Politics Verbatim blog
“Failure seems to follow Jerry everywhere he goes."
Meg Whitman’s well-worn phrase is familiar to those following California's gubernatorial race. During her primary night victory speech, Whitman claimed that “Oakland schools deteriorated to the point that the state had to intervene” while Brown was mayor.
Just last Thursday, Whitman’s campaign unrolled a website devoted to demonstrating Brown’s failures in jobs, spending, taxes and schools. Her key point on schools insists Brown drove Oakland’s schools to the brink of bankruptcy:
"Brown used his political clout to gain control of the school board, but the outcome ended ... Read more
Not three weeks after he challenged Meg Whitman to square off with him in a series of 10 town hall debates around the state, Jerry Brown announced today that he has RSVPed to a like number of verbal throw-downs moderated by media and public policy outlets between July and late October.
"The morning after his victory in the Democratic primary, Brown proposed that he and Republican nominee Meg Whitman hold 10 joint town hall appearances around the state to discuss job creation, schools and the state’s budget mess and to answer questions from voters," Team Brown announced in a ... Read more
Quick. Where have you heard these two phrases before?
1.) "We should focus on three things: Creating jobs, cutting spending and fixing education."
2.) "We need someone in there with the skills and the knowledge, and maybe more importantly - insider's knowledge, but an outsider's mind."
If you don't know that those statements have effectively become slogans for the campaigns of Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown, respectively, the inevitable barrage of political advertising primed to drop this summer and fall will pound them into your head soon enough.
But even off the air, both Whitman and Brown -- and ... Read more
In the first of her many television ads released over the last few months, Meg Whitman intoned that politicians should "say what we mean" and "mean what we say."
We agree.
That's why California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting today are launching Politics Verbatim: a new project designed to hold California's two major gubernatorial candidates accountable in the most straightforward way possible: by collecting and categorizing the promises, proposals, arguments and attacks that they make on the campaign trail.
Our hope is that by doing so, we'll accomplish several goals:
1. Provide voters a resource ... Read more
Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman set to work courting support among Latinos last week after a brutal GOP primary battle that forced her to take a loud and hard stance against immigration issues.
The centerpiece of her recent efforts is a series of TV and radio ads, released to coincide with the Mexico/France World Cup match, in which she touts her opposition to the Arizona immigration law.
"She includes all of us," one ad says. "She respects our community," says another.
Some pundits have taken a skeptical view of Whitman's newest immigration narrative, though others, like Politco's ... Read more
Since Jerry Brown entered the California governor's race back in March, his GOP rival, Meg Whitman has frequently criticized him for not offering enough specific policy ideas in public forums. Columnists such as the LA Times' George Skelton have also joined in.
For his part, Brown has bristled at the notion that he hasn't brought enough concrete ideas to the table. But if he does choose to be vague, studies show that it could help him in the long run.
A paper published last year in the American Political Science Review, for example, shows that ambiguity "can be ... Read more
