aspect of Davis's troubled side is the ease with which the power elite in California, many of whom know he is unbalanced, laugh off the long public deception that has created Davis's public persona. "He'll never be governor," one well-known Democratic state senator explained to me last year, justifying his own failure to criticize or out Davis. "He'll never be the Democratic nominee," the senator insisted.
And that's certainly how things stood, in my own mind, until Davis announced his intention to run for governor.
So the story was well-known, but nobody bothered to really come forward until it became clear the man wanted to be governor. Sounds familiar, and it makes sense to me.
"I guess Gray's biggest lie," says his former staffer who notes he often flies into a rage, "is pretending that he operates within the bounds of normalcy, which is not true. This is not a normal person. I will never forget the day he physically attacked me, because even though I knew he had done it before to many others, you always want to assume that Gray would never do it to you or that he has finally gotten help."On the day in question, in the mid-1990s, the staffer was explaining to Davis that his perpetual quest for an ever-larger campaign chest (an obsession she says led Davis to routinely break fundraising laws by using his government office resources and non-political employees to arrange fundraisers and identify new sources of money) had run into a snafu. A major funding source had dried up. Recalls the former staffer: "He just went into one of his rants of, 'Fuck the fucking fuck, fuck, fuck!'" I can still hear his screams ringing in my ears. When I stood up to insist that he not talk to me that way, he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, 'Good God, Gray! Stop and look at what you are doing! Think what you are doing to me!' And he just could not stop."
Perhaps the worst incident—long known to Davis-adoring editors of the Los Angeles Times but never published by them—was Davis's attack four years ago on a loyal aide in Los Angeles who for years acted as chief apologist for his "incidents."
- Gray Davis, Closet Wacko
- Published: October 03, 2003
- Type:
- Section: Politics
- Writer: Phillip Winn
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- Phillip Winn's personal site
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The L.A. Times didn't report on these rumors largely because they didn't meet the standards they used for the Schwarzengroper story.
That story used some anonymous sources, but always spoken to directly by the Times and corroborated by named sources.
Jill Stewart's 1997 story has one named source for one incident. The other incident is neither directly reported nor corroborated. It's not only anonymous--it's a friend-of-a-friend thing.
If you read the L.A. Times story, you'll see that none of the six incidents of Schwarzengroping they report on are based on anything so shaky.
The Times editors said they had plenty of other leads about A.S. sexual-harassment incidents, but they couldn't corroborate them to their satisfaction in the seven weeks they had for the investigation (this election doesn't have anything near the lead time that a typical election would--it's not the Times' fault that the story is being published when it is).
Arnold's behavior follows a pattern that is confirmed time and again by witnesses not connected to each other or involved with partisan politics. The Gray Davis rumors reported by Jill Stewart simply don't meet that standard.
ME: Goose, meet Gander.
GOOSE: No! My feathers are completely different, and the coloration is all wrong!
ME: What was that about raising the standard of evidence again?
GOOSE: But that's different! It's DIFFERENT!
ME: The 1997 sources said they were afraid to come forward, as did the 2003 sources. How is that different? More importantly, what the heck does either issue have to do with job performance, the issue at hand?
GOOSE: It just does, that's all.
ME: Sorry, buddy, your goose is probably cooked.
So let's see:
Gray is a psycho
Arnold is a perv
Cruz supports a 5th-Column organization
And McClintock can't win
Why can't McClintock win? Please? Pretty please?
6 sources
all directly spoke to the Times
all corroborated by other, named parties
vs.
2 sources
1 directly spoke with Jill Stewart
1 spoke through an intermediary
neither is corroborated by a named party
If you'd like the L.A. Times to lower its editorial standards to Stewart's level, you can send them a letter with your request. If they grant your request, though, they're going to need a lot more paper to print all of the (hundreds? thousands?) of A.S. stories that meet the lower standard.
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/8895)
I heard this...I think it's terrible. So much for my decision to vote 'No' on the recall.
I didn't vote for him the first time anyway.