You won't have the recall to kick around anymore after Tuesday -- to paraphrase Richard Nixon's famous farewell press conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in 1962 after he lost the governor's race to Pat Brown. (You may remember that he did get elected president six years later).
So here we are, batting cleanup:
* In the heart of Hollywood, a Hollywood vote: At the local Chamber of Commerce's 15th annual business expo late last month, a straw poll on the recall and the candidates drew ballots from about a quarter of those in attendance. They lined up 55% in favor of recalling Gov. Gray Davis, 45% against. And 38% of them voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger, 15% for Tom McClintock, 12% for Cruz Bustamante and 3% for Arianna Huffington.
Angelyne, whose vote was negligible, got the biggest round of applause -- this was in Hollywood, remember.
* The California Governor's Conference for Women, the 17th annual, is still scheduled for Oct. 22 -- but with which governor? Both First Lady Sharon Davis and her husband are scheduled to speak at the event -- as is actor and children's book author Jamie Lee Curtis, a Schwarzenegger co-star who in 2001 joined three of his other co-starring women to protest a Premiere magazine article alleging Schwarzenegger's boorish conduct on movie sets. Since a Times story last week on the same subject, Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that he acted inappropriately toward some women and apologized.
* With Tuesday's voting promising to bring about a quarter-million first-time voters to a drastically reduced number of polling places, perhaps the GOP gubernatorial candidate could couple his pledge to end the state's high-occupancy vehicle carpool lanes with a pledge to institute an HOV lane in polling places -- for "high-occasion voters" who know the ropes.
* If the votes "trend" the way the polls have, to use the pundits' verb, news readers nationwide will have to learn how to pronounce the name of the new governor of California -- four syllables, "SHWARTZ-EN-EGG-ER." Many of them have been sliding into the easier-to-pronounce "SWORTZ-NEG-ER," or even just falling back on "Arnold."
