Thank you for this!
Whitman’s general campaign is identical to her primary campaign: flooding the airwaves with negative ads. I am so thoroughly thoroughly sick of her I could puke.
Her sole positive: that she hired a lot of people at eBay. Of course, running a state and running a corporation are a tad different; adding to payroll as a governor is a negative, not a positive. 
That’s why I shake my head sadly whenever a businessperson thinks they have what it takes to succeed in politics. There is virtually no overlap in skillset.
In California’s case, certainly. In general, no. Why is it a negative for a governor to add to payroll? It’s just a way of creating jobs – a duty which an elected official has and a corporate CEO has not.
Because I can’t think of any level of government, in the last 20 years, where expanding the size of the government has been viewed as a positive thing. Expanding the economy…yes.
The problem is negative campaigning has proven to work. Until it fails, it will be used again and again. She has the money to bury California in ads until election day.
So many it’s hard to keep track. Once an hour on every radio station, at the very least. And she’s on TV more than William Shatner.
As a California Democrat, I was never excited about Jerry Brown. Good on the environment, vaguely competent, but he doesn’t come close to his father.
Meg Whitman, though, has excited me. I’ve always been going to vote, but her ads have gotten me to get no less than 4 friends registered. I want her to lose bad, like really bad.
And it’s looking like on what will otherwise be a terrible night, there’ll be a slight amount of satisfaction for me to close out the night with: Queen Meg didn’t win.
You miss the point. She is very wealthy and if she want to have governorship, it belongs to her. The little people better just get out of her way.
Not having been old enough to remember Brown’s other terms as governor, I’d vote for him simply because:
- He’s a Democrat
- He told the stupid homophobes to fuck their pet description of Prop 8 and placed it on the ballot as what it really was: taking away rights. Not some “protect marriage” bullshit
- He refuses to defend Prop 8 in the trial, hopefully making it dead in the water if the Appeals court rules that other people have no standing to appeal Judge Walker’s decision
I also don’t trust these corporate types who think they can come into a public office and run it like a CEO. In this “company”, Meg, you technically work for your employees and can’t simply fire them. Her idea of success is more profits. If she has to ship jobs out or cut jobs, so be it. I want the government to give jobs to people if the economy doesn’t improve, this is the perfect time to expand government payroll, not reduce it
There seems to be some meme in the air, largely created by Whitman, that Brown was a big-spender who raised taxes.
Quite the contrary: Brown was extremely frugal, probably the most frugal governor we’ve had in decades, and kept taxes quite low.
Whitman is anti guns. Brown is pro guns. Irony. I’m voting for Brown.
Guns are one of those issues whose political ramifications vary greatly from place to place. The current Republican governor of California is also on the anti-gun end of the scale. By contrast, in a place like Montana, guns effectively aren’t even an issue at all, since every politician here, regardless of party, is pro-gun.
Haven’t we proven already that this has no correlation with ability to govern?
WRT the application of golden-parachute skills, OTOH . . .
Are you arguing with me over a statement I made when I was explaining in vague terms my basic impressions of the candidates and requesting that folks educate me a bit more beyond those basic impressions? Because, you know, she does appear to be a good business woman, but I said nothing about the effect that has on my thoughts on her ability to govern.
I got a chuckle out of Meg’s recent assessment of Fresno, "Fresno looks like Detroit. It’s awful.’’ That’s sure to win her some friends in the central valley!
I don’t think so. I think his stint as Mayor of Oakland slapped some reality into him. Much for the better. These days, it seems that the beef with him is that he is ineffective. Whitman’s latest ads drive this point home and are devastating.
Truth be told, the new post-Mayor Brown might be the better choice, as he’ll probably have an easier time getting things through in Sacramento. That said, I do think that this state needs to cut spending, and see Whitman doing that moreso than Brown.
Right? Listen, lady- if anybody will win you this election, it’ll be us (and I guess Orange County…maybe).
On the other hand, I do think that a business person, like Whitman, and especially Fiorina, understand the problems businesses face and why they feel they need to either leave the sate or outsource jobs abroad. I do wish Fiorina would turn the fact that she outsourced something like 30,000 jobs to Asia as a positive. Something to the effect, “Yeah, because I had a fiduciary responsibility to the company and shareholders. And I can tell you in detail why I had to do that. And what changes are necessary to ensure that the calculation for the next CEOS comes out differently. And they’re able to keep jobs here.”
What the hell would she know about being mayor of a city like Oakland or governor of (what used to be) one of the largest economies on the planet, particularly during times of economic chaos? Has he been ineffective as state AG? Brown is a cost-cutting mo-fo and has the track record to prove it. How does little miss billionaire’s spending record stack up?