With polls showing the recall race tightening in a last dash to Tuesday's election, Gov. Gray Davis on Sunday questioned the truthfulness of Arnold Schwarzenegger's response to sexual misconduct allegations while the Republican tried to shift the focus to his rival's shortcomings as a leader.
Davis challenged the GOP candidate to respond in detail to accusations by women that he groped or humiliated them. Schwarzenegger, dogged by the allegations for the fourth day, sought to lay them to rest in two nationally televised interviews.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday October 11, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 55 words Type of Material: Correction
Schwarzenegger quote -- Because of an inaccurate transcript from NBC News, Arnold Schwarzenegger's response to a question posed by Tom Brokaw was incorrectly reported in articles in Monday's Section A. To the question "So you deny all those stories about grabbing?" Schwarzenegger said, "No, not all." The stories quoted Schwarzenegger as saying "not at all."
"A lot of these are made-up stories," Schwarzenegger told NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw in a campaign-bus interview on "Dateline NBC." "I never grabbed anyone and then pulled up their shirt and grabbed their breasts, and stuff like that. This is not me. So there's a lot of this stuff going on.... "
"So you deny all those stories about grabbing?" Brokaw asked.
"Not at all," said Schwarzenegger, who apologized Thursday for having "behaved badly sometimes" toward women. "I'm just saying this is not -- this is not me."
Campaign spokesman Sean Walsh would not clarify whether Schwarzenegger had ever groped women in the ways they had described. Schwarzenegger did not respond to a request made through Walsh for an interview.
As Davis and Schwarzenegger made their respective pitches to voters, the other major candidates tried to draw attention to their own candidacies.
Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the only prominent Democrat in the replacement race, kept on the offensive against Schwarzenegger. Fighting to regain the lead he once held, he said the women's accusations showed Schwarzenegger was unfit to govern California.
"First there were three, then five, then six, then nine, then 11 and now 15," Bustamante said at a Gardena labor gathering. "You know, after a while, these start to sort of depersonalize, start to sound like numbers. These are not numbers. These are women, women who were harassed in the workplace."
The other major Republican contender, state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), muted his criticism of Schwarzenegger, the favorite candidate of California's GOP establishment. Nonetheless, with polls showing damage to Schwarzenegger's campaign since Thursday, McClintock tried to persuade voters who fear he is too conservative to win that he actually has a shot. "If everybody who believes I'd do the best job actually votes for me, we would win in a landslide," he said on CNN.
