Archive for the ‘Meg Whitman’ Category



eMeg Surges Ahead of Commish; Both Trail Crusty

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

On the strength of about $19 million spent in 2009, Meg Whitman has surged to a 45-17% lead over Steve Poizner in the Republican race for governor and picked up 11 points against Democrat Jerry Brown, who still leads her by 46-36% in a simulated general election match-up, according to the latest Field Poll.

Attorney Gen. Brown, who has not yet formally declared his candidacy for governor, also leads Insurance Commissioner Poizner 48-31% in a general election simulated by the Field Poll, the basic results of which were made available to Calbuzz.*

In the absence of a campaign, Crusty the General has lost some ground to both eMeg and the Commish. In October he led Whitman 50-29% and he was ahead of Poizner 50-25% in the Field Poll.

In the GOP race, Whitman and Poizner nearly evenly split most of the voters who would otherwise have supported former Congressman Tom Campbell, who jumped into the U.S. Senate race last week. In a three-way race for governor, the Field Poll had it 36% for Whitman, 22% for Campbell and 9% for Poizner.

Despite Whitman’s formidable lead in the GOP primary and her overwhelming spending, 38% of Republican voters remain undecided – giving Poizner hope that he can catch up and capture the nomination.

Now that the Republican contest is a two-way race, Poizner is free to go after Whitman without fear of giving a boost to a third candidate. But his verbal swipes at Whitman have thus far have not reverberated beyond the echo chamber of the political press corps.

Meanwhile Brown’s overall image rating — 44% favorable and 32% unfavorable — has remained basically unchanged since October when it was 44-29%. Brown has picked up some among Democrats: he’s now 64-17% compared to 57-18% in October. Among Republicans, however, his favorable has dipped to 20-57% from 26-27% in October.

Importantly, however, Brown’s favorable rating among independents is 20 points positive – 43-23% — compared to 44-26% in October. Still, nearly a quarter of all voters have no opinion about the former two-term governor, making him vulnerable to negative framing by either or both of his potential opponents.

A major challenge for Brown is introducing himself to younger voters who have no idea who he is from his previous incarnation as governor. According to the San Francisco Chronicle — a Field Poll subscriber with early access to survey data — 60 percent of respondents under 30 had no opinion of Brown.

Despite spending $19 million, Whitman remains unknown to a majority of voters, with a 25-20% favorable rating, up from 18-14% in October. Her favorable ratings are 16-31% negative among Democrats, a slide from her 15-18% in October; 34-8% positive among Republicans, an improvement from 29-10% in October; and 27-13% among independents, a big boost from 12-12% in October.

Poizner remains virtually unknown and not all that popular among those who have an opinion about him. His overall approval is 16-20% negative – 15-22% among Democrats, 18-19% among Republicans, and 27-13% among independents. In October, Poizner’s overall favorability rating was 22-17% positive; 20-20% among Democrats, 24-16% among Republicans, and 22-15% among independents.

The Field Poll surveyed 958 likely voters Jan. 5-17 by land line and cell phone, including 202 likely Republican primary voters. The margin of error for the overall sample is plus or minus 3.3% and for the GOP sample it is 7.1%.

* Calbuzz does not receive the Field Poll in advance from the Field Corp. We offered to pay for a subscription, but were rejected because Field executives fear the wrath of their MSM clients, some of whom have complained behind our backs about us getting the survey.

When we can find out more information — like how each of the candidates is doing among voters in different age, race, gender and geograhpic categories — Calbuzz will report it.


Meyer Debuts, Dr. H Returns, Jerry Time Travels

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

meyer cartoon 1.1-18colorToday we present the latest, irrefutable evidence that America’s most talented journalists are free flowing to the web (emphasis on “free”), with the Calbuzz debut of award-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Meyer.

Meyer, who says he aimed to “entertain and exasperate readers” during a 28-year stint at the SF Chronicle, has also been published in the NYT, the WashPost, New Republic and National Journal, plus a whole bushel full of other places through United Features Syndicate.

Recipient of a Fischetti Award, the big-deal editorial cartoon competition named after the late, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti, Meyer also has been honored with a James Madison Freedom of Information Act Award – not to mention a couple of particle board plaques from the Peninsula Press Club. In his spare time, he likes to bet on dachshund races.

He’s quite simply one of the best in the business, a point we think is sharply underscored by today’s take on televising the Prop. 8 trial. Please join us in welcoming Meyer to the Calbuzz ranks.

meyer cartoon 1-18color

__________________________________________________________

The Return of Dr. Hackenflack:

Dear Dr. Hdr-hackenflack
In analyzing the Massachusetts Senate race, do you think Scott Brown’s nude centerfold photos in Cosmo were a really big factor?
– Lady Gaga, Poker Face, Tex.

Dear Gaga,
There was a MASSI
VE gender gap on this issue: Men thought it a huge positive by +10, but women said it wasn’t that big a deal, only +4. Final length of victory = +5.

Herr Doktor,
I just heard Meg Whitman’s new statewide radio ad attacking people on welfare. Isn’t she a zillionaire or something – is this really the greatest good for the greatest number?
– Karl, Marxville

Dear Karl,
Please remember, the filthy rich are people, too. I’m sure she’s more than willing to give one of those welfare folks a good job grooming her horse or cleaning up behind it.

To Dr. P.J. Hackenflack
From Ellen from Malcolmsburg
Re: Women and Whitman

I just stumbled across Meg Whitman’s campaign video with testimonials about her from prominent women in politics, like Jillian Hasner, Amisha Patel, Jessica Patterson, Sara Myers and Sarah Pompei. She sounds like such a generous person!

Dear Ellen,
Yes, since everyone in the video is on her payroll, we think of it as eMeg’s very own welfare queen program.

Jerry smashemike-curbs time-space continuum: Plenty of Calbuzzers, not yet eligible to pull money out of their 401(k)s, were scratching their heads  when California’s Acting Governor, Attorney General Jerry Brown, joked in Wednesday’s “Quicktake” that he planned to suspend AB32  and compared himself in the process to former Lite Gov. Mike Curb.

A Calbuzz stroll through the dustbin of history (mixed metaphor? –ed) brought back vivid memories of Curb, the cherubic-faced record* executive-turned-future-hope-of-the-Republican party. In 1979, his first year in office, Curb carried on a campaign of political performance art, purporting to seize control of the levers of power every time Brown left California to promote his nascent bid for president, which was pretty damned often.

Curb’s dumbass guerrilla effort crashed on the evening of Wednesday, May 16, when he tried once again to assert his disputed powers as acting governor, this time suspending state standards for the content of gasoline, and pretty much making a fool of himself to boot.

With Brown in D.C. , Curb with great ceremony signed a proclamation in San Francisco, rolling back tougher-than-national standards on lead and vapor pressure in gas. Not long after, an aide discovered that the word “consistent” had been substituted for the word “inconsistent” in the signed executive order, which would have given it exactly the opposite effect Curb intended.

So he made a mad, 90-mile dash to Sacramento, for a very informal meeting with then-Deputy Secretary of State Michael S. Gagan, a favorite of Sacramento’s crowded, after-work saloon crowd, who happened to live one floor below Brown’s famous “mattress on the floor” digs in an apartment near the Capitol.

Curb was met at the curb by a trio of tipped-off reporters when he pulled up to the apartment. The group included a future Calbuzzer, who provided this chronology for S.F.’s morning paper the following day:

6:59:30 – Curb hustles into the apartment house elevator accompanied by an aide and several reporters who showed up to greet him.

As the elevator door closes, a building security guard throws it open and asks, “Who let you in?’”

“You’re holding up state business,” says the aide, explaining that the deputy secretary of state is expecting the lieutenant governor.

7:00 – As the governor’s plane approaches California’s skies, the elevator slowly creaks up to the fifth floor and Curb mumbles, “There’s got to be an easier way to make a living…This is the last thing I needed this week.”

7:02:10 – Deputy Secretary of State Gagan calls the telephone recording that gives the time, as Curb signs his corrected executive order, sitting on a leather couch below a leaded glass lamp with the word “Budweiser” embossed on it.

7:03 – As Gagan, drinking a beer, completes the legal necessities of accepting the proclamation…Curb paces in the living room of the neatly furnished apartment and answers questions from reporters.

“Some people may not understand why we did this, but I think it’s a key issue,” Curb says. “I don’t think anyone with a brain doubts this is going to produce more gas.”

For the record, SF Chronicle night city editor Michael Taylor was told by the Federal Aviation Administration later that night that Brown’s plane entered California air space at the Colorado River on Jet Airway J-10 at 7:06 pm, PST. You could look it up.

* A disk designed to be played on a phonograph (an electronic device that reproduces sound by means of a stylus in contact with a grooved rotating disk).

iCarly dcarlyrightefies laws of arithmetic: In the wake of the Massachusetts Senate race, there are plenty of things a Republican Senate wannabe like Carly Fiorina could whack an incumbent Democrat like Barbara Boxer over – but one of them is not campaign fundraising, especially one larded with numbers that are backasswards.

“Barbara Boxer should be a very worried incumbent senator today,” sez a new press release from Hurricane Carly HQ. “Not only did Carly out-raise Boxer in just 60 days to the tune of 2 to 1, but the polls” etc. etc.

Well, not really. In fact, iCarly’s “2-to-1” claim about out raising Boxer turns out to be what Poor George W would call your fuzzy math.

In her latest campaign finance filing, Fiorina in the 4th quarter of 2009 did, in fact, report receipts of $3.58 million, compared to $1.8 million for Boxer. Problem is, $2.5 million of the total – 70 per cent – came in the form of $2.5 million loan from Carly to herself.

In contributions, it was Boxer who out-raised Fiorina almost 2-to-1 – $1.8 million to $1.08 million.

More importantly, Babs has $7.2 million in the bank, compared to the iCarly’s $2.75 million – including the self-loan. Which helps explain how the Hurricane messed up the finances at HP so effectively during her tenure there.

Today’s sign the end of civilization is near: TMZ sez Mo’Nique’s got a leg up on the competition.  (You wanna see it, you gotta follow the link.)

AB32 Fight: Smokestack Steve vs. Monoxide Meg

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

smokestacksteve2Throughout our so-called careers, Calbuzz has been consistently entertained by our friend Richie Ross’s talent for concocting cut-to-the-bone epigrams about political campaigning.

“When you’re behind,” Richie once told us, amidst a race where he was running some now-forgotten dog, “always pick a fight.”

The formulation came to mind this week, as Smokestack Steve Poizner took out after Monoxide Meg Whitman, insisting to all who would listen that his position on the environment was waayyy worse than hers.

One day after our piece examining eMeg’s fierce opposition to California’s landmark AB32 climate change legislation (Coincidence? You be the judge) The Commish whacked her as an opportunistic, closet tree-hugger.

megkissingsarah

“Meg’s rhetoric on AB32 is again a sign of the two Meg Whitmans,” said Jarrod Agen, Poizner’s slasher-in-chief. “Campaign trail Meg is making claims that directly contradict her actions and Republican voters will not trust her.”

The me-too attack came as Poizner endorsed the so-called “California Jobs Initiative” being co-sponsored by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Paleolithic, and Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Sirloin. The measure, now being signature circulated, calls for suspension of AB32, until employment levels get back to where they were before it passed in 2006.

056-597But the endorsement was really just an excuse to remind GOP primary voters of eMeg’s eleemosynary contribution of $300K to the Environmental Defense Fund, a strong supporter of AB32, not long after the measure passed, as well as her gushy past praise for ex-Obama Green Czar Van Jones – “I’m a huge fan!” – whom she met on a save-the-earth cruise that also included Jimmy Carter, fercrineoutloud.

Pshaw, dismissively responded the volcanic Sarah Pompei, eMeg’s well-paid responder. Whitman, she said, don’t need no stinkin’ initiatives to crank up the thermostat on the world all by herself.

“The authority to suspend AB32 already exists and Meg is committed to using it on her first day as Governor,” Pompei said, adding that, “as a result of the struggling economy, Meg was the first candidate to call for a suspension of AB32 . . . If there was any possibility that Steve Poizner could be touting those same credentials, well then, he probably would be.”

And thank you for that.

On Monday we presented the case, and the polling to back it up, that a majority of Californians don’t see a huge conflict between environmental protection and economic growth. While Calbuzz is open to being proven wrong (in fact, we’ve made a pretty good living at it), we think racing to the bottom on pollution is strictly a GOP primary strategy that won’t sell in a general election.

angelides

Milk Carton Report: Phil Angelides, who had a charisma bypass before such surgery was fashionable, strode his way into the national spotlight Wednesday, as he opened as chairman the much-anticipated hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

“People are angry,” Angelides said, with the heads of the nation’s two largest banks and two biggest Wall Street firms sitting, under oath, before him.

They have a right to be. The fact that Wall Street is enjoying record profits and bonuses in the wake of receiving trillions of dollars in government assistance — while so many families are struggling to stay afloat — has only heightened the sense of confusion.

Not bad stuff for a guy who ran the worst campaign for the top spot since John D. Sloat didn’t cop a single vote. Given his financial bona fides as a former state Treasurer, not to mention his classic training at the hand of Angelo Tsakopoulos, Angelides ain’t a bad pick for the gig, which Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped him land.

It’s hard to imagine the commission coming up with much in the way of true reform, however, although the hearings do have some entertainment value. Best coverage we’ve seen is the live blog over at Huffpost  which also has a dandy piece co-authored by former N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who managed to keep his pants on for the occasion.

halperinBeltway wisdom gone awry: There are few people in the political news business more obnoxious, self-referential and self-absorbed than ABC’s Mark Halperin, so we were delighted at Jason Linkins’ superb takedown of “Game Change,” the ’08 campaign account Halperin co-authored with John Heilemann, and which their fellow Beltway snobs are lapping up like melted Ben & Jerry’s.

Under the terrific hed “The Blackhearted Ethos of Game Change,” Linkins writes:

What you will get from this tome is the experience of being dragged through a great, teeming, gossipy Superfund-sized pile of shit, lovingly accumulated by two authors who have basically allowed anyone willing to offer nasty hearsay, trash-talk, or score-settling to dump away.

Calbuzz sez check it out

We’re from the press, we’re here to help: Kudos to Calitics for being first on the scene early Wednesday with a list of how-to-help contact info for the victims of the horrible earthquake in Haiti. Best bitchslap of the insufferable Pat Robertson: thank you Andy Borowitz for “Haiti? I Thought They Said ‘Hades’”


How Climate Change Law Shapes the Gov Race

Monday, January 11th, 2010

megkissingsarahAlthough a 12.3% unemployment rate and $20 billion budget deficit ensure the economy will dominate California’s race for governor, Republican front-runner Meg Whitman has guaranteed that the environment will also be a high-profile issue in the campaign.

Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, declared in September that her first act as governor would be to suspend the state’s pioneering climate change law, AB32. It was a high-risk political move for Whitman, putting her campaign at odds with the views of a large majority of California voters while, more broadly, re-igniting a statewide debate about the impact of strong environmental regulation on economic growth.

AB32, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law in 2006, sets increasingly stringent caps on greenhouse gas emissions, leading to a 25% reduction by 2020. The governor’s office described the bill as “a first-in-the-world comprehensive program of regulatory and market mechanisms to achieve real, quantifiable, cost-effective reductions of greenhouse gases.”

050-702

Percentages in favor. Source: PPIC

That’s not how Whitman sees it. The law, she says, “will lead to higher energy costs at a time when we can least afford them. They will discourage job creation and could kill any recovery.” Schwarzenegger, who encouraged the measure, answered Whitman’s statements with sharp criticism for all those who assert a conflict between the economy and the environment:

“I think there are people that just don’t believe in fixing and working on the environment,” he said. “They don’t believe there is such a thing as global warming, they’re still living in the Stone Age.”

Whether the measure is the best approach to reducing greenhouse gases – about which there is considerable debate – Whitman’s stance against it flies in the face of California political trends in recent decades. Like abortion rights, environmental protection is strongly favored by independent, decline-to-state voters, as well as by large majorities of Democrats. As with the issue of choice, taking a stance in opposition to popular opinion can kill the general election chances of a statewide candidate.

Already, the liberal Courage Campaign has attacked Whitman in a radio ad, comparing her position on carbon reduction targets to that of Sarah Palin. Significantly, Whitman used the ad by the leftist grassroots organization as a fundraising tool, positioning herself as a free market champion under attack.

As a political matter, the candidate’s AB32 opposition may make some short-term tactical sense. Her first challenge is to win the Republican primary contest, where right-wing voters dominate, and where she faces Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Rep. Tom Campbell. The Public Policy Institute of California recently reported that, among Republicans, support for AB 32 has fallen in recent years, from 65-to-20% in favor in 2006 when it was passed to 43-to-46% against the measure in 2009.

As an aside in the GOP primary but a harbinger for the general election, Democrats in the state stand 78-to-12% in favor of the law and independents are 67-to-23% in favor of it.

And while 89% of California Democrats and 75% of independents say “it is necessary to counter the effects of global warming right away,” Republicans are split on that issue, with 44% favoring immediate action and 46% saying it isn’t necessary to take steps yet.

Whitman’s strategy could ultimately backfire. It is difficult to see the environment as a determinative issue in the GOP primary, where Poizner more quietly takes the same position as Whitman while Campbell favors AB32. Republicans historically have not picked candidates according to their positions on the environment

But Democrats and independents do, and they will be voting in the general election.

PPIC reported that about nine in 10 California Democrats and eight in 10 independents say the government should regulate greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming. Whitman might call that a “job killer,” but she would do so at her political peril: even 54% of Republicans favor such measures, according to PPIC polling.

It’s not hard to envision an anti-Whitman ad quoting Schwarzenegger:

Some have challenged whether AB 32 is good for businesses. I say unquestionably it is good for businesses. Not only large, well-established businesses, but small businesses that will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to help us achieve our climate goals.

While Whitman has been raising the issue’s profile, the state Senate Select Committee on Climate Change and AB32 Implementation, headed by Sen. Fran Pavley, a Democrat who represents Malibu, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and other L.A. beach enclaves, has begun hearings on Schwarzenegger’s implementation of the measure.

“It’s time to figure out whether we mean what we say or not,” said committee member  Sen. Joe Simitian, a Democrat from Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz.

Further driving the environment onto the front burner is Gov. Schwarzenegger’s renewed effort to gain approval of the controversial Tranquillon Ridge offshore oil project in Santa Barbara which — whether is has merit or not — will almost certainly serve as a rhetorical line of demarcation between environmental purists and appeasers.

At the same time, the governor’s Office of Planning and Research has been instructed to promulgate guidelines by which cities and counties can evaluate the effects on global warming of new development – a result of lawsuits brought by Attorney General Jerry Brown. The presumptive Democratic candidate for governor, Brown with his actions has forced consideration of global warming into local planning decisions.

Whitman may please Republican conservatives on the issue, but she is up against broader political forces that favor policies to slow down climate change, including a huge portion of general election voters who want California to lead the way.

A version of this post was published today in the Los Angeles Times.

Pondering the GOP’s Future: New Ideas or SOS?

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Dan vs. Dan: Our old friend Dan Scsickelephanthnur has been doing some serious wool gathering on the question of whether any of the three Republican contenders for governor have the political mettle, not just to win election, but to redefine the GOP in the process.

Mere hacks that we are, Calbuzz isn’t fully certain that we follow all the nuanced twists and turns of the baroquely reasoned argument made by Schnur, a former partisan turned neutral academic, who now reigns as the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

As best we understand his latest dispatch over at Flashreport, however, Schnur seems to posit that the current, sorry spectacle of a teabag-besotted  Republican party means that it’s time for the GOP to rethink the ideological framework that’s sustained it since Ronald Reagan’s first term.

schnur

While it has become fairly predictable for Republican politicians to wrap themselves in the flag of Reagan, the pessimism that currently infects our body politic does present the same type of psychological challenge that the Gipper confronted in his first successful presidential campaign . . .

We are currently witnessing the stirrings of a similar internal debate within the Republican party to that which the Democrats fought throughout the 1970s and ’80s . . . No credible voice is making the case that Republicans should abandon Reagan’s economic principles . . . (but) perhaps there is an argument to be made that those priorities must also be updated, in order to deal with the challenges of an era in which the economic centerpiece of the country has moved from Detroit to Silicon Valley.

Perhaps there is, but we’ll never know because Schnur doesn’t make it.

Instead he quickly steps back from the ledge of suggesting to Republicans, on the most influential Republican web site in California, that perhaps they should, just maybe, take a second look at the whole tax-cuts-and-deregulation-will-fix-everything-in-a-jiffy, Heaven’s Gate groupthink that afflicts them.

Putting aside the short shrift that he pays to the inconvenient fact that Republicans have held the White House for 12 of the 21 years since Reagan left office, Schnur’s hasty retreat from his own, intriguing ergo ipso facto is a disappointment. Wafting in a tepid bath of yes-we-can kumbaya, he treads water in concluding with the hope that someone in the Republican field – anyone! – might come up with a fresh idea to save the GOP,  if not the Republic itself:

reepcollage

[Campbell, Poizner and Whitman] may be better positioned than any Republican politicians in the country to lead this next stage of ideological evolution. If one of them is able to do so, he or she will not only provide the tools to fix California’s economy, but its embattled psyche as well.

Or not.

For our money, Schnur’s magical thinking melts away before the force majeure of the fact-based argument, made by us and other right-thinking people, that California’s crackpot state political structure effectively prohibits the rational and effective exercise of governance. That view was stated most recently, and most emphatically, by California’s other boy genius named Dan –  Walters of the Bee Minus.

waltersA notion in the minds of a few pundits, including yours truly, a couple of decades ago — that California was becoming functionally ungovernable, its politics severed from social and economic reality — has since become conventional wisdom. And it will dominate this election year in the nation’s most populous and arguably most troubled state . . .

One of the four [current candidates] will almost certainly become California’s governor a year hence and begin what will more than likely be a doomed governorship.

Declaring the state’s next leader an utter failure 11 months before the election is held -– now that’s punditry we can believe in.

Feel free to use Pay Pal: We’re hardly the first to reach for the Enalapril whenever another of those astonishingly condescending e-blasts shows up from Obama’s Organization for America, purring on about how we’ve all worked so hard together to put special interests on the run and could you please send another $5 to the DNC?

Way back last year, lefty blogger Markos Moulitsas offered a minor gem of a rant, aptly called “Idiocy,” that got to the nut of the annoying treacliness of  these fake-sincere messages:

Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we’re supposed to get excited about whatever end result we’re about to get, so much so that we’re going to fork over money?…In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform.

hopelessWe’ve taken a couple of whacks, here and here, at analyzing why once-enthusiastic Obama supporters feel so betrayed by his late-blooming Clintonian corporatism (corporate Clintonism?), but Micah Sifry over at techpresident pretty much nails it in “The Obama Disconnect: What happens when myth meets reality.”

The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn’t happen, in the first year of Obama’s administration. The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests–banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex–sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

tila-tequila2

“People are frustrated because we have done our part,” one frustrated Florida Obama activist told the Politico. “We put these people in the position to make change and they’re not doing it.”Scholars may decide that his team’s failure to devote more attention to reinventing the bully pulpit in the digital age, and to carrying over more of the campaign’s grassroots energy, may turn out to be pivotal to evaluations of Obama’s success, or failure, as president. Calbuzz sez check it out.

Today’s sign the end of civilization is near: Tila Tequila channels Jackie Kennedy.



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