More Thunder from eMeg’s Right; Carla Held Hostage
Little noticed among all the Ken und John Sturm und Drang came another right-wing whack at Meg Whitman’s campaign prevarications, from a less cacophonous, but arguably more consequential, conservative quarter.
Peter Foy, a Ventura County supervisor and a favorite of Tea Party and other hardline precincts, took eMeg to task in a SignOnSan Diego piece (h/t Jon Fleischman) for her flip-flopping flexibility on immigration and climate change, a post showing that conservative dismay with Our Meg is not limited to the yakkers and shouters on the AM band.
Foy played a high-profile role in sinking Governor Schwarzmuscle’s budget plan in last year’s special election, characterizing both Whitman and Steve Poizner as “squishy” on that and other fiscal matters in an interview with Calbuzz at a time when he was taking a semi-serious look at running for the big job himself.
In his new piece, Foy declared himself “a Whitman supporter,” but was unstinting and surgical in slicing her in the very spots where she was pounded last week on talk radio.
It’s troubling that Meg Whitman – the billionaire first-time candidate seeking to become California’s next governor – is running the most conventional of too-clever-by-half campaigns. If she stubbornly continues this aloof tactical venture she will almost surely lose and won’t deserve to win…
While Whitman and her advisers understand the need to reach out to diverse constituencies, ham-handed efforts to woo Latinos (and other favored groups) are likely to both fail to launch and even blow up in their face…
They are likely to see this for the kaleidoscopic approach it is – inviting people to see what they want to see – and could punish Whitman even more severely than they would a different politician.
Here’s why. Whitman obviously has special appeal and the independent, outsider profile many voters say they are looking for. But if she’s simply going to advance the most expensive version of a bargain-basement campaign, Whitman is literally inviting voters to view her as calculating and even manipulative. While this is dangerous for a veteran politician, it’s lethal for a newcomer.
Over at Fox and Hounds, the estimable Joe Mathews argues that Meg’s appearance on John and Ken was a “Sister Souljah” moment that will help her image among independent voters by showing she’s not afraid to stand up to the most raucous elements of her party. We say: Not so much.
Unlike the talk show boys, Foy is a well-starched, perfectly respectable, establishment arch-conservative. As a political matter, it’s significant that he not only sounds the same themes as John and Ken but also echoes the argument, made by independent voices like ours, plus progressive sites like Calitics, that Meg’s tell-everyone-what-they-want-to-hear pattern of behavior is most troubling, not as a policy issue, but as a character flaw.
…Their hearts and minds will follow: Maybe eMeg should stop with all the too clever by half moves and be more like Linda McMahon in taking a more ballsy approach.
Just askin’: Has there ever been a goofier idea by a news organization than the Chronicle’s effort to goose print circulation by delaying for 48 hours the posting of some of its best stories on SFGate?
A half-baked hybrid version of Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to force readers to pay for content one way or another (which itself is not exactly off to a roaring start) the Hearst Chron’s strategy of holding its own Sunday edition journalism hostage seems to be having three main effects:
1) it keeps some of the best work of its reporters out of the real-time conversation that drives the 24/7 news cycle;
2) it gives more eyeballs to the competition, as folks in search of new news head to the L.A. Times or SacBee to find it;
3) it drives traffic to aggregation sites which find and post the Chron’s stories despite the paper’s delusional notion that it can exercise singular control over the flow of online information.
For example, this Sunday the Chron kept Willie Brown’s column off the web, so readers in search of his latest take on the governor’s race (“Nerdy Jerry Brown a Formidable Opponent,” read the good hed, which was all a reader could read) was directed to this note:
This story is exclusive to the Chronicle’s Sunday print edition and will not appear on SFGate.com until 4:00 AM on Tuesday, August 10. To buy an electronic version of the Sunday paper now, go to…Print subscribers can go to…to sign up for free e-editions.
Hold your horses, Maude! Let’s forget that picnic and hike in the Berkeley hills – I really need to spend half the day navigating the Chron’s web site to read “Willie’s World.”
Readers encountered a similar M.C. Escher-like maze if they clicked on Carla Marinucci’s Sunday blog post (hopefully through the link on the Calbuzz Blogroll of Honor) where she offered a sketchy version of Jerry Brown’s just-released jobs plan, then appended this sad little lose-friends-and-don’t influence people note:
UPDATE: Check today’s San Francisco Chronicle for a “print-only” exclusive analysis of the jobs proposals being offered by both gubernatorial candidates, Brown and Whitman, as well as the candidates for U.S. Senate — Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer and GOP challenger Carly Fiorina. The “print only” exclusive will be released to the web on Tuesday morning…
Rather than wait until Tuesday morning, however, political junkies who cared found the very good, “exclusive analysis” of the jobs issue, which Marinucci co-wrote with boy wonder Drew Joseph, over at Jack Kavanagh’s Rough & Tumble , where it was posted more than 24 hours before it appeared “exclusively” on SFGate.
While the pathway the story took to R&T is not entirely clear, at least one key thing is: keeping information barricaded behind walls is kind of like running the 100-yard dash with water cupped safely in your hands.
Update 7:41 a.m. Rough and Tumble’s Jack Kavanagh checks in with this on the Chron/48-hour delay imbroglio:
I never link to Chronicle stories that are being withheld from the Internet on Sunday.
I only link to items readily available on the Chronicle site or the Chronicle politics blog.
The story you referenced by Carla was either available on the site or on the blog.
By the time the stories that are withheld by the Chronicle on Sunday are released on the following Wednesday, I generally ignore them mainly because by that time they are generally pretty stale.
Emphasis in original. We rest our case.
Memo to Frank Vega: Great Cesar’s Ghost, man! Free Willie, Carla, Drew, Phil, Andy and all political prisoners!
Regarding the Chron’s goofy idea: One would have loved to smell the wood burning in the upper management meeting that came up with the brilliant approach to undermining the exact thing that makes web content so attractive: timeliness! Nothing like undermining your future (the web) in a vainglorious attempt to save your past.
“…but also echoes the argument, made by independent voices like ours…”
Independent voice? You’re kidding, right? I’d peg you firmly in the “thinly-veiled progressive” category.
And enough grousing about the print industry. If the “delay-for-pay” scheme works, the Chronicle will flourish. If it doesn’t, the Chronicle fails. Their decision, their risk. As it should be in a free market.
Dive bomber, you’re clearly not a progressive yourself. Otherwise you’d know the Chron isn’t. Carla is. I’m sure some of the other reporters are. But editors and upper management keep any lefty tendencies pretty much under wraps except in blogs or chatty stuff like the what Wee Willie writes.
If, by “progressive,” you mean the Calbuzzers are not knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, you would be right. But if you are attempting to throw them in with the left-liberal, politically-correct, bran-muffin caterwaulers, then you’re mistaken.
Ah, free your mind from such stereotypes good doctor. I’m left liberal, hate political correctness, and haven’t touched a bran muffin in years–despite allegations of such behavior by Calbuzz. Caterwauling I must admit I’m prone to, especially at knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.
You see, some of us left liberals have a certain libertarian bent. We believe in freedom from other people’s religions. That folks should be allowed to do what they want unless it hurts somebody else. That the whole “liberty” concept is pretty open ended. But that government has a role in providing fertile ground for the “pursuit of happiness” part of our national aspirations. So I have no interest in telling people what to do. But I do have a bias toward helping them do it. To me, that helps float all boats.
It’s what the good professor Lakoff calls “bi-conceptual.” In other words, some of us ARE capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Not necessarily bran muffins.