An overdose of democracy

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The California recall was a victory of a rich celebrity over a career politician, of an iconic outsider over a dull insider, of shallowness over wonkishness, of upscale populism over disorganized labor, of direct democracy over the representative kind on which our country was founded.
James Madison would be horrified by the idea that voters, acting on the passions of the moment, could toss out an elected representative less than a year after he was voted into office. But Hiram Johnson and the Progressives might be pleased by the recall, if a little puzzled that their device for protecting against the railroad trust had elected a rich movie star aligned with business interests.
Government by recall is no way to run a republic. Recall should be the atomic bomb of the democratic process, detonated only when an office holder has engaged in serious improprieties. Gov. Gray Davis' boring, mean-spirited style of politics hardly qualified. Nor did the state's enormous budget crisis, which nearly every governor faces. Nor did Davis' handling of the energy crisis, which occurred before he was re-elected last year.
Still, it's hard to argue with the resounding verdict of the California people, delivered in an election with the extraordinarily high voter turnout of 67 percent. Davis' initial claim about the recall process being an undemocratic coup by right-wing extremists rings hollow after a majority of union and Hispanic supporters voted to recall him.
Precedent, of sorts
It's easy to say that Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger is likely to fail -- that he is ill-prepared for public office and has little chance of solving the state's serious budget and economic problems. But California once had another actor as governor who was thought to be unprepared for big problems, and he did pretty well for himself. (By the way, that governor, Ronald Reagan, came into office with a big budget deficit and plugged it with the biggest tax increase in state history.)
Democrats will be tempted to play payback by turning the next three years into a demonic series of recalls. But they shouldn't. Government by recall doesn't give an official enough time to address difficult problems that require unpopular solutions.
Schwarzenegger's big victory with 48 percent of the vote -- far larger than the small plurality many had predicted -- gives him a mandate of sorts. Or it would if he had been more specific. At the very least, he seems to have a mandate for small government, low taxes and a new tone of politics.
What we don't know after this two-month binge of direct democracy is whether Californians have elected a real leader or an ambitious, buff-but-empty vessel whose grasp of governing runs no deeper than his glib slogans. If that turns out to be the case, the next three years will seem like a long hangover after an overdose of democracy.