Cruz M. Bustamante, the only Democratic officeholder running as an alternative to Gray Davis.

ELK GROVE, Calif., (By Dean E. Murphy, NYTimes) Aug. 22, 2004 — Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante, the only Democratic officeholder running in the California recall election as an alternative to the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, has a knack for being at the door when opportunity knocks.

When he was 19, breaking slabs of concrete in 100-degree heat for a fertilizer company near Fresno, his father got a tip. A family friend knew a congressman who needed a summer intern in Washington, and the elder Mr. Bustamante, a barber who was working three jobs to support his six children, suggested Cruz, his firstborn.

Mr. Bustamante quit jackhammering, cashed in his savings for a used Toyota, packed up a few days' supply of his mother's home-cooked meals and drove East. He spent the summer of 1972 in a cramped basement office on Capitol Hill answering constituent mail.

"I remember, about halfway through, thinking, `You know this government thing; you can really help a lot of people,' " the 50-year-old Mr. Bustamante said in an interview at his tract home here in suburban Sacramento. "And it just sort of turned on. It was a light bulb. It was kind of everything that I was thinking about, but not really knowing where I was headed."

The light bulb kept shining, opportunity kept knocking, but throughout the next three decades Mr. Bustamante remained largely unknowing about where it was all headed. Now, rather suddenly, he is emerging in the early going as one of the most competitive of the 135 candidates to succeed Mr. Davis should the governor be ousted in the recall vote, set for Oct. 7.

The lieutenant governor's chances were heightened further today when California's Democratic Congressional delegation and the state's largest union of teachers put their weight behind his candidacy, reflecting growing worry over Mr. Davis's ability to defeat the recall.

California's highest-ranking Hispanic politician since the early decades of statehood, Mr. Bustamante is positioned to make an already historic election possibly more so by becoming the state's first Hispanic governor since 1875. That year Lt. Gov. Romualdo Pacheco served the final nine months of Gov. Newton Booth's term after Booth left for the United States Senate. Though Pacheco's tenure was brief, he distinguished himself as the only California governor who ever claimed to have lassoed a grizzly bear, or so says a biography in the state's archives.

California has no more grizzly bears, and Mr. Bustamante, the self-described Danny DeVito of the recall contest, is admittedly no swashbuckling outdoorsman or attention-crazed politico. ("I am short, I am overweight, and I am losing all my hair," he often tells school groups.)

He did not even contemplate his first run for elective office until 1993, when his boss, a state legislator, unexpectedly stepped down, and he got around to completing his work for a college degree only three months ago, having changed his major five times in 30 years.

"I am not suggesting or recommending you do that," said Mr. Bustamante, whose academic interests drifted from butchery to medicine to ethnic studies, "but the point is that we don't always know exactly the direction we are headed."

Yet to attain the state's highest office, he may be called upon to perform Pacheco-like stunts, most notably lassoing both Arnold Schwarzenegger, so far his most formidable foe on the replacement ballot, and Mr. Davis, who is none too pleased that a fellow Democrat is campaigning for his job.

A poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, released today, showed Mr. Davis losing the recall vote and Mr. Bustamante running just behind Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, for the lead among replacement candidates. The recall ballot will have two parts: First, voters will decide whether to oust Mr. Davis, and second, they will choose a successor from the list of 135 should he lose.

Even Mr. Bustamante's admirers acknowledge that landing the governorship is a tall order for a candidate who some political strategists suspect entered the recall derby only because he had little chance of winning in 2006, when Mr. Davis's four-year term ends and more Democratic officials would be expected to join the fray.

Mr. Bustamante has said he chose to run as an insurance policy for Democrats after seeing Mr. Davis sinking in the public opinion polls. There have also been suggestions that his arm was twisted by some Democrats in Congress who were worried about the same polls and who considered him bland enough to emerge as a consensus candidate.

"He is one of those kids you remember, but I never thought of him as going into politics or being a governor or anything like that," said Lloyd Talbot, a high school biology teacher in Tranquillity, a small farming town in the Central Valley where Mr. Bustamante attended school and was known to prefer the locker room to the classroom.

"He played football," Mr. Talbot said, "but he wasn't the quarterback. He was a lineman."

It was the lineman in him that probably got Mr. Bustamante to this juncture in California's political football. It allowed him to prevail in statewide politics over the past decade as the capable but largely unmemorable utility player, the one who is good for small yardage but otherwise commands little of the kind of attention he received on Tuesday, when he opened his campaign by presenting a fiscal plan that would raise taxes and revise the state's sacrosanct property-tax laws.

This self-effacing grandson of Mexican immigrants was elected to the State Legislature from Fresno in 1993, became the first Hispanic speaker of the Assembly four years later and has defied the expectations of some of those closest to him by winning two terms as lieutenant governor since then.

"Being Hispanic in the Valley, you have to be just as good and better to be viewed equally," said Refugio Arroyo, who went to school with Mr. Bustamante and is married to one of his three sisters, Dorothy. "What Cruz has done is give everybody a different bar to jump. `If I take it this high,' he is saying, `you take it even higher.' "

He did it all while quietly plodding through the muddled middle ground in California's right-left politics, a poor Hispanic who grew up with field hands but went on to represent a district dominated by more conservative farmers.

He favored abortion rights while siding with agribusiness in some important environmental disputes; he appointed an openly gay legislator, Sheila Kuehl, as speaker pro tem while backing the death penalty.

Had he actually been a flashy quarterback, some of Mr. Bustamante's colleagues suggest, his career might have been less notable.

"It was no surprise that Cruz rose rapidly in the Assembly, because Cruz did exactly what Cruz does best," said Bruce Bronzan, a former assemblyman from Fresno who employed Mr. Bustamante as his district representative for five years. "He went in and was quite the problem solver and brought people together."

Mr. Bronzan said Mr. Bustamante's unassuming manner was never more evident than when Mr. Bronzan decided to retire in midterm and the subject of a successor was being discussed. Mr. Bronzan had already decided to draft Mr. Bustamante, but when they went to lunch, Mr. Bustamante was blindsided by the suggestion and took several days before agreeing to run, Mr. Bronzan said.

"He just looked at me and said, `Me?' " Mr. Bronzan recalled. "He really wasn't politically ambitious. He loved doing the work. I think he wanted to be the best staff person in the world, and he probably was."

Kam Kuwata, a Democratic political consultant who has known him since his days working for Mr. Bronzan, said Mr. Bustamante had made a career of defying expectations.

"The beauty of Cruz is that people I think have underestimated him for his entire public career," Mr. Kuwata said.

But Mr. Bustamante has made missteps along the way.

In his most embarrassing moment as lieutenant governor, he used a racial slur in remarks he made in February 2001 to a labor group celebrating Black History Month. He apologized repeatedly, saying he had meant to use the word "Negro" instead of the slur, but news reports at the time said some in attendance had walked out in protest.

He has also been criticized for his close campaign finance ties with some of California's Indian tribes, which have been aggressively pushing for more gambling in the state and are heavy contributors to many politicians, including both Mr. Bustamante and Governor Davis.

As the recall campaign heats up, Mr. Bustamante's relationship with the state's Hispanic constituency is also drawing more notice. In announcing the Democratic Congressional delegation's endorsement of Mr. Bustamante today, Representative Nancy Pelosi said a major factor was the expectation that he would draw Hispanic voters to the polls and help defeat the recall in the first place.

Throughout his political career, Mr. Bustamante has both embraced his Mexican heritage and sought to keep it at some distance. He has broken countless ethnic barriers in politics, in part because he has California's changing demographics on his side but also because he has been able to avoid being typecast as ethnocentric.

"He has very solid links to the community without appearing to be pandering," said Carlos E. Garcia, who runs a Hispanic consumer and public policy research firm in Burbank. "He understands that Hispanics want to be equal and part of the whole."

Many Hispanics have been inspired by Mr. Bustamante's rise from rural California, still the entry point for numerous newcomers, and remain grateful for his firm stance against Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure, later struck down by the courts, that would have restricted public services for undocumented immigrants. Mr. Bustamante had a public falling out with Governor Davis over how to handle the legal aftermath of the courts' action, one of a series of disputes that left their relations strained even before Mr. Bustamante decided to run in the recall.

"If he becomes governor," said Leonel Flores, coordinator for the San Joaquin Valley Coalition for Immigrant Rights, in Fresno, "it will be a message to the people that Hispanics are part of California, a recognition of the work being done here."

Alicia Alarcon, host of a popular Spanish-language talk radio show in Los Angeles, said, however, that Mr. Bustamante was viewed by many Hispanics as too easygoing. Many of her listeners, especially the younger ones, were initially swept up by Mr. Schwarzenegger's candidacy, largely because of his can-do action-hero image, she said.

But that early enthusiasm dropped markedly, she said, after Mr. Schwarzenegger acknowledged his support for Proposition 187 and named former Gov. Pete Wilson, one of its chief advocates, as a campaign chairman.

"For the Hispanic population, 187 is a wound that hasn't closed yet," Ms. Alarcon said. "It is something they won't forget and they won't forgive. That can only help Mr. Bustamante if he starts speaking his mind."

Mr. Bustamante did not mention Proposition 187 when he opened his campaign on Tuesday with his plan addressing the state's recurring budget problems. But in a hallmark of his style, he held back-to-back news conferences on his front lawn, first in English and then in Spanish.

In the interview here, Mr. Bustamante said he had spent little time contemplating the symbolism of his candidacy for Hispanics.

"I love my culture," he said. "I love everything about it. I love the music, I love the language. I love the food. Look at me, I really love the food. But I am the lieutenant governor, and I want to be the governor, for everybody in California."