Joe Conason on the Arnold recall

What Joe says makes some sense:

According to the state Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be vulnerable to a new recall petition within 90 days -- which means, as Kos pointed out this morning, that the filing could take place just in time for the March 2004 presidential primary. Such a scenario would be considerably less expensive than this election, since the March election is already scheduled, and would attract considerably more Democrats since their party has a contested primary and the Republicans don't.

Is this a good idea? Perhaps not, considering the turnout and margins that ousted Davis and installed Arnold. Annexing the presidential primary to run a second recall may only help Bush by turning off independent voters (and deranging the process in the biggest Democratic state). And voters across the spectrum may regard an immediate recall as unfair, since Schwarzenegger will only have had four months between his certification as governor and the March primary. The best potential Democratic opponents are likely to bide their time until the next scheduled election.

Yet printing up and circulating Recall Arnold petitions is still worth considering, for two reasons. As a general rule, Democrats should not hesitate to deploy any technique or technicality used by Republicans, including badly drawn constitutional procedures like the California recall. More specifically, a million ready-to-file recall petition signatures could provide some useful discipline to the gang of Wilson retreads surrounding Schwarzenegger, not to mention the governor-elect himself. Who knows what these people have in mind? Aside from abolishing the car tax, they didn't reveal much about their plans.

I like the whole threat aspect of it (the man on the freaking moon has no better idea of what Arnold and his team are going to do than you or I, or probably even Arnold).

But I believe that as soon as the (hypothetical) recall petition is drafted and turned in to the California Secretary of State, the petitioners have only 160 days after certification to get the required number of signatures and turn them in. So it's not like we can just have these petitions sitting around as a threat for the remainder of Arnold's term.

Also, will we go out and gather these sigs telling people that we might not even turn the petition in at all?

Also, if we don't gather the million or so sigs, does that send the opposite message to Arnold?

I have an idea for the name of the recall effort, though: Enjoin Arnold.

(If someone already thought of that, my apologies.)

And does anybody have any idea what this Open Source Politics graphic means?

It makes me feel stupid because I don't get it.