Tweeting For Dollars: With the deadline for this quarter’s fundraising approaching fast (midnight tonight), Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown and Steve Poizner all turned to their Twitter followers to raise bucks and demonstrate support.
On the Democratic side, Brown seems to be a big winner, predicting he’ll have $7.3 million to $7.4 million in the bank while Newsom claimed to be breaking new ground in online fundraising.
Here’s a series of Newsom pitches:
* Campaign reporting deadline in 36 hours. Need 208 donations to break 4000 online. Can you give $10?
* Update: 162 donations to go to hit 4000. 75 donations already today! Can you give $10 to help?
* Update – 227 people donated today! We’re just 10 donors short of our goal of 4000 online donations already.
* Reporting deadline in 13 hours. We r $2,459 short of $1 million raised online. Can you give $10?
(In an email to supporters Tuesday afternoon, Newsom says he’s pulled in more than 4,000 online donations worth more than $1 million.)
Here are a couple of Brown’s tweets:
* Help me Beat the Deadline: Midnight tonight –
* Less than 10 hours to go – help me beat the deadline!
And an assist from Joe Trippi:
* I’ve worked w/ Jerry Brown for a long time. CA is a mess. He’s the right man to get CA out of it. Pls donate b4 midnight
“We’re going to have somewhere between $7.3 and $7.4 million in the bank,” Brown told Calbuzz Tuesday afternoon.
And then there was Steve Poizner, trying to build up his showing against eMeg (who’s expected to show as much as $8 million for the quarter).
* June 30th fundraising deadline is tonight, become a Dollar Donor today!
People often ask us, “Calbuzz, what about this Twitter deal? Is it important to campaigning these days?” To which we reply: It depends how it’s used.
When a candidate or campaign uses Twitter to raise money (like the examples above) or to mobilize supporters (like Tom Campbell did the other day when he was about to appear on KGO Radio with Ronn Owens) – those are uses of Twitter that make sense.
Then there’s what we call, in the trade, a Big Fat Waste of Time:
Whitman2010 Just filled up with gas at the Boyett gas station. Now off to Visalia in our truck
Who gives a rat’s ass?
Calbuzz Rules: While everybody knows that the First Absolute Rule of Politics is that “Conventional wisdom is always wrong,” South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford appears to have invented a second inalienable law of politics: “Don’t cheat on your wife and then talk to the AP.”
Sanford caught a lucky break last week when wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Jackson’s death quickly eclipsed the bizarre story of his sexcapades with Argentine news reader Maria Belen Chapur. A wiser, or less narcissistic, pol might have relished the opportunity to lower his profile, but not good ole’ Governor Gamecock.
No, Sanford had to fight his way back into the headlines by sitting down with a couple of AP reporters at the South Carolina statehouse and spill his guts, not only offering TMI about Ms. Chapur, but also way more than we wanted to know about the rest of his personal life.
“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” he said. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”
Yuck.
Hey, if this whole politics thing doesn’t work out, Mark, you can always find a job writing jacket copy for Danielle Steel.
Go ahead, make my day: That roar of hilarity rising up and out of Southern California 
emanates from the political camp of Senator Dianne Feinstein, choking with laughter after reading GOP analyst Dan Schnur’s LAT op-ed predicting Herself won’t stand for re-election in 2012.
Of even greater amusement was Schnur’s suggestion that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is in line to take over the seat two years hence. “That would be a Clint Eastwood moment,” says one DiFi acolyte. “Please, God, let Antonio run against Dianne.”
Add Tony V: Speaking of Villaraigosa, Betty Pleasant, who writes the “Soulvine” column for the Los Angeles Wave has some great behind-the-scenes dish from the big parade celebrating the Lakers’ NBA championship. She reports that Kobe Bryant was none too happy with the former Tony Villar’s efforts to push himself in the team’s spotlight, and refused for a time to board the bus to the event:
The cause of the hold-up was occurring adjacent to the locker room, where Kobe was refusing to ride on the City Council bus because the mayor was to ride on it. At the same time, the mayor, the consummate spotlight thief, was refusing to get on the City Council bus unless he got on with Kobe. Kobe loudly denounced the mayor in phrases that
started with “I don’t like the …” and ended with “I’m not going to let him pimp my popularity!”
