“Vote for me, I’ve been on advisory boards,” doesn’t have the ring of a winning campaign slogan, but Republican Carly Fiorina is ready to use it.
Irvine Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, the lone official candidate for next June’s GOP Senate nomination, apparently annoyed Fiorina, an almost-but-not-quite-yet-official candidate, when he suggested to a San Diego Republican group Monday night that the former Hewlett-Packard CEO wasn’t ready for the political big time.
After beating up on Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for a bit, DeVore warned that the same people who supported the Hollywood superstar for governor are now saying “we should take a chance on another individual with no public policy experience.”
The charge had the Fiorina camp frothing.
“It’s unfortunate that a locally elected politician with little or no experience with national issues would suggest that someone who has served the Defense Department, the State Department and the CIA (on advisory panels) would be lacking in public policy credentials,” Beth Miller, a spokeswoman for Fiorina sniffed to John Marelius of the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Well, that certainly put the locally elected politician in his place. Of course, DeVore did spend two years with an actual job in the Defense Department and then worked for Orange County Rep. Chris Cox. And most people in politics know the purpose of advisory panels is to meet occasionally – sometimes very occasionally – and produce reports and recommendations that can safely be filed and forgotten. Hence the “advisory” part of the description.
And lack of experience in national affairs hasn’t exactly disqualified anyone from representing California in the Senate.
George Murphy’s national experience consisted of directing the entertainment for President Dwight Eisenhower’s Inaugurations in 1952 and 1956. S.I. Hayakawa had been president of San Francisco State. Alan Cranston was state controller. Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein had been big city mayors.
In recent years, as a matter of fact, the senator who had the most prior experience dealing with national issues was – drum roll, please – current Sen. Barbara Boxer, who had spent 10 years in Congress before being elected to the Senate in 1992.
Don’t expect either DeVore or Fiorina to point that out.
What’s more interesting is why Fiorina is even bothering to react to DeVore’s sniping. The termed-out assemblyman’s campaign treasury is under water ($75,663 in the bank versus $106,912 in unpaid bills on June 30). There’s no way a self-described moderate like Fiorina is ever going to pull the hard-core conservative voters from DeVore. And complaining about a speech DeVore made on a Monday night to a small group of Republicans is just going to give him publicity he can’t afford to buy.
Here’s a hint: a Field Poll released last Friday showed Fiorina and DeVore virtually tied among GOP primary voters, with a whooping 59 percent undecided. The poll also showed that in a head-to-head match-up with Boxer, the two Republicans lose badly, but equally badly.
You’d be hard-pressed to find any political observer in the state who expects that trend to continue. Fiorina not only has plenty of rich friends she can hit up for TV ad money, but she also can afford to put millions of her own cash into a Senate campaign. That’s likely to leave the cash-strapped DeVore hitting meetings of the state’s various Republican groups, hoping for a miracle.
But still …
In this space on Monday, Ron Nehring, chairman of the state Republican Party, argued that the Field Poll numbers show that Boxer is in trouble.
“Boxer is remarkably weak,” Nehring said. “Even against unknown opponents, she can’t crack 50 percent of likely voters.”
Now the poll actually was taken among registered voters and Boxer’s numbers are a bit better than they were at the same time in 2004 and 1998, when she was easily re-elected. But even her comfortable early lead doesn’t mean this will be a waltz for the incumbent, especially with the economy in the dumps and the voters increasingly grumpy.
But Nehring’s suggestion that both Republican candidates are unknowns has to bring a grimace to Fiorina’s face. Since she first announced she was considering a Senate run, Fiorina’s backers have argued that her years as one of the nation’s best-known female business executive provided the type of high-visibility national exposure that would make her Boxer’s worst nightmare.
Running neck-and-neck with a three-term state assemblyman doesn’t help that image of invincibility the Fiorina folks want to project. So expect them to do anything they can to put DeVore out of the political picture as quickly as possible.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.