Govs Under The Gun

By KAREN TUMULTY

To live in California is to go about your business knowing the earth could move under your feet at any moment. That's pretty much the tectonic nature of California politics too, with voters regularly floating recall petitions to throw out their elected officials and pushing referendums on high-flown social questions like whether a police officer should be allowed to carry a ventriloquist's dummy. So over the past few months, while Governor Gray Davis has battled with the legislature over the state's deepening fiscal crisis, he has paid little heed to the underground rumble of a loosely organized effort to oust him from office.

The ground began to shift last week. Multimillionaire Republican Congressman Darrell Issa announced that he might put up at least $100,000 of his own money toward the recall drive--and pledged to raise in the next week at least half the $1.2 million he thinks the campaign needs. The effort claims 100,000 signatures, and collecting the required 900,000 is a daunting job, but organizers will now have the resources to hire professionals to gather signatures in front of grocery stores and shopping malls across the state. If he succeeds, Issa intends to offer himself as a replacement for Davis. Garry South, Davis' top political adviser, says chances of success are still "less than fifty-fifty, but it's not impossible."

Just a few years ago, Davis was one of the country's more popular Governors. In last year's election, he bucked national trends to lead a Democratic sweep of statewide offices. But now he finds himself with a 24% approval rating, making him the most unpopular Governor in the Field Poll's 55-year history. And he has plenty of company. New York's Republican Governor George Pataki has an approval rating of 43% in the latest Quinnipiac poll, 38 percentage points lower than it was after 9/11. And Pataki is faring better than his neighbors, Democrat James McGreevey of New Jersey (38%) and Republican John Rowland of Connecticut (33%).

What they have in common is that optimistic promises from the fat old days are coming back to haunt them. Democrat Gary Locke pledged to be Washington State's "education Governor," but in January tens of thousands of teachers marched on the state capitol to protest his plan to deny them pay increases, and the Washington Education Association has been running ads accusing him of breaking his word to children. The bleak fiscal situation has also meant no honeymoon for the bumper crop of 24 new Governors elected last year.

The situation is particularly tricky for Republicans, many of whom are now invoking the ultimate G.O.P. heresy--tax hikes. While President Bush held a rally last week near Arkansas' state capitol to drum up support for his tax cuts, a few blocks away, at nearly the same hour, Republican Governor Mike Huckabee was imploring his balky legislature to support a tax raise. "I envy his position of being able to come to Little Rock and preach tax cuts while I preach a tax increase," Huckabee told TIME. "He has a tool that I do not have, called deficit spending, and can shift--or at least not fix--the Medicaid issue, which is causing most of my heartburn." Medicaid costs in Arkansas have risen from $1.2 billion a decade ago to $2 billion, and Huckabee, like Governors everywhere else, wants Washington to start shouldering more of the burden.

To most Americans, the budget wars in Washington may seem like so much posturing, but what they see close to home is very real. "To the extent that anyone is engaged in public life these days, you're engaged with what's going on at the state level rather than something abstract like the Bush tax cuts," says Democratic pollster Ed Reilly. "It's not an abstraction when your kid's teacher gets laid off."

Governors were the demigods of the flush 1990s--slashing taxes, building schools and prisons, giving raises to teachers and health care to poor children. Times were so good that they even found tens of billions to salt away in "rainy-day funds." Then the rain came, first as a trickle of layoffs and budget cuts last year, and now as a gully washer. With all but Vermont required by law to balance their budgets, the states are working to close a total shortfall of $100 billion between now and the end of fiscal 2004. A dozen state legislatures are in emergency session to deal with their crises. Governors are not just raising taxes but also releasing prisoners and shutting down libraries. Among options that Davis has had to consider: denying prosthetics to amputees who can't afford them and eliminating adult diapers for prostate-cancer patients.

Not the least of the Governors' problems are the new mandates being put on them by Washington--by a President who was once one of their own. Governors must pay increased costs for homeland security in the wake of 9/11 and election reform after the 2000 Florida debacle. And there are billions in added costs connected to meeting the standards imposed on their schools by the President's education reforms. Bush's tax cuts also weigh heavily on their treasuries, because state tax systems are pegged to the federal one. Even the Senate Finance Committee's slimmed-down version of Bush's dividend tax cut, for instance, would cost states as much as $11 billion over the next 10 years, according to an estimate last week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank.

Governors increasingly blame the Bush Administration for the severity of their situation. "I am a good Republican. I am a good team player," Arkansas' Huckabee said laughingly during an interview. "[But] turn that tape recorder off and I will speak an earful." Aboard Air Force One between Canton and Dayton two weeks ago, Ohio's Governor Bob Taft laid out his predicament to the President. Taft cited his state's high unemployment rate and staggering Medicaid costs and his sinking approval rating. It was, as someone who was there later described it, "a cry for help." Bush sat silently, and all Taft had at the end of the day was a photo op with a President whose popularity he can only envy.

The problems before the Governors are so daunting that solving them sometimes means putting their careers on the line. Idaho Republican Dirk Kempthorne used to brag that he cut taxes 49 times during his first four years in office. He cruised to re-election in 2002. But now, after the longest legislative session in Idaho history, he has raised sales and cigarette taxes and has announced he will not run for a third term. "I was not going to preside over the dismantling of central services in the state," Kempthorne says. "I've been elected to do what's right."

For California's Davis, things are likely to get even rockier this week, when revised budget numbers are expected to show that the state's $35 billion budget gap has grown by $2 billion. But South, his adviser, grimly notes that before anyone decides to challenge Davis, he or she should consider what would be won: the painful obligation to make ends meet. --With reporting by Steve Barnes/Little Rock, James Carney/Washington, Heidi Marotz/Idaho Falls and Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles

With reporting by Steve Barnes/Little Rock, James Carney/Washington, Heidi Marotz/Idaho Falls and Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles