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| The ageless Brown and the aging Whitman |
Campaign fatigue is taking a toll on Whitman. While Jerry Brown is aging well, Meg Whitman is rapidly aging; the stress of seeking a political office for which she offers no credible experience is showing. Brown is 72 and Whitman is 54. Side by side, one would have quite the time discerning that almost 20 years separate the two. Important? Not at all, but perhaps it is a fleeting look of how well each holds up under stress.
My money is on Brown.
Recent polls show that both candidates are tracking evenly; about 34%(Whitman) to 37% (Brown) with about a quarter of registered voters undecided. No one should be anxious about the numbers that favor either candidate at this point. The undecided numbers are more compelling. Brown will woo them with his pragmatic pitch about experience and public service. Whitman will woo them with her undeniably slick brochures and eBay experience, and the love from Romney, Gingrich, Cheney and her best pal, McCain. Some say Palin endorses Whitman, but she isn't listed on the candidate's website. Kudos to Whitman for avoiding the mama grizzly.
And speaking of wooing - Whitman just dropped another $13M into her campaign bringing her self-funded total to a grand $104M, just a few million short Michael Bloomberg's landmark total. It seems quite likely that she will surpass Bloomberg in the Guinness Book of Idiots who spent entirely too much personal money on their political campaigns. Jerry Brown has a hot $23M at his disposal and is saving most of it for late fall. His assist comes from the unions who are currently spending their own funds on several advertisements supporting Brown which counter the argumentum ad nauseam that is the Whitman television, radio and print barrage.
Whitman's campaign has printed up another booklet/brochure/pretty book with pictures, the sequel to her first attempt at telling voters what she is all about. Both publications are mostly graphs, charts and pictures. They give the reader sound bites that encompass a travelogue of what a good politician ought to be doing. Both editions while slick and pretty, are poor substitutes for conveying actual knowledge and experience. We know that Meg has had a steep learning curve with regard to the California constitution and general civics; she had trouble getting her private citizen self to the polls to vote in past years and made public gaffes while on the campaign trail that a 12th grader who studied civics would not make. No one should mistake the Whitman candidacy for anything but a facade of what a politician ought to look like. Like many Silicon Valley businesses and real estate during the boom years, bricks but no mortar.
Divided on Prop 8, and with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requiring all briefs to be filed before the election, it is likely that both candidates will reach out to both sides to seek support. In Brown's case, as the current Attorney General for California, he is already on record siding with overturning Prop 8 on the merits of the law (not to mention general fairness). Whitman was an understated supporter of Prop 8. Her campaign may reach out to Prop 8 supporters with message that a Whitman government would not support overturning the prop. However, even the conservative Orange Country registered slammed Whitman when she naively gave her opinion about the matter to the press after Judge Walker's ruling, parroting the right wing/religious message that marriage should be between a man and woman. Too bad she didn't follow the court case which was not about that.
Perhaps next time one of her campaign staffers might actually give her a more reliable soundbite; that is, something that is prepared for her to read since she is proving to be as clueless as ever about what it takes to run a state like California. If only she and current Governor Arnold were on speaking terms - he might give her a hint about how fickle
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| Whitman, a thousand years younger in 2009 |
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