With the second gubernatorial debate between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown to begin in about half an hour, I'm still trying to process Tuesday's debate at the Mondavi Center and what, if anything, really was said/happened. The scripted quality of Whitman's rhetoric allowed her to stay eerily close to message (which is basically impossible to escape thanks to the hours and hours of airtime of her commercials) and sound very, very canned, something like a pull-string doll spouting out Palin-style aphorisms with little-to-no substance. Just on an visceral level, she kept on this forced smile, which failed to hide neither her nervousness nor her growing anger. She kept discussing insanity, specifically a quote she falsely attributed to Einstein which stated the definition of insanity to repeat the same mistake and expect different results. She repeated this statement at least three times. Oh, the irony.
But anyhow, Whitman has spent $120 million of her own money, plus another $25 million, on her campaign -- the most of any candidate, ever. Business-wise, sure, she's fairly savvy. But government is not corporation, and this fact does not quite seem to register in her mind, at least based on her debate contributions. Her figures never matched up; how, exactly, would she give $1 billion to schools (without actually making an executive decision about the UC budget, instead giving that job to the schools' chancellors -- way not to lead, Whitman) AND re-route the water lines AND build a border fence and improve border security AND deport illegal workers and their contributions to the state's economy AND force later retirement ages for state employees AND refuse to raise taxes? That's impossible. According to Time magazine, she plans to fire about 40,000 state employees; hence, many state employees and other unions, such as the nurses, do not support her. In the debate, she called state workers and workers' unions "special-interest groups," to whom Brown would be indebted. That was pretty fallacious; for one, as a private donor to her own campaign she effectively is a special-interest group, and two, Jerry Brown doesn't really seem to care about who he owes what. He's been involved with politics for most of his life, basically nonstop, understands first-hand California government and, ultimately, is too old to really have any more political goals after this campaign. I feel the need to momentarily digress and say that, although I generally do agree with Brown, his debate wasn't flawless; one of his trademarks is getting off-topic and trying to sum it up with a little motto, this time, "I've done it before, and I'll do it again," and quite a bit of what he said about elementary schools and water conservation wouldn't really be in his powers anyway, which he would obviously know. But at least he tried to answer the questions; Whitman turned each question into a way to follow her script, somehow answering a UC-budget question with a welfare-themed answer. (Digression over.)
This debate was one of the first times Whitman really publicly discussed her beliefs on immigration, saying she opposes the "Arizona law" but would basically create something similar-but-not to deport illegal immigrants; Jerry Brown said something about instead working towards naturalization, which is far more reasonable than deportation. Anyways, Whitman also has been courting the Latino vote, gaining a peak of 35% of Latino voters's support (this is a traditionally Democratic group, according to the Sacramento Bee). Today's debate is being shown on Univision, with Spanish voiceover. I just think it's strange that her heavily anti-immigration sentiments -- which, in my opinion, would peg her as the a protector of upper-class whites and not much else (yeah, I'm biased against her, but her tax cuts for the rich and job cuts for the not-rich kind of influences how I see her)-- haven't affected this demographic too drastically. Until last Wednesday, of course, when celebrity lawyer and professional annoyance Gloria Allred came forward with a story about Nikki Diaz Santillian, former housekeeper to Whitman, until she told her boss that she was an illegal immigrant and Whitman, instead of assisting her, fired her. Whitman is quoted in the Sacramento Bee as calling herself a "victim" to another illegal immigrant worker -- seriously? The rich, white woman with the governor's campaign is being victimized by a poor immigrant? Currently, on the debate in Fresno, Whitman is accusing Brown of controlling this story and releasing it to Allred at a pivotal time during campaign season. In return, Brown says that she's "talking out of both sides of her mouth" as she vies for support from the Latino community.
This has gone, again, off-topic and into a virtual rant, and I apologize for that. But at least I don't have to apologize for never voting like Meg Whitman did so pathetically at the Davis debate.
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