I’D LIKE TO ANNOUNCE MY CANDIDACY

Gray Davis worked his whole life to become Governor of California. If you hurry, you can get there on October 7.

It turns out that all it takes to throw your hat in the ring is $3,500 and 65 signatures from registered voters. And that means this race is going to be even more of a freak show than we thought. According to today’s LA Times), over 200 people have already filed papers to join the race.

Because electronic voting won’t be ready in time for this hastily-arranged election, the LA Times is guessing that we might need two punch cards to represent all the candidates. (Each punch card can accomodate only 300 names.) Two punch cards?! I think the LA Times is sincerely underestimating people’s willingness to waste $3,500. Can you imagine how many people would be willing to pay that much for a chance to say “I ran for Governor of California”? What a way to beef up your resume. I can already imagine a bunch of guys in bars drunkenly warbling, “Hey, let’s get Jimmy on the ballot! Everyone toss in ten bucks!” I have a feeling we’re going to need a wheelbarrow to get our punchcards into the voting booth on October 7.

What sucks is that if the voters vote against the recall, all those ballots for replacement candidates won’t even be counted, so we’ll never know which of the freaks — Larry Flynt, Angelyne, Darrell Issa — would’ve won. (For a good laugh, check out the LA Times’s analysis of Darrell Issa’s record from earlier in the week.)

One of the more legitimate candidates in the race is the creator of “Bat Boy: The Musical”, who, if elected, vows to step aside so that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante would ascend to the governorship.

Yeah, great plan, except isn’t Bustamante the one who drew up the rules for this nutty election in the first place? He’s made the whole election such a farce that he’s virtually assured that voters will keep Gray Davis just to put an end to it all.

Then again, maybe Bustamante is the smartest man in politics.