The Whitman Meltdown
Wow. That was fast. Last Tuesday, Meg Whitman was officially launching her campaign. (Again). Now she’s melting down and her campaign is in deep trouble.
I just listened to audio of Meg Whitman’s press conference at the CRP. It was nothing less than a disaster. I say this as someone who has written, repeatedly, that it’s early in the campaign and that it’s unwise at this point to focus on the lack of specifics in her campaign. The transition to politics is a difficult one, I’ve written. Give her some space.
That’s over. No more space. A candidate for governor of California, even a political novice, should be able to answer, accurately, basic questions about her life and record. And the current controversy over her failure to register to vote before 2002 shows her to be incapable of this basic task.
Reporters – good and fair reporters – asked her very straightforward questions about her own voting that she couldn’t answer. The main query was: why didn’t you register to vote before 2002? The follow-up was: why did you mislead the public by saying previously that you had been registered to vote before that (and as a Republican)?
First Look at Campaign 2010
The California elections in 2010 have all the makings of a three-ring circus and subscribers of the California Target Book, along with other political junkies, are coming together for a Sacramento conference on Thursday to get a first look on what’s coming down the pike.
California voters will likely be deciding on several ballot measures that could have a direct impact on how we elect our elected representatives and how they shall govern.
Should partisan primaries be scraped and be replaced with an open primary where the two top vote-getters, regardless of party, face a November runoff election? Should we have a part-time legislature? Should we change the way congressional district maps are drawn? Or, should we scrap everything and call for a constitutional convention to overhaul state government?
On the legislative campaign front, we’ll be replacing more than 25% of the state legislature with new people, mostly due to mandatory term limits. Those races are usually easy to read. But the massive decline in Republican voter registration makes more races interesting… and competitive. The increase in voters registering as Decline To States will also throw off the predictability scale of many contests.
Conservative Dreaming at GOP Convention
To quote Yogi Berra, it was déjà vu all over again at the state GOP convention this weekend as the three candidates for governor insisted that the only problem facing California’s Republican Party is that it just hasn’t been conservative enough.
Never mind that the Democrats’ registration edge in the state is 44 percent to 31 percent and growing. Or that recent polls show that the increasing number of decline-to-state voters tends to identify with Democrats and, more importantly, vote like them. Or even that the distinctly liberal Barack Obama steamrolled the ever-so-conservative John McCain in California last November, 61 percent to 37 percent.
Nope, an even tougher conservative line is the key to victory in November 2010 and the candidates for governor were willing to play “Can You Top This?” in effort to show who’s the most conservative of them all.
“Don’t let people come in here and tell you that we need to reposition the Republican Party,” state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said in his speech to the convention Saturday. “And don’t let people come in here and tell you that we need to re-establish the Republican Party at the center. That is wrong, that is nonsense.”
California needs to own up to regulatory morass
Last week, we blogged about a report released by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and conducted by Sanjay Varshney that quantified the regulatory costs on California’s small businesses. The study is now being scrutinized by the press and others to determine its validity and credibility. No matter the outcome of the debate, there is no question that California is an uncompetitive place to do business in large part because of the regulatory impediments and costs. We know the regulatory environment is killing middle class jobs. It’s too bad we don’t have regular, consistent, and independent analysis of each state regulation so we know exactly what we are up against. Let’s face it though, even if California’s regulatory costs are half what the study finds, the Governor and legislature should take immediate action to reduce the cost of regulatory impediments.