During his first three years in office Davis gave liberals and progressives plenty to carp about, starting with a law-and-order stance arguably to the right of his Republican predecessor. But the real disillusionment jelled during last year's power crisis. After some initial populist public posturing, including a threat to seize plants, Davis took a distinctly corporate-friendly line. The state hiked electricity rates an average of 30 percent and used ratepayer funds to underwrite multibillion-dollar bailouts for the private utilities. At one point, Davis's top two spinmeisters on the power issue (former Clinton adviser Mark Fabiani and former Gore adviser Chris Lehane) were simultaneously on the payroll of one of the private utility monopolies. In the end, Davis wound up negotiating costly long-term power contracts to keep the lights on. As a result, California is now paying as much as ten times the market price for electricity. The budget surplus Davis enjoyed at the onset of his administration is now a $24 billion deficit--and still growing. With money for social spending zapped by the electric bills, the state's healthcare, housing and transportation program are collapsing.

And it all rebounds against Davis. "The voters have a snapshot of him in their mind from the time of the energy crisis," says veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick. "And they don't like what they see. They see a governor who did very little to prepare them or warn them of what was coming, and they were left saying, 'How the hell did this happen?'"

Davis--a legendary rainmaker who bags a consistent million dollars a month in campaign contributions--is also dogged by a public perception that he's always on the make for money. Indeed, in mid-July his campaign announced it had crossed the $50 million mark for this year's re-election bid. That's a new record for any American gubernatorial candidate. And the last record-holder was Davis himself, when he pocketed $35 million in his 1998 run. "For Gray Davis, being governor is just a hobby, something he does a couple of hours a week," says leading progressive policy advocate Harvey Rosenfeld. "He spends the rest of his time raising money." Simon's boardroom connections should make him vulnerable at a time of intense national focus on corporate wrongdoing, but Davis's nonstop harvesting of campaign cash allows the money issue to work equally against him. One example: Some of Simon's first TV spots humorously show one of Davis's office cleaners being shocked at how much paperwork Davis has left unattended in favor of money-raising. And Davis has collected substantial sums from some of the worst corporate malefactors now in the headlines, including Enron ($120,000), WorldCom ($109,000), Global Crossing ($120,000) and Adelphia ($52,500).

Meanwhile, substantial portions of the progressive Democratic base are dismayed that the endless flow of cash into the Governor's coffers lubricates a pro-corporate and disappointingly conservative policy agenda. "Some centrist Democrats, like the DLC, at least have a proactive policy approach," says Carrick. "But Gray's definition of centrism is to stay out of traffic. Consequently, he has real problems at every level of his base: labor, minorities, environmentalists." He adds, "We could have a replay of 1994, when Democrats stayed home and Wilson got re-elected."

If Davis's tenure has left progressive Democrats, and even moderates, with many reasons to criticize, it has at the same time given them little to cheer. Yes, the Governor is steadfastly pro-choice. And he just signed an anti-global warming bill that he had been waffling on. The Governor also kicked off his administration with a special session of the legislature dedicated to school reforms--though it left little political trace except bitterness among the teachers' union and a massive, ACLU-led civil rights suit alleging state neglect of poorer schools. But on just about every Democratic core issue, Davis has wobbled, punted or defected. As of early July, the Sierra Club, usually a slam-dunk for California Democrats, was still withholding its endorsement of Davis. Environmentalists were furious to learn that California's powerful timber industry had been exempted from proposed new tax hikes, and that the same industry, once a GOP stalwart, had lavished more than $100,000 in contributions on the Governor. It's a disturbingly familiar pattern. Earlier this year, investigations blossomed when the Oracle Corporation gave a $25,000 contribution to Davis shortly after his administration purchased $95 million of Oracle software that no state agency seemed to want (the Governor has since returned the money).

Nothing reveals Democratic disillusionment with Davis better than his incestuous relationship with the 28,000-member California prison guards' union--known as CCPOA--which was previously a political and funding mainstay for Pete Wilson. During the 1998 campaign Davis performed a feat of political magic: By convincing CCPOA president Don Novey that he would be Singapore-hard on crime, Davis lured the guards into the Democratic camp, along with $2.3 million of their campaign funding. The results of this alliance have been disastrous. "Simply put, Gray Davis has been worse on criminal justice issues than Pete Wilson," says Joe Domanick, senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC. "He's imposed a litmus test on naming judges, who must be pro-death-penalty and pro-three-strikes-and-you're-out. He even vetoed a bill that merely called for a review study of the three-strikes law." As the state was sinking into the sea of red ink generated by the overpriced long-term energy contracts, Davis handed the guards' union a 34 percent salary increase. He also loosened work rules, which has resulted in a 20 percent increase in sick time claimed by the guards, some of whom now make more than $125,000 a year.

To be fair, California liberals and progressives have to accept much of the responsibility for their impotence in influencing Statehouse policy. Up through the 1960s, a network of left-of-center organizations under the California Democratic Council exerted powerful grassroots influence over state party policy. Then, starting in the mid-1970s, Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy played a similar role. But since the fading of CED almost twenty years ago, California progressives have made no visible attempt to reorganize. Liberal interest groups have played much more the role of predictable satellites than sources of grassroots pressure within the party. "It was way back in March, a day or two after the primary, and you had abortion rights groups like ours lining up to give an early endorsement to Gray Davis," says a Southern California feminist advocate. "Don't you think we could have at least waited a month or two and maybe tried to extract something from Gray? Talk about setting ourselves up to be taken for granted!"

But Davis is banking on the fact that liberals have no place else to go. "This is not going to be Gray Davis versus an opponent with no name," says Davis's closest aide and strategist, Garry South. "The voters are going to have to choose between Gray Davis and Bill Simon, and in the end they will choose Davis."

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