Dateline Carson – Jim Dear, the seemingly invulnerable and most controversial city clerk in Southern California, had all evening to become uncomfortable with the notion that he was going to lose an election, odiously and heftily, for the first time in 17 years.
When the inevitable announcement came from City Hall shortly after 10:30, Mr. Dear promptly stepped before an amazingly ethnically diverse crowd of loyalists and aimed his verbally loaded six-shooter at a familiar target.
Aflame with passion, he whacked the Yes on Recall partisans who were led by former city official Vera Robles DeWitt. “I really am not surprised we lost because the other side ran an underhanded and dirty campaign,” the controversial former mayor said.
“They made up false accusations, sold them to the media (meaning the Daily Breeze, the South Bay newspaper). The media simply reported what they heard. The reporter for the Daily Breeze said that to me tonight. She told me: ‘What we do as reporters is print what people say.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you do fact-checking?’ Her response: ‘We don’t have time or the resources to do fact-checking.’”
The angry, likely devastated, Mr. Dear never raised his voice, just his nuclear charges.
“In order to defeat me,” he said, “they had made up all kinds of false stories and accusations about me. They made them up. They kept repeating them, repeating them, repeating them.
‘Unfortunately, a number of Carson voters actually believed them.”
Externally confident facing his second recall special election in eight years, Mr. Dear was soundly beaten by a group of uncommonly bitter political rivals who grind their teeth whenever they say his name.
Win Almost Never in Doubt
With 16 percent of this heavily ethnic community participating, the Yes on Recall crowd won 53 percent of the vote, coasting past Mr. Dear’s 47 percent, 4424 votes to 3974.
In this outer space-like, bizarre political universe that is Carson, former City Clerk Donesia Gause, whom Mr. Dear handily ousted last March in a regularly scheduled election, shortly will reclaim her old job.
Oh, she has been busy since last year’s defeat. Three months after the election, Ms. Gause was appointed to the roustabout City Council, headed by intensely controversial mayor Albert Robles.
There were so many ironies floating from Dear headquarters to City Hall a half block east, that there scarcely was breathing space.
Here is a juicy one. Not accidentally, Ms. Gause, running “unopposed” for the clerk position she had held for three years, drew 4359 votes, a 65-vote difference from the 4424 Yes on Recall total. The obvious and logical conclusion is that Gause voters also cast Yes votes on recall.
This is not the end for the 63-year-old Mr. Dear. He noted that two City Council seats and the mayor’s chair will be at stake in the March 2017 election. He did not commit to running, but he did not have to confirm what everyone at Dear headquarters believed.
From the start of counting at Carson City Hall, Mr. Dear trailed more than 97 percent of the time. The several times he nosed ahead, his lead never lasted longer than a red light at an intersection,
It is virtually a commandment in small-town elections that mail-in ballots are a reliable weathervane of what lies ahead – and so it was again.
