A Whitman Surge
Momentum, thy name is Meg Whitman. The newly released Field Poll caps an extraordinary surge in energy for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in less than one week.
Just a week ago, Whitman was being excoriated by the media for holding a press availability and then would not talk to the press. Questions were asked whether she could handle the heat of a political campaign and the knock-about, unscripted situations that test one’s mettle during a campaign.
She quickly turned those doubts around with two steady performances in front of the media microphones at the state Republican convention and topped it off with a confident turn at the Monday debate with Republican gubernatorial rival, Steve Poizner.
Now the Field Poll finds Whitman pulling away and trouncing Poizner by 63% to 14%. For good measure, the poll revealed for the first time Whitman was ahead of Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Jerry Brown, 46% to 43%.
Opening Up Governors’ Papers
Could there be a small break in the dam protecting records of California’s former governors?
Maybe. Last month, I received notice that former (and perhaps future) Gov. Jerry Brown had granted me a waiver from state laws that permit him and other former governors to restrict access to their papers for 50 years or until their death, whichever is later.
The waiver applies only to me, however, and not the public at large. (Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition told me that he received a similar waiver). The terrible 50-year restriction – part of a state law that effectively gives governors personal control over public papers – remains in place.
In an email, Zackery Morazzini, senior deputy attorney general, said my request for access was “only recently brought to the attention of the former Governor.”
What’s strange about that is that I filed the request in August of last year, and wrote about my request in the LA Times last November.
California Employment Free Fall and Where We’re Heading
EDD released its “benchmarking” of 2009 payroll employment recently, and the results were dramatic. The monthly payroll surveys had indicated that payroll jobs declined during 2009 by 579,836 jobs. However, a fuller review of payroll data by EDD indicated the true job loss was 818,400 jobs—an additional 338,000 jobs lost. .
Taking this recent information, the chart below shows the payroll job numbers in California by sector in December 2006 and in December 2009—a period in which the state payroll jobs decreased by 1,400,000 jobs.
Forced March to the Cities
Cross-posted on NewGeography.com.
California is in trouble: Unemployment is over 13%, the state is broke and hundreds of thousands of people, many of them middle-class families, are streaming for the exits. But to some politicians, like Sen. Alan Lowenthal, the real challenge for California "progressives" is not to fix the economy but to reengineer the way people live.
In Lowenthal’s case the clarion call is to take steps to ban free parking. This way, the Long Beach Democrat reasons, Californians would have to give up their cars and either take the bus or walk to their local shops. "Free parking has significant social, economic and environmental costs," Lowenthal told the Los Angeles Times. "It increases congestion and greenhouse gas emissions."
Scarily, his proposal actually passed the State Senate.
One would hope that the mania for changing how people live and work could be dismissed as just local Californian lunacy. Yet across the country, and within the Obama Administration, there is a growing predilection to endorse policies that steer the bulk of new development into our already most-crowded urban areas.