In the closing days of a very long campaign, Democrat Jerry Brown has opened up a ten-point lead - 49% to 39% - over Republican rival Meg Whitman. Another 5% of voters are favoring other candidates and 7% remain undecided.
The current poll finds Brown shoring up his support among women, non-partisans, Latinos and in Los Angeles County. In addition, despite heavy paid media presence of Whitman over the past year, she has been unable to appreciably increase the proportion of voters who view her favorably (42%). The proportion of voters who hold a negative opinion of her has grown to 51%, its highest level recorded.
Reread that second paragraph. Whitman trains among women, Latinos, independents, and in Los Angeles County. Clearly, she has totally failed to break out beyond her right-wing base, which represents a shrinking minority of California, and has no broad appeal across the majority of the electorate.
So how does Whitman respond to this? By making one last desperate bid for the mainstream of California politics?
Hah, no, that would be the smart move, and Whitman is not a smart politician. No, Whitman's super secret plan to win the election is to further alienate Latinos and moderates by throwing her housekeeper overboard and chasing after her right-wing base:
As Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman tours parts of California that have traditionally been receptive to GOP candidates, she's also appealing directly to conservative TV audiences, hoping to fire up her party's base....
Until now she has declined to comment on whether the former housekeeper should be deported. But Wednesday, in an interview with Greta Van Susteren, Whitman answered the question head on. "Well, the answer is it breaks my heart, but she should be deported because she forged documents and she lied about her immigration status," Whitman said. "And it breaks my heart. Gloria Allred pulled off a political stunt. And you know what? On Nov. 3, no one's going to care about Nicky Diaz. But the law is the law and we live in the rule of law. It's important."
Whitman, who once called her housekeeper "a member of the family," now wants her deported even though she's lived in California for a very long time. Wow.
I don't know what else needs to be said, except that Meg Whitman is not just a bad choice to lead California - she's just a bad person, period. No wonder she has a 51% disapproval rating from Californians (according to today's Field Poll).
Of course, it's not just that Whitman is self-destructing through her right-wing extremism. Jerry Brown has confounded his critics by running an extremely effective, efficient, and clever campaign that has maximized their scarce resources. Brown's TV ads in particular, such as the now-classic "Echo" ad, have been very effective for a low price. Brown's online team has been doing excellent work, giving Brown over 1.1 million Twitter followers as opposed to Whitman's 242,000.
More importantly, Brown understood that he could not win California without reaching out to its new progressive majority, and has been very effective at doing so. He provided a clear contrast to Whitman's immigrant-bashing by making a clear moral argument in defense of immigrant rights - including the rights of the undocumented.
If Jerry Brown wins next Tuesday, it will be because he ran a good campaign that understood California is a diverse place that cannot stand the right wing - while Meg Whitman mistakenly thought she was running for governor of Texas.
In this election cycle, some ballot propositions have gotten more attention than others. Prop 24 is one that deserves a higher profile. In the 2008 and 2009 budget deals, Republicans demanded and won new corporate tax loopholes worth at least $1.3 billion per year. Because of that, teachers are going to be laid off and other public services cut once those tax breaks go fully into effect next year - all so that the rich can get richer.
The Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) doesn't think that's right. We put together a new video showing what happens when a voter sleeps through the election - and what happens to all those fired teachers. Watch it:
Union of Concerned Scientists Warns CA Voters about Misleading Slate Mailer and 'Trojan Horse' Attack Against State's Clean Energy Law; Urges Voters to Vote NO on 26
With most voters' attention diverted by the oil industry's efforts to derail the state's landmark clean energy and climate law with Proposition 23, another, less scrutinized oil-industry-funded ballot measure--Proposition 26--also poses a serious threat to the environment and clean energy.
Proposition 26 has received nearly $16 million from Chevron and other big oil companies, as well as alcohol and tobacco interests, to get themselves off the hook from paying for environmental and health damage they cause and shift that burden to taxpayers.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is alerting California voters to beware of misleading 'slate mailers' arriving in their mailboxes just before the November 2 election. UCS strongly urges a 'NO' vote on Prop. 23 and Prop. 26.
"While Prop 23 is a frontal assault on our clean energy law, Prop 26 is more like a Trojan horse," said Dan Kalb, UCS California policy manager. "As deceptive as the Prop 23 campaign has been, the campaign to pass Prop 26 is even more insidious. Not only do the oil and tobacco companies behind Prop 26 hide the fact that it would starve state and local public health, clean air, and clean energy programs, but now they are funding misleading slate mailers that misinform voters about what the pro-environment position really is on Prop 26. The pro-environment position on Prop 26 is a definite NO."
Voters have already begun receiving a for-profit mailer with the headline "Californians Vote Green" recommending votes on Props 25 (no) and 26 (yes) that are the opposite of what the state's leading public health and environmental organizations recommend. UCS and several other leading environmental and consumer groups strongly support Prop. 25 and oppose Prop. 26. "This pay-to-play 'green' mailer sinks to new lows when it comes to false advertising," said Kalb.
(cont.)
Although my Mexican beer of choice is either Pacifico or Tecate (the latter during sporting events), there's no doubt that the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man In The World" ad campaign has gotten a lot of attention here in 2010.
So it was only fitting that the California Democratic Party put together their own version of that ad, focused on Jerry Brown: The Most Interesting Man In California:
We come from all walks of life. Some of us are students, some are workers, and some are jobless. Some of us are laden with student debt. Some of us work to support our children, some work to support our parents. Some of us have had to postpone starting a family, and some of us have had to move back in with our parents just to make ends meet. But we all have one thing in common -- we are the young voters of California. And it’s time for us to flex our muscle at the polls, take control of California’s future and fight off the right wing’s attempt at a hostile corporate takeover of our state.
Our generation has been hit disproportionately hard by the recession. According to a recent report from the AFL-CIO, a third of all adults under age 35 cannot pay their bills, and 70 percent don’t have enough saved to cover even two months of living expenses. We just can’t afford to sit back and wait for things to get better, because if corporate candidates like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina triumph on Tuesday, things will undoubtedly get worse.
These Wall Street candidates have spent hundreds of millions in order to buy this election, and if elected, they plan on doling out massive tax breaks to the wealthiest individuals and corporations in California, while at the same time slashing the vital services, education, health care, unemployment benefits, civil liberties and much-needed jobs for young people trying to enter the workforce.
So what’s at stake in this election?
Our jobs. Both Whitman and Fiorina have extensive track records of outsourcing tens of thousands of jobs as corporate CEOs, and Whitman’s plan for California centers around laying off 40,000 state workers, which could cause our unemployment rate to jump a full percentage point. Whitman also believes in the categorically untrue concept that giving tax breaks to the rich will somehow create jobs. It didn’t work when Bush did it, and economists agree that the concept is totally bogus.
Our education. Meg Whitman plans to cut another $15 billion from the state budget, and nearly half of the budget goes to K-12 and higher education, which would inevitably mean more draconian cuts to schools and universities that have already been decimated under Schwarzenegger.
Our health care. Carly Fiorina vowed to repeal the new health care law that has allowed so many of us to go back on our parents’ health insurance while we finish school and look for work in this tough job market.
We can’t allow these extreme right-wing candidates to trample all over our generation. We’ve got to take matters into our own hands, and the best way we can do that is to hit the polls en masse on Tuesday, just like we did in 2008. Let’s not forget, it was the young people – both voters and volunteers -- who secured Obama’s triumphant victory. And we have the power to do it again, if we commit to vote and getting others out to vote as well. As the President said last week to more than 37,000 Californians at a rally at the University of Southern California:
You’ve got to talk to your friends. You’ve got to talk to your neighbors. You’ve got to make phone calls. You’ve got to knock on doors. You have to make sure that you are as fired up and as excited now as you were two years ago - because the work is not yet done.
If you’re like me, you’re sick of the tired rhetoric from the media that young people just don’t vote as often as older adults. It seems like that message has become a self-fulfilling prophecy – many young people mistakenly feel like their votes don’t count as much, and subsequently they’re less inclined to vote.
But with an election as close as this one, our votes are more valuable today than ever before. If we do the expected and stay home on Election Day, we’re essentially handing the reins over to the mega-wealthy corporate shills whose Big Business agenda will make their super-rich friends even richer, while the rest of us are left fighting for the crumbs. It’s on every single one of us to vote, and do everything we can to get out the vote to our friends, family, co-workers, classmates and neighbors.
In the Attorney General's race, things have taken a turn for the nasty. The latest incident is a huge television buy opposing San Francisco DA Kamala Harris on the death penalty. Without going into the details, it is an extremely cynical ad, even in a season of such ads. It calls for an unflinching adherence without a consideration of the individual facts.
The ad was paid for by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie's Republican State Leadership Committee. The group is funded mostly with a variety of tobacco and oil money. However a few entries in their contribution history stand out:
Donor
Date
Contribution
Google
07/30/2010
$20,000
Yahoo!
05/21/2010
$45,000
Hewlett Packard
06/04/2010
$36,500
eBay
03/05/2010
$40,000
Why are a small group of Silicon Valley companies paying for a cynical attack ad? After all, Google's slogan is "Don't be evil." How else can we describe the politics that brings together tobacco and oil money to do a widespread attack "issue" ad in a county that is 350 miles away from San Francisco?
Google, Yahoo, and the other tech companies should probably consider why exactly they have teamed up with Karl Rove to bring this brand of politics to our airwaves.
Governor Schwarzenegger's veto of almost a billion of spending, primarily for the neediest Californians couldn't have come at a worse time. To recap, now is a good time to allow the needy to starve, the sick to suffer, and the elderly to go unassisted, but a bad time to increase taxes a single penny on the wealthiest Californians. Sen. Steinberg has indicated that he will attempt to reverse the cuts under a new governor, but that is still a ways away.
Anyway, some legislators and child care activists held a press conference in the East Bay yesterday, and managed to get a few members of the press there. It is still pretty big news that over a quarter of a billion for working parents on CalWORKS was cut, at least for non-insiders.
Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger's team has moved on. Any discussion of that news is just rehashing battles already fought. That the cuts are about to take effect, and the devestation about to be wreaked on families across the state, well, pay no mind to that. It just isn't news. Reporters spilling ink on the subject are basically historians wasting their time...or so says Aaron McLear, the governor's spokesman.
Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear this afternoon questioned why, despite today's news conference and the veto's impending effects, I'm bothering to report about a veto that happened weeks ago - "We're having a presser tomorrow to overturn Prohibition. Hope you can make it." - and referred questions to state Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer.
(Asked if he really wanted to be so cavalier about a veto that will impact so many families, McLear responded by e-mail, "Sounds like you're writing from a particular point of view - interesting reporting. Just making sure u know this story is weeks old.") (InsideBayArea)
I suppose when you are walking through Brentwood, admiring the scenery, you don't really see the people suffering from the cuts. But they are real, and their stories worth telling. That the Governor's staff is that heartless should be no surprise at this point, though.
Yesterday Fiorina was hospitalized with an infection yesterday and still has not returned to the campaign trail but the National Republican Senatorial Committee has bought another $3 million of television ads supporting her.
With even Meg Whitman endorsing Jerry Brown for Governor, the Senate race is the most important race in the State we must focus on. Come out today to meet Boxer at 2pm at Plummer Park and make some calls to friends and family urging them to vote for Barbara Boxer today!
There's just one week left in the election campaign, but we would be remiss if we didn't comment on a disturbing new development in the ongoing battle to fix California's broken government. A billionaire investor is dumping $20 million into the effort to "reform" California, but only in the direction of unwanted and undesired corporate-friendly changes that undermine the public sector:
Nicolas Berggruen will give at least $20 million to a group of Californians who long to restructure state government so it is more responsive to voters, more responsible with public funds and ready to reposition the state to meet the challenges of today's economy....
The members he has chosen for the Think Long Committee for California run the ideological gamut. Reaganite George Schultz and Bush administration veteran Condoleezza Rice will weigh in, as will Democrats Willie Brown and Gray Davis. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad will also serve on the committee. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be a guest at the first meeting.
Actually, that doesn't "run the ideological gamut" at all. Because look who is missing - that's right, progressives. Gray Davis is a moderate Democrat; there appears to be nobody at all to his left. The entire progressive movement, which represents at least a third of California, is totally absent from this conversation, whereas the right-wing is there in the form of Condi Rice and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Looking at the proposed agenda, it's clear why progressives have been frozen out of the process:
Berggruen, whose reading matter tends toward Sartre and Confucius, says in California he will be promoting common sense. For him, that means more constitutional controls on state spending, a halt to runaway pension costs, more authority for local government and new accountability measures for government programs. He also favors the creation of an endowment of sorts for the state university system that would help limit tuition and provide funds to attract and retain top teaching and research talent.
His reading matter ought to include Polanyi, Veblen, Sinclair and Stiglitz. Instead he's promoting the same old failed corporate-friendly "centrist" reforms that Californians have already rejected, such as a spending cap (rejected twice by voters), slashing pension benefits even further to make retirement insecure, undermining the effectiveness of government programs by making them waste their time and money on ill-defined "accountability measures" and so on.
This is nothing more than the same corporate reform agenda that stalled out in 2009 and early 2010 for lack of public support. There's nothing here about what people actually want or need, which is a robust public sector able to provide for the basic needs of the population so as to enable them to create new economic value. It's all about constraining the public sector so that big corporations can do more of what they want to. No wonder progressives are excluded from this process - what we want isn't what the wealthy "reformers" want.
Further, these proposed reforms are just nibbling around the edges. Joe Mathews and Mark Paul set out a very good set of much more important and useful reforms in their excellent new book California Crackup, and Jeff Lustig also set out not only good reforms but a coherent philosophy to organize them, rooted in a reassertion of the public good (res public) against the rise of corporate power, in his own excellent reform volume Remaking California.
I will have a lot more to say about both books after the election, but they set out the path down which California reform projects need to follow. The "Think Long Committee" takes us further down a very different path, a path Californians are set to reject next Tuesday: a path where the rich decide everything for the rest of us.
The problem with this reform effort, as with others before it, is that it has no place at the table for the people of California. Progressives are primarily interested in promoting democracy, both in politics and in the economy, as a fundamental element of both government reform and of economic recovery. That's inimical to the goals and methods of the big corporations, and so it should come as no surprise that progressives and the people of this state are shut out of this new reform initiative.
Unless they make room for progressives and for the people of California in the shaping of the reform agenda, and not just as rubber stamps for their pre-ordained plans, this reform effort lacks legitimacy and ought to be another well-funded flop. After the election, it will instead be time for progressives to get serious about charting our own plans for rebuilding democracy and prosperity in the 21st century. At least, that's going to be my own priority.
Meg Whitman certainly didn't do her imploding campaign any favors with her cowardly refusal to join Jerry Brown in running a positive campaign from now through election day at Governor Schwarzenegger's Women's Conference in Long Beach. And if women knew that Meg was just as non-committal on choice as she is on her campaign strategy, they'd probably be even less impressed than they already are. Thankfuly, the Los Angeles County Democratic Party has an ad for that:
Truth is, Meg Whitman doesn't care about social issues, just as long as she gets impose her radical economic agenda on the state. So she'll just say whatever she thinks is likeliest to get her elected. Pathetic, all in all.
There is a healthy amount of attention being paid to California’s systemic fiscal challenges this election cycle – with a new state budget apparently out of balance even before it was signed.
But as we debate how to restore fiscal sanity, we need to understand how the skyrocketing cost of our state’s criminal justice system is contributing to the downward spiral – and what we can do to reverse the fiscally unsustainable trend.
During last year’s budget, California spent 11% of its general fund on the state prison system and only 7.5% on higher education.
This level of spending on prisons requires raising taxes and fees while cutting other programs – and, ironically, the first targets are too often programs that help reduce crime. For example, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is slashing $250 million – almost 45% – of the $560 million it had allocated to rehabilitation this year alone.
We know that sending more kids to summer school lowers the drop-out rate, which is one of the single biggest predictors of future criminal activity. And, we also know that our state prison recidivism rate of nearly 70% could go even higher as proven prison rehabilitation programs continue to fall to the budget axe. And this recidivism rate has an immediate fiscal impact – with the cost of housing a single prisoner in California now reaching nearly $50,000 per year.
Fixing this difficult and systemic problem will take bold new ideas and leadership. And nowhere is this issue more important than in the Attorney General’s race, where San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has the chance to bring her reform-minded, and cost effective, policies to Sacramento.
During Harris’ tenure, San Francisco has dramatically lowered crime rates by keeping more kids in school, teaching more young people job skills, creating living wage jobs and focusing police and prosecutorial resources on programs that make the most sense, not just programs that make for easy headlines.
The numbers prove the success of these policies. With a very small investment San Francisco has seen a significant 33% drop in elementary school truancy in just the past two years. Since keeping kids in school keeps young adults out of prison, this improvement will not only help protect San Francisco families, it will help protect California taxpayers.
One of the best examples of the effectiveness of the Smart on Crime approach is the Back on Track program Harris launched in San Francisco. The program directs non-violent, first-time drug offenders into job training and rehabilitation services. Since the program was launched, Back on Track graduates have just a 10% recidivism rate – a stark contrast to the typical 50% rate for similar offenders. This success, if it could be replicated statewide, would save hundreds of millions of tax dollars over the long term.
Prison sentences – long prison sentences – are a powerful tool and should be used whenever required to protect our communities. And in San Francisco, conviction rates are up as prosecutors focus on violent and serious crimes.
But the data show that by promoting a range of prevention and intervention programs, Harris has established a track record that can protect communities without bankrupting them.
We tend to think of the Attorney General’s race as focused on issues that are separate from other political contests in California. But with budgets so tight this year, we must embrace an Attorney General who understands how to keep us safe from crime while helping to restore fiscal sanity in Sacramento.
David Onek is a Senior Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, Host of the Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast and a Former Commissioner on the San Francisco Police Commission.
At today's Women's Conference, Matt Lauer asked both candidates to take down their negative ads. Eventually, Jerry Brown agreed that he would be fine with both candidates just talking to camera in nice positive spot. Meg Whitman seemed to hedge away...
We're just one week away from the November 2010 election, and the Texas oil companies are hoping they can sneak through a big victory for their bottom line - at the expense of our jobs and our environment.
As you know, Tesoro and Valero have spent millions to try and pass Prop 23, which would gut our state's AB 32 global warming law and destroy thousands of jobs. But you may not be aware that oil companies are also spending millions to try and pass Prop 26, which would require a 2/3rds vote for new fees AND undo fees created since January 1, 2010. Prop 26 is designed to also undermine AB 32 by making it impossible to fund the implementation of the law. So if we defeat Prop 23, we're still screwed if Prop 26 passes.
That's a message we need to get out there to voters, making sure they don't sleep through the election. So that's why the Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) produced this video showing what happens after a voter slept through Election Day and Props 23 and 26 passed:
While Jerry Brown is on the verge of defeating Meg Whitman, recent polling suggests the US Senate race is actually tightening. It is an extremely high priority that we defend Barbara Boxer against Carly Fiorina - control of the US Senate may depend on it, and we need to ensure that we support a progressive hero like Boxer.
A poll last week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California showed Brown opening an eight-point lead over Whitman, up from a virtual tie in September. But Fiorina had edged to within five points of Boxer, with 13 percent of likely voters undecided. A Rasmussen poll Friday showed Fiorina closing to within three points, and leading by five among those who said they are certain to vote....
Public Policy Institute President and CEO Mark Baldassare said voters are deeply unhappy with both Sacramento and Washington, but draw a distinction between the two very different jobs of governor and senator.
"You've got a Boxer-Fiorina race that revolves around how people are feeling about Congress, and you don't have that same dynamic in the Whitman-Brown race," Baldassare said. Aside from partisans, he said, "Independents are really the interesting issue. What do they want in Sacramento? And what do they want in Washington?"
There's no doubt that the public is, quite rightly, upset with the failures of Congressional Democrats, and the Senate in particular. At the same time, it would be extremely self-destructive to take that out on Barbara Boxer, who has been an effective Senator and stood up for Californians and our values even in the face of intense pressure not to do so, such as her courageous and correct vote against the Iraq War eight years ago.
Independent voters are the most susceptible to Fiorina's argument, although the choice here is clear and easy: Fiorina believes in sending jobs overseas instead of creating them here at home, doesn't support expanded health care coverage, and supports the right-wing's extremist social agenda that most California independents reject.
But there are some that are trying to argue that Boxer also has a problem maintaining progressive voters as well. That's the argument in Christopher Cook's new article at In These Times, which includes a quote from me that appears to be taken out of context:
Boxer also suffers from a nationwide "enthusiasm gap" among Democrats, says writer Robert Cruickshank, Public Policy Director of the Courage Campaign. "Voters, especially the so-called 'Obama surge' voters from 2008, have seen the U.S. Senate in particular fail to implement an agenda of change," and are turned off. "All Senate Democrats are suffering as a result of the obstructionism employed by Democrats such as Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman," says Cruickshank, and some California Democrats "are indicating they won't vote in November."
I spent all night searching for that quote of mine - I never spoke to Cook, and though I recall writing those words, I certainly did not mean them to suggest that California Democrats won't have Boxer's back. They will. The point I was making there was that Boxer is hurting because of problems outside her control - like other Senate Dems, the self-destructive actions of people like Nelson, Lincoln and Lieberman made it impossible for Democrats to implement their agenda and therefore have made Boxer more vulnerable than she should be.
In fact, California Democrats aren't showing much of an enthusiasm gap. They are quite likely to vote, especially to protect Barbara Boxer. Here's what I had to say about Boxer in the Calitics statewide endorsements:
The choice here is stark and simple: a progressive champion who fought against the war in Iraq and led the effort to pass a strong climate bill (among MANY other accomplishments) or a right-wing extremist who praises the Tea Party and defends her record of shipping tens of thousands of jobs overseas. Barbara Boxer had our back in the Senate when few others did. She deserves our support now against Carly Fiorina's radicalism. Further, if Boxer wins, it is very difficult for the Republicans to retake the US Senate, another reason to vote for Boxer and maintain the firewall.
Every California progressive voter I talked to understands the importance of this race and of defending Barbara Boxer. It's time we spread that word over this final week before the election. We cannot afford to let Boxer lose.
I've worked in law enforcement for 35 years, including 15 years as the police chief in San Jose, California. Over my career, I have seen firsthand how misguided our marijuana policies are for our state and our country. That's why I narrated the Yes on 19 campaign's new TV ad.
