 
 
Top left: Arianna Huffington, an independent candidate for governor in California's impending recall election, holds a press conference outside The Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles on Thursday. Top right: Huffington and Green Party recall candidate Peter Camejo cut a tentative deal on Wednesday in San Francisco that if one of them is polling ahead of the other right before the recall election, the one who is lagging will endorse the other. Bottom left: Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, right, endorses Camejo in San Francisco on Tuesday right before Nader gets a cream pie in the face (sorry -- I can't find any post-pie photos). Bottom right: California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a Democrat, who has been doing the best against Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger in the polls, urges voters to vote no on the recall of Gov. Gray Davis but to vote for him in case Davis is recalled.
Huffington out; Bustamante in
My endorsement of Arianna Huffington for governor of California in the upcoming recall election was premature. (However, I did indicate that it was tentative; "Arianna for Governor [for Now]," the headline reads.) I now support Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who announced his candidacy in the recall election shortly after I'd endorsed Huffington.
Huffington, unlike missing-in-action Republican recall candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, is actively campaigning for the gubernatorial recall election scheduled for Oct. 7, but she is looking worse, not better, as we get to know her.
For starters, I'm having a difficult time seeing how her opportunism is any different than Schwarzenegger's.
In an article about Huffington's candidacy titled "Contender, or Spoiler?", Salon.com reports:
And Huffington is against the recall, but only sort of. "I'm asking voters to vote their consciences," Huffington told Salon Thursday. "If they want to send a message to Republicans about the way they're using the recall provision to unseat Gray Davis, even though he had been democratically elected nine months ago, then vote no on the recall. But if they want to use this opportunity to bring some fundamental change to the way that California is governed, then vote yes on the recall."
For Huffington, the choice is apparently an easy one: "I'm personally voting yes on the recall," she said. "Even though I'm against the power grab, the opportunity in the middle of the chaos is too important to me."
Isn't Huffington basically saying, "Yes, I know it's wrong, but I'm doing it anyway"? She claims that she is "against the power grab" but she says in the same breath that she's going to vote for it anyway.
Huffington's Website gleefully reports of the recall election:
If Davis is recalled, then the replacement candidate who gets the most votes will become governor. There is no runoff. That means that a candidate could win with less than 50 percent of the vote. For example, if Arianna gets 35 percent of the vote, but nobody else gets more than 34 percent, she would win.
I just cannot support a candidate who says, basically, "Fuck democracy." (And, as you will see momentarily, Huffington is dreaming if she thinks that she can get anywhere near 35 percent of the vote.)
Then, of course, there is the Los Angeles Times reportage that indicates that Huffington is a big fat hypocrite. The Times reported on Thursday:
Arianna Huffington, who launched her campaign for governor with criticism of "fat cats" who fail to shoulder a fair share of taxes, paid no individual state income tax and just $771 in federal [income] taxes during the last two years, her tax returns show.
Huffington, who released her tax returns for the last two years to The Times, lives in an 8,000-square-foot home in Brentwood above Sunset Boulevard that is valued at about $7 million. She socializes with many wealthy and prominent people.
But the returns show that at least for the last two years, her income was far outweighed by losses that she reported were incurred by Christabella Inc., the private corporation she owns and uses to manage her writing and lecturing business.
In announcing her candidacy last week, Huffington blamed California's fiscal crisis, in part, on the corrupting influence of special interest groups that have helped "corporate fat cats get away with not paying their fair share of taxes."
The Times goes on to report:
In an interview Wednesday, Huffington said there was no inconsistency between her campaign message and income tax record. She characterized her deductions as "very conservative" and said that any comparison between her and those whom she has criticized would be unfair.
"There isn't any loophole here. There isn't any dodging here," she said. "This is basically putting your income against your expenses."
Nonetheless, tax experts said Wednesday that Huffington's tax profile is not one that the typical working family in California can duplicate.
"The average guy isn't able to wipe out the taxes on his wage income because he doesn't have millions of dollars in losses" from a private corporation, said Phil Holthouse, a partner in a Los Angeles certified public accounting firm.
I'm not a tax lawyer, so I don't really know whether Huffington is a tax dodger or not, but I definitely catch a whiff of hypocrisy here. I mean, she lives in a $7 million home in Brentwood and for the past two years she paid only about a third of what I paid in federal income tax this past year alone. And I, who live not in a $7 million home in Brentwood but in a rather dumpy apartment in Sacramento, paid more than $300 last year in state income tax. (I kick myself for having given Huffington's campaign $25; had I waited less than 24 hours later, I would have learned that Bustamante was entering the race, and I most likely would have withheld my donation to Huffington, who seems to need my money as much as Ahhhnuld does.)
The recall election completely aside, finding out that there is even the appearance that Arianna Huffington is a tax dodger is almost like finding out that another of my heroes, Michael Moore, owns sweatshops in Third World countries. There are so few heroes these days that I don't need to find out that even one of my heroes is really a fraud.
But let's suppose that Huffington had never admitted that she is an opportunist who is willing to take part in the subversion of democracy in California for personal gain, and let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Huffington is not a tax-dodging hypocrite. Let's put these considerations entirely aside and consider instead:
Among the candidates vying to replace California Gov. Gray Davis, Lt. Gov. Bustamante, according to a Field Poll released today, has 25 percent to Schwarzenegger's 22 percent. (The poll of 448 "likely voters" who were asked their first choice of candidate should Davis be recalled has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.)
Huffington garnered only 4 percent in the Field poll (4 percent is the highest I've seen her get in any of the polls regarding the recall election), and Green Party candidate Peter Camejo, who got 5.3 percent of the vote in the November gubernatorial election, garnered only 2 percent in the poll. Huffington and Camejo met on Wednesday and Camejo said he would encourage his supporters to vote for Huffington if she is polling better than he is just before the election. Huffington so generously said she would "consider" doing the same for Camejo if he is leading.
Huffington and Camejo claim that they don't want to split the progressive vote, yet that's exactly what they are doing by appearing on the recall ballot. Aside from stroking their egos, Huffington's and Camejo's candidacies will serve only to take away votes from Bustamante, who is the only progressive candidate on the recall ballot who has a chance to beat Schwarzenegger's name recognition.
(The Green Party's willingness to hand elections over to Republicans apparently was the motivation of the pie-wielding assailant who attacked Ralph Nader in San Francisco on Tuesday while Nader endorsed Camejo for the recall election. Fortunately, the assailant got away. "Before the pie incident, Nader said California voters should take advantage of the unprecedented gubernatorial recall," the Associated Press reported.
Apparently, the leaders of the Green Party are just as opportunistic and undemocratic as are Huffington and Schwarzenegger, and while I voted for Nader for president in 2000 and Camejo for governor in November, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that I will vote for a Green Party candidate ever again. A while back I switched my voter registration from the Green Party back to the Democratic Party primarily in order to be able to vote in the Democratic presidential primary, but I'll probably remain with the Democratic Party.)
Polls regarding the California recall race consistently have put Bustamante at No. 2, just behind Schwarzenegger, and with its margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, the Field Poll that was released today could have incorrectly put Bustamante ahead of Schwarzenegger.
The recall polls indicate that Bustamante needs all of the support that he can get to safely beat Schwarzenegger, and Huffington and Camejo, who have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the governorship anyway, are only siphoning votes away from Bustamante, thus making it more likely that Schwarzenegger will be the next governor of California.
Does Huffington lose any sleep over this? The article in Salon.com suggests not:
And when asked Thursday about her role as a possible spoiler in the race, Huffington railed against the possibility of a Gov. Schwarzenegger but then denied any responsibility -- or, it seemed, any concern -- for whether that possibility would become a reality. "There's no question, the worst thing would be to have a Republican governor," she said. But what if her presence in the race gives progressives a comfort level in voting yes on the recall or draws would-be winning votes away from Bustamante. "Oh," Huffington said, "that really is of no interest to me."
Bustamante has made it clear that he opposes the recall and is running only so that a Democratic candidate appears on the recall ballot (the state constitution prohibits Davis' name from appearing on the ballot). Bustamante is encouraging voters to vote no on the recall and to vote for him in case a majority of voters vote to recall Davis, which, polls indicate, most likely will happen. (Bustamante's recall campaign Website is called, accurately but awkwardly, noonrecallyesonbustamante.com.)
While Bustamante genuinely seems to be running reluctantly as Davis' potential replacement to ensure that the governorship does not fall into the thieving hands of the Republicans, Schwarzenegger, Huffington, Camejo, et. al., openly relish the possibility of coming to power the only way that they could come to power: By taking advantage of a flaw, a loophole in the California Constitution that could make one of them governor even if the highest number of voters in the recall election in effect vote for Davis by voting not to recall him.
I voted for Bustamante in November, and it seems appropriate that I vote for him in the recall election, as I voted for him to do the lieutenant governor's job, part of which is to take over for the governor should anything remove the governor from office.
And, having been a member of the state assembly from 1993 to 1998, assembly speaker from 1996 to 1998 and lieutenant governor since 1999, Bustamante -- entirely unlike Schwarzenegger, Huffington, Camejo and the vast majority of the other 100-plus recall candidates -- knows from personal experience how do to the governor's job. And he has demonstrated that he has been willing to work his way up to the governorship, to earn it, not to have it handed over to him on a silver platter because of a glitch in the California Constitution.
If you are a California voter, I encourage you to vote no on the dirty, Republican-orchestrated recall of the democratically elected governor and to vote for Bustamante for governor should the democratically elected governor be recalled.
12:35:47 PM 
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