Sunday, September 26, 2010

Meg Whitman's Unfortunate Editorial Board Adventure: Fresno v. Detroit

Really?  Detroit is in Michigan?  Not Louisiana? (AP)
Meg Whitman stuck her fashionable, yet practical stiletto (ok, pump) in her mouth yet again.  This week she compared the economic plight of Fresno to Detroit.  That's right.  Fresno, where they grow almonds and make lots of raisins is what she compared to Detroit, that bigger city on a Great Lake where they pretty much grow shipyards, auto plants, and Motown, once upon a time.
 
And how did Candidate Whitman lose her shoe this time?  Through a time honored tradition, candidates meet with various newspaper editorial boards for interviews as the election nears.  Editorial boards then sum up the meeting and give a thumbs up or down to the candidate.

Candidate Whitman's editorial adventure with the San Jose Merc did not go well.   Meeting with the editorial board of the San Jose Mercury News she began the conversation saying that Fresno was as awful as Detroit.  Really?

When asked to clarify, Candidate Whitman shoveled a little deeper.

"Fresno looks worse than Detroit. It's awful." She acknowledged it didn't go over well, and explained, "I made a comparison between Fresno and Detroit. It wasn't all that well received but what I was trying to say, what I meant to say, what was absolutely imbedded in those remarks is that it is not acceptable Detroit has a lower unemployment rate than Fresno."



But let's add a little logic to that simplistic comparison of "awful" made by Whitman.  Numbers are not always equally significant.   Fresno has a population of about 500K while Detroit's numbers are approaching 1M.  That 15% unemployment in Fresno and 14% unemployment in Detroit actually makes the automobile city's suffering much more "awful" (using the  Whitman awful-scale) based on real numbers of people out of work.  And a bright 5th grader might know that each city's various industries are not similar, the unemployed worker profiles are vastly different, and the overall recovery patterns would not be nearly the same. 

And just for fun, let’s help out Candidate Whitman with a few more relevant facts.

Fresno is steeped in California history as part of the gold rush and early railroad industry. But since it is in central valley, on the edge of the mountains, it also still serves as a great farming and orchard community; cotton, grapes, almonds and more are grown around Fresno.  Fresno is the world capital for raisins. About 60% of the world’s raisins are grown there and provide the majority of raisins sold in the United States. The largest employer in Fresno? The IRS.

Detroit?  It began as a flour milling town and moved into copper (you know, like gold only copper). And then there were the shipyards and ship repair, being not landlocked like that other city, Fresno. A big machine industry town, Detroit evolved into something we all think about when we think of Detroit; Motown and Gladys Knight.  Oh, and automobiles, too, as in General Motors and Henry Ford.

So much alike are these two cities, it is hard to tell where one begins and the other one ends.

While campaigning in the city of Fresno, Whitman was accompanied by Bobby Jindal, whom she calls a role model.  That would Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Rhodes Scholar and exorcist, who thinks creationism is great science; accompanying would-be CA Governor Meg Whitman, a Harvard Business School graduate who only began voting in 2002 and was the boss of Mr. Potato Head for a number of years. 

Is Meg Whitman smarter than a 5th grader?  You decide.

No comments: