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Shady Sam’s Sham Oil Stance Meets Mariachi Meg

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Sam Blakeslee, the San Luis oilman Californians just can’t trust, is trying to steal a victory in a state senate special election next week by posing as a moderate Republican environmentalist who loves sea otters even more than snowy plovers.

The blunt truth of the matter, however, may be found in 1) the lavish oil industry contributions shoveled into committees that have forked out more than $1 million to back Blakeslee’s play in the 15th State Senate district and 2)  the photograph posted at the top of this story, which shows exactly where the San Luis Obispo GOP assemblyman stood on offshore oil drilling in California – before that whole Gulf of Mexico thing made it really, really unfashionable.

The ex-Republican assembly leader is locked in a fierce battle with former Democratic assemblyman John Laird for the seat representing a vast, coastal district that was held until recently by Lite Governor Abel Maldonado. It’s up for grabs in a special next Tuesday that Governor Schwarzmuscle carefully scheduled to benefit Blakeslee.

Laird just now is getting his brains beat in on TV, as BP, Chevron and other oil companies have rushed to finance pro-Blakeslee independent expenditure committees that are paying for a barrage of ads portraying the Democrat as a crazed socialist considerably to the left of Hugo Chavez.

As we predicted a year ago hardliner Blakeslee now is falsely positioning himself as a pro-green centrist, in an effort to capture a majority vote in the June 22 primary, which would make a scheduled August run-off unnecessary.

“I have been an environmental Republican throughout my service,” Blakeslee told Paul Rogers of the Mercury News. “I’ve never wavered on my protection of the coast.”

Excuse us while we build a tower big enough to hold our laughter.

In claiming he’s against offshore oil, Blakeslee tries to hide behind the skirts of a group of Santa Barbara environmentalists, who pitched the controversial Tranquillon Ridge offshore project, just off the coast of the southern end of the 15th SD, as a way to trade new drilling now for less in the future (for those who’ve been hanging out on Uranus for the last year, our primer on T-Ridge is here).

In truth, Blakeslee’s history on the issue is strongly at odds with the greens who originally co-sponsored the plan with the Houston-based oil company PXP; his record shows a drill-baby-drill determination to ram through the offshore project via a series of backdoor legislative schemes intended to overrun the opposition of the State Lands Commission, which rejected T-Ridge and which, oh yeah, for decades happens to have had sole jurisdiction over state oil leases.

After the lands commission turned down the project in 2009 – saying its promise to end future drilling was unenforceable because the power to do so ultimately resided with the scandal-ridden federal Minerals  Management Service, Blakeslee plotted with fellow knuckledragger assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Orange County to end run the commission, a move that the enviros who originally backed the proposal categorically opposed.

First, the dynamic duo tried to pass AB23*, a DeVore bill that was gutted in the Senate and amended to approve PXP’s T-Ridge project by creating a special exemption and removing it from the jurisdiction of the lands commission.

On July 24, 2009, the measure was heatedly debated in the Assembly and defeated with only 30 of the house’s 80 members supporting the drilling plan.

Within hours, however, the official record of that vote was expunged, in what appeared to be a Blakeslee maneuver to remove his fingerprints from the pro-drilling bill. Despite the insistence of Blakeslee flacks  that he had nothing to do with erasing the vote, the reliable Anthony York of Capitol Weekly shortly after the deal went down cited sources who traced the move to the then-Republican Assembly leader.

For those still pondering the mystery of that expunged vote, Calbuzz is pleased to provide an historic photo of it, which clearly shows Blakeslee among the small minority of those who backed the special interest legislation to expand drilling off the coast.

Two months later, Blakeslee was back at it, this time gutting one of his own bills in an effort have his way on behalf of the oil industry, which would have liked nothing more than to use T-Ridge as a foot in the door to overcome California’s four decade opposition to any new leases authorizing more drilling in state water.

It’s instructive that when Laird kicked off the 15th SD special election campaign by whacking Blakeslee on offshore drilling,  the Republican a) began trying to finesse the issue by touting his purported environmental credentials and b) changed the subject, unloading a barrage of ads assailing Laird as a menace to society on fiscal issues.

Among other crimes, it seems, Laird accepted pay raises that, um, Blakeslee also took (Jon Coupal, the doctrinaire Howard Jarvis acolyte who’s plugging Blakeslee in the IE ads, might want to check out some of Sam’s squishier statements on tax increases here and here).

Then again, if Shady Sam is willing to masquerade his environmental record to get elected, why should anyone be surprised that he’d gussy  himself up on other issues as well?

eMeg proves she has no shame: Guess who’s nowhere to be found on Meg Whitman’s new website Latinos for Meg or in her new Spanish language TV commercials? Former Gov. Pete Wilson, her campaign chairman and iconic diablo among Hispanics in California.

Gone is the “tough-as-nails” Meg Whitman who sternly warned “No amnesty. No exceptions” as she vowed to send the National Guard to the border, crack down on sanctuary cities and generally lower the boom on illegal immigrants.

As Calbuzz predicted a couple of weeks ago: Whitman, now desperate to capture Latino voters she didn’t give a rat’s ass about in the Republican primary, suddenly is all about jobs and opportunity, sunshine and inclusiveness. Oh puhleeeese. What a fraud.

The only uncertainty, as we noted before: “…we don’t know whether, by spending untold sums on campaign propaganda, Whitman will be able to obliterate the collective memory voters might otherwise have of her lurch to the right.”

Oh, and Meg dropped another $20 million into her war chest this week, bringing her personal “investment” to $91 million.

Now, Mariachi Meg is emphasizing that she was never for Proposition 187 (although its chief advocate is her campaign chairman) and she opposes Arizona’s check-their-status law. Maybe – after spending serious money to make the point that she opposes amnesty – she’ll go back to arguing for a guest worker program where people “stand at the back of the line and pay a fine.”

So far no one is up on TV countering Whitman’s hypocritical drive to round up Latino voters. But the Democratic Governor’s Association did create a 90-second video in Spanish called “Send Pete Packing.”

As Tenoch Flores, on behalf of the California Democratic Party,  argued:

“Apparently Meg Whitman forgot that we live in the age of ‘the internets’ – ironic for someone who touts her eBay experience. She sincerely believes a Spanish language advertising buy is going to gloss over the fact that together with her mentor Pete Wilson, and her rival Steve Poizner, she engaged in the greatest Republican Party anti-immigrant hate-fest this side of the California-Arizona border.”

The CDP also reprised Meg’s “Tough as Nails” radio ad and even offered up a Spanish translation. Said Flores:

“Latino voters in California haven’t forgotten about Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant crusade, and that was over ten years ago. They certainly won’t forget that Whitman used them as foil to get herself through the GOP primary less than a month ago.”

Unless Whitman’s beyond standard quantum limit spending can wipe away all memory.

* In an earlier version of this post we had a typo that labeled AB23 as AB32 — a super mix-up since AB32 is the famous climate-change bill.

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Posted in California Governor's Race, California Politics, Campaign Advertising, Environment, Illegal Immigration, John Laird, Meg Whitman, Proposition 187, Sam Blakeslee | 5 Comments »

Last Chance for Poizner: Make the Case for Himself

Monday, May 24th, 2010

As the PPIC poll made clear last week, Steve Poizner, as of the middle of May, got himself within striking distance of Meg Whitman. But unless he makes all the right moves in the next week or so, he’s toast. In fact, it may already be too late for The Commish: he may have missed his chance to put his puny boot on eMeg’s wattle.

Whitman, the former eBay CEO, is in part a victim of her own success. So thoroughly had she dominated the airwaves and the GOP contest for so long, that only her message was out there, sending her to an unsustainable 61-11% lead over Poizner, the Insurance Commissioner.

So when Poizner FINALLY put some money behind attacking eMeg for her connections to Goldman Sachs, her stand on immigration, her voting record and more, he inevitably brought her down to Earth. In the process, he moved up against her in most polls. Private surveys Calbuzz trusts showed the race had narrowed to about 6-8 points in the first week of May.

It looked as if Poizner might be moving in for the kill. We hear pollsters were finding that he’d driven her unfavorable rating WAY up. GOP primary voters were looking around for somewhere to go. They didn’t like her much because she was tied to Goldman, she was wishy-washy on immigration and she looked kinda arrogant and out of touch. Not like them.

But Poizner a) didn’t sustain the character/ideology attacks and b) didn’t give voters any sense of what he would do, how he would lead or why they should switch to him. After months of singing, “Just you wait Mrs. Whitman, just you wait,” Poizner’s much-anticipated assault was kinda like him: not quite forceful enough.

While we’re awaiting the final pre-primary surveys from Field and the L.A. Times, those private pollsters say now that Poizner’s failure to make a case for himself has allowed those voters whom he shook lose from Whitman to begin to drift back to her in the past week.

Looking back over all of Poizner’s advertising since late March, there are only a few ads in which he gives voters any sense of who he is and what he would do as governor. His negatives on her – on immigration amnesty, support for Barbara Boxer, representing a third term for Arnold Schwarzenegger, supporting tax-payer funded abortion, her voting record, her ties to Goldman Sachs and opposition to Arizona’s immigration law – combined to have an effect.

But why should anyone vote for Poizner? If TV viewers were still listening  after he got done attacking Whitman, they might have caught the briefest mention of him saying he’ll cut taxes, cut spending, support Arizona’s approach to illegal immigration and deny benefits to illegal immigrants and oppose taxpayer funded abortion. The strongest pro-argument was in an ad featuring U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, a Republican conservative icon, who said it wasn’t even a close call – Poizner is the only conservative in the race. But that ad was up for just two weeks in late April and early May.

To have any hope of winning this race, Poizner will have to:

1. Put Goldman Sachs and Whitman’s voting record into one ad that argues that eMeg is nothing more than a Wall Street predator who couldn’t even bother to participate in California politics until she decided to buy the governorship with her  ill-gotten lucre.

2. Put McClintock back on the air telling viewers why he’s for Poizner and have Poizner lay out three or four things he’ll do as governor: cut taxes and spending in order to preserve schools and law enforcement; be fair to legal immigrants and tough on illegals, protect the environment but stop job-killing red tape. Or whatever: it’s not our platform; it’s his.

The point is make the case to voters in the GOP primary that not only should they reject Whitman, they should be FOR him because he knows what he’s doing and has a plan to govern California. Or whatever honest and authentic upside message resonates.

The Whitman campaign is spinning furiously that Poizner is falling further behind every day and that he’s not even competing in the Bay Area market he recently suggested was a key to winning.

Poizner’s people insist their guy  is in it to win it – that only in a race where one candidate has blown through something like $80 million could it be a question whether a guy who’s in for $24 million is really serious.

Their argument, from chief strategist Stuart Stevens: This has turned into a race about illegal immigration, amnesty and the Arizona immigration law. And Whitman is on the wrong side from Republican primary voters. Big broad strokes. The “Whitman/Obama amnesty plan,” one ad calls it.

“The question is: who’s more conservative?” Stevens asks. Whitman, who started out with a three-point message, he says, now is “boiling the ocean” — exactly what she said she would never do. And remember, Poizner keeps noting, illegal immigration was never one of eMeg’s top three issues.

“Those who say that Steve hasn’t given voters a reason to be for him probably don’t care much about illegal immigration,” Stevens says. The Poizner ad running that goes after Mexican President Felipe Calderon suggests where Poizner will go in the coming days: they’re going to attack Mexico and argue that Whitman and Calderon are two peas in a pod.

They believe they can win by arguing that Poizner is the guy to vote FOR because he’s the only Republican running who primary voters agree with on immigration and amnesty. We’re skeptical — in part because, in the latest PPIC poll, immigration came in third among Republicans asked to name the most important issue facing Californians (immigration was at 14%, behind jobs and economy at 42% and the state budget and taxes at 24%).

It is clear, however, that Team Steve has driven the Whitman juggernaut off its fundamental three-point message. So we’re hanging on for the ride.

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Posted in California Governor's Race, California Politics, Campaign Advertising, Immigration, Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner, Tom McClintock | 4 Comments »

New Whitman Ad: The Three Faces of eMeg

Monday, May 17th, 2010

In the hours since Meg Whitman released a bizarre new ad Friday, Calbuzz has been hunkered down in our darkened media room, playing and replaying the 60-second spot in slow-mo, stop motion and mute, deconstructing the thing with the same painstaking care we devoted to Blowup and the Zapruder film.

Unshaven and unshowered, fueling our round-the-clock labors with Cheez Whiz nachos and Team Gulp cups of 7-11 coffee, we’ve been desperately driven to answer one key question about the ad:

Huh?

The new spot marks a radical and utterly random departure for the eMeg marketing team, which previously was characterized by a confident, consistent and tightly focused message discipline.  Now, “Tough Business” suddenly lurches into unfamiliar, dangerous territory, like a drunken Rotary Club conventioneer stumbling after midnight into the Tenderloin district.

The ad presents to viewers a cue card-reading version of eMeg, who recites a whiny and rambling, if not incoherent, script.

Second-by-second, her expressions change and twitch – eyes narrowed in anger, brows lifted in self pity, mouth widened in rictus grin – a painful exercise that recalls nothing so much as the thespian exertions of Joanne Woodward in “The Three Faces of Eve.”

White-lettered talking point phrases swiftly unfurl and then disappear from the screen, like shards of Power Point on speed; the pastoral, Cezanne-like still life of pink roses, three oranges and a cozy coffee cup behind her is suddenly replaced by a discordant, grainy noir image of a border fence running to the ocean.

Beyond the uneven tone and whiplash aesthetics of the spot, however, what’s most curious is its insistent defensiveness, which appears aimed at answering in one swell foop every one of the countless attacks and charges that GOP rival Steve Poizner has hurled at her in the last six months.

To the extent it succeeds in that dubious goal, it seems to us that the ad does so solely on behalf of several hundred political junkies and paid campaign staffers, surely the only people in California familiar enough with the tit-for-tat warfare that’s unfolded to date to have enough background to follow the damn thing.

A couple of key points from the text:

1-“Sacramento politicians like Jerry Brown and Steve Poizner are fighting me every step of the way because I’m running for governor to clean up the mess they’ve made.”

Putting aside the inherent illogic of equating Brown and Poizner, the linguistic construct at the start of the sentence is at least a game, ju-jitsu effort to defend against the dynamic in which Whitman is being simultaneously attacked from left and right.

But as she delivers the second half of her assertion, eMeg’s face displays a flash of frosty anger aimed at the very notion that the two are “fighting” her at all – How dare they? – that not only reflects her own sense of entitlement but also makes her sound like a low-rent nagging mom telling you to go clean your room.

2-“I strongly oppose Barbara Boxer…”

This is the real Dr. Irwin Corey moment (“nonsensical observations about anything under the sun, but seldom actually making sense”) of the ad, when eMeg suddenly beams herself up into the U.S. Senate race, 17 words after she mentions in passing that she’s running for governor, with nary a pause for breath, and apropos of nothing.

Clearly, her wild swing on Boxer is meant to knock down what Whitman’s handlers must be polling as one of Poizner’s more effective lines of attack. But coming out of nowhere, without context or foundation, all it will do is confuse any  ordinary voter who encounters the ad while surfing in search of a “Gray’s Anatomy” re-run , making him feel like he’s walked in in the middle of the movie.

3-“Absolutely no amnesty, period.”

About 20 percent of the 150 words of the ad are devoted to immigration, a bid to blunt and co-opt the Commish’s apparently effective embrace of a bash-the-immigrants line. We don’t recall eMeg previously vowing to send the national guard to the border, a Poizner applause line he was trying out as least as far back as an interview we did with him last fall.

And her professed no-amnesty certainty is a clear shift from what she said  at an appearance on the border last year, when she stated that illegal immigrants “should do some things that would ultimately allow a path to legalization.” (In defense of Whitman on this point, it seems plausible that at the time of her earlier statement, she was ill-informed about the power and importance of code words, like “amnesty” and “pathway to citizenship” in the immigration debate; that was essentially the argument she made at the Republican state convention in March, when SacBee political writer Jack Chang pressed her at a presser about her quote and whether it represented an endorsement of amnesty).

As much as eMeg tries to muddy the waters on immigration, however, Poizner’s support for the Arizona immigration law, which he endorsed at last month’s big San Jose debate, just 48 hours after he said he opposed it, is now a sharp point of differentiation between the two that is working for him in appealing to conservative GOP primary voters.

Bottom line: eMeg’s new ad has a strong odor of desperation, and the look of a piece that was thrown together by committee on a tight deadline, a reflection of where things stand in the primary race with three weeks to go.

So different is it from the rest of her communications strategy that a rumor has spread on the internets that she has suddenly turned to the New York-based advertising firm BBDO to write it, a claim that eMeg’s mouthpiece, the volcanic Sarah Pompei, flatly denied.

“This is the musings (cq) of an internet gadfly,” she said.

From an undisclosed location: Big Dick Cheney’s endorsement of eMeg, in a Sunday op-ed in the Orange County Register, is a nice little coup, and its timing suggests a determination by Team Whitman to regain control of the news cycle, in a week when at least one new big poll will offer fresh, independent evidence of whether and, if so, by how much Poizner has actually slashed eMeg’s once-commanding lead.

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Posted in California Governor's Race, California Politics, Campaign Advertising, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner | 7 Comments »

Chamber’s Hypocritical Swing at Brown on Prop. 13

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

It’s not often in politics that an esteemed organization like the California Chamber of Commerce produces and finances a political ad that is as cynical and disingenuous as “Enough is Enough” — the Chamber’s attack on Attorney General Jerry Brown, masquerading as an “issues ad.”

“California’s lost one million jobs, we’re 200 billion dollars in debt and Jerry Brown has a 35-year record of higher spending and taxes,” the ad begins, as if these assertions are  related.  And that’s just the opener.

“Governor Brown opposed Prop. 13. Spending increased 163 percent. He turned a budget surplus into a massive deficit,” the ad continues, ignoring the inconvenient truth that former Governors George Deukmejian (Steve Poizner camp) and Pete Wilson (Meg Whitman camp) and the California Chamber of Commerce itself — and almost every major corporate entity in California — opposed Prop.13 at the time.

In other words, Allan Zaremberg’s executive committee at the Chamber — which got clearance from the Chamber board to do issue advocacy — has instead leaped into the governor’s race with both feet as a rank partisan opposed to Jerry Brown.

“It’s not an attack ad,” Zaremberg insisted to Calbuzz. “This is an issue ad.”

“We want to ensure that we integrate the issues that are critically important to our members and Californians into the election debate,” he said in a press release “The goal of these ads is to press the candidates to articulate how their views about taxing and spending are likely to impact our job climate in the future.”

To which Calbuzz says: Ah, horseshit. This is an attack ad. Watch it yourself.

What is galling about this is not that Zaremberg has decided to go to war with Brown — we frankly don’t have a dog in that fight. It’s the smarmy, hiding-behind-the-skirts pretense of principles that we find loathsome.

Meg Whitman’s campaign strategist, Mike Murphy, had no qualms about describing the ad. “Cal Chamber runs TV ad to remind voters of Jerry Brown’s 35 yr record of fiscal disaster. Large media buy. See it here: http://bit.ly/bZfS3A,” Murph tweeted.

If  Zaremberg wants to lead the Chamber into battle against the Attorney General, then  man up, go to the board — including the CEOs of the University of California, State Universities and Community Colleges — and get them to agree to open fire.

As for the truth of the ad, Brown’s people vehemently dispute virtually every statement. Their response can be found  . . .  oops, looks like Brown’s campaign brain trust has decided, for strategic reasons, not to post their rapid response. Huh? But you can find a partial defense of Brown at Calitics, written by the Oracle of Cruickshank himself.

BTW, the Chamber didn’t fund this ad through its political action committee which would have been subject to disclosure regulations. Instead it’s funding the ad  — reportedly more than a $1 million buy — on its own, complete with a phony front site.

P.S. The news that Peter Schurman, founding director of lefty MoveOn.org, has decided to challenge Brown in the Democratic primary can only benefit Crusty. With Meg Whitman bashing Brown as a statist commie, Schurman’s platform of sweeping tax increases gives the General a handy opportunity to position himself more visibly in the middle on budget issues.

Boon or boondoggle: A new Public Policy Institute of California study of illegal immigration, showing that a legalization program would have little impact on the economy, is significant for both policy and political reasons.

As a policy matter, it sharply conflicts with recent reports out of USC and UCLA, both of which predicted a huge boost to California’s economy from legalizing the state’s several million undocumented adult workers, at a time when the immigration debate has been renewed in Washington. As a political matter, it comes amid a campaign battle over immigration that has been raging for weeks between Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner in the Republican primary for governor.

The new PPIC report is based on an analysis of data compiled by the New Immigrant Survey, a joint project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and several universities. Among its key conclusions:

–There is little evidence for claims, such as those in the USC and UCLA reports, that legalization would help boost the economy by generating large amounts of new tax revenue.

–Charges that newly legalized immigrants would put a new burden on government through heavy reliance on welfare programs are also without much quantitative foundation.

–Newly legalized immigrants rarely move into better paying jobs because of their changed status and, for that reason, do not represent much competition for jobs with native-born workers.

Said researcher Laura Hill:

A legalization program is unlikely to lead to dramatic changes in the labor market. We wouldn’t expect it to significantly affect the job prospects of low-skilled workers in the short run – whether immigrant or native-born.

eMeg vs. The Commish: One conclusion that reasonable people (we name no names) can draw from the PPIC report is that all sides in the debate routinely overstate the effects of illegal immigration, an intriguing point given the rug-chewing hysterical froth that Poizner has worked himself into over the issue in the past several weeks.

Immigration barely registered as a concern for state voters in last month’s PPIC poll, but Poizner has been beating the drum on it because he knows that there’s an ideological passion gap on the issue, with Republicans and conservatives far more concerned than Democrats or independents, which suits his paddle-to-the-right primary bid just fine.

But some of the cross tab findings on immigration in the new L.A. Times/USC survey may give him pause.

It is true that by 2-to-1 margins, both Republicans and self-described conservatives support Poizner’s Prop. 187-like call to “turn off the magnets” and deny virtually all government services to illegals, one of the key issues he harps on.

But it’s also true that Republicans (65-to-29) and conservatives (61-to-33)  support a “path to legalization” as described in the LAT/USC poll, which makes them not much different than  Democrats and independents alike.

Poizner has been bashing eMeg for a statement she made last fall in favor of a “path to legalization” by accusing her of backing “amnesty,” a hot button word that does not truly describe the framework of a compromise plan being discussed in Washington , which calls for undocumented immigrants to pay fines and back taxes, perform community service, learn English and pass a background check, among other requirements.

This just in: The Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center will launch its latest effort to revive the Tranquillon Ridge offshore oil project Wednesday, with a news conference, including local favorite Rep. Lois Capps, positioning the proposal for a new state drilling lease as a way to stop expanded oil drilling. Key question: will they release the text of the new agreement they’ve reached with PXP energy company, after getting beat up for keeping an earlier version secret?

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Posted in California Economy, California Governor's Race, California Politics, Illegal Immigration, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, Peter Schurman, Proposition 13, Steve Poizner | 6 Comments »