The Recall Election Ten Years Later

A few months ago, San Francisco Chronicle Reporter Joe Garofoli tracked down several of the Gubernatorial candidates and interviewed them about the Recall Election and its effects, a decade later.

From his piece about Mary Carey:

Carey was only 23 when she moved to Los Angeles in April 2003. The fledgling theater major dropped out of Florida Atlantic University, where she had taken classes for three years, to seek her fame in LA’s adult film world. When she filed her candidacy papers for governor, she still had Florida license plates on her car.

She signed with a smaller company whose owner Mark Kulkis promised to make “me a household name in a year.”

One day, he asked her a question: You want to run for governor? “Well, I didn’t graduate from college,” Carey recalled telling him. “I dropped out.”

No, no don’t worry about it. You just have to be 18 and have no felonies.

So Kulkis, the president of Kick Ass Productions, much like any other campaign operative, began prepping Carey on everything from the state’s budget deficit to its tax structure.

“I’m really good with coming up with funny answers and being witty,” Carey said. “Because I was kind of goofy, people mistake my playing dumb for really being dumb…. realistically, if I was dumb, I wouldn’t have been able to get through these interviews and come up with funny answers.”