Grey Davis, whose middle name should be "I MEANT to do that" had no clever plan to help Simon win the primary. This whole "get Davis to be the nominee by attacking Riordan" bit is utter bullshit, and only showed up as a face-saving proposition after the primary. At the time he was running attack ads on Riordan, Riordan was so far ahead of the pack that it was not even conceivable to most people that he would not be the nominee. Davis wasn't trying to get Simon to win the primary, Davis was just jumping the gun on the election by trying to cut the most likely opponent off at the knees.

Sorry. Davis and his advisors aren't as clever as they'd like us to think.

What happened is that the conservatives who form a large proportion of any Republican primary decided they would rather have a conservative as a candidate. Davis had very little to do with it, compared perhaps to a large, anti-Riordan campaign that permeated conservative talk radio for months. Of course, the Democrats and the L.A. Times wouldn't know about that.

Think about it for a minute. Davis ran attack ads on Riordan that all had one thing in common: they berated him for being a conservative and holding conservative positions. The common theme was accusing Riordan of being pro-life, which is the worst crime imaginable in the minds of Democrats. This is interesting, considering that a state governor has absolutely no influence in a controversy that has become a Federal problem, but who said logic had anything to do with politics.

Now, if Republican voters were paying any attention at all to what Davis had to say against conservative positions, then why in the heck would they abandon Riordan for someone MORE conservative? It makes no sense.

Simon is in for the fight of his life, as I discussed in this post. Even now, I'm sure the dirtdiggers have been dispersed in droves, looking for the old girlfriend, the DUI, the voting record, anything they can find. When it's Republicans, the term "private life" doesn't apply the way it does to Democrats.

The fact that the terms "pro-life, pro-gun, pro-voucher, pro-deregulation, and pro-privatization" are assumed by the Democrats to be lethal insults says more about the dark precipice this country is hanging over than just about anything else. Simon is going to have to fight on his own terms and his own principles, and not allow the left to redefine Republican concepts to suit their own purposes. It ain't easy, when the media is aligned against you. I wish him luck. Like some other politicians, he may surprise us all.