Ex-Davis rival featured in ads pleading his case
SAN FRANCISCO -- In his first paid television ads of the recall campaign, Governor Gray Davis has left it to a far more popular California Democrat -- his one-time rival, Senator Dianne Feinstein -- to plead his case.
The two commercials, previewed for reporters yesterday, do not mention Davis by name, and they show only one, tiny photo of the governor that appears briefly at the bottom of the screen.
In the ads, Feinstein urges voters to reject the recall and let the governor continue to do his job.
"The governor deserves the chance to keep working on issues we care about like education, health care, and important new privacy legislation," Feinstein says in one ad. "This governor was elected just last November," she says in the other.
In both ads Feinstein, who fought off a recall as mayor of San Francisco, warns that a recall would lead to instability and uncertainty.
The ads not only give Davis support from the state's most popular politician, but offer proof that the two have repaired their rocky relationship, stemming from Davis's negative campaign against Feinstein for the Democratic nomination for Senate.
Davis campaign director Steve Smith said he doubts Davis's name had been deliberately left out of the ads. He said Feinstein had written the scripts herself and wanted to present the case against recall in her words.
"This was the senator essentially talking about why she's against the recall," Smith said. "It certainly wasn't a conscious decision on our part. I doubt it was a conscious decision on hers."
But observers said the omission signaled a clear choice by the campaign to divert focus from the embattled governor, whose popularity ratings have hovered in the low 20s in recent polls.
"I think it's a huge concession on the governor's part to allow Dianne Feinstein to go on the air with an ad that doesn't name him," said Democratic consultant Gale Kaufman. "When your numbers are where his are, the best commercial you could do would be to talk about the recall itself and the damage that could be caused by it."
The commercials, set to debut in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Monterey today and run throughout the remaining five weeks of the campaign, will be part of an initial $1 million purchase of ad time. Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, running to replace Davis if he is recalled, has spent about $1.4 million on campaign commercials so far, the only other candidate to put any significant amount into television ads.
