Meg blinked for the first time in an almost flawless campaign. Until this week, it appeared that the GOP had successfully rolled out their new product — a conservative, ambitious businesswoman with a big check book. Her branding was effective and her television advertising brilliant. Political consultant Mike Murphy earned his money. Team Meg was launched, and they were relentless. Nothing really hampered or stuck to them until “the blink” — involving her domestic help in her Atherton hacienda (no pun intended).
To be blunt, Jerry Brown sure caught a big break this week. The race was in a dead heat with Brown moving slightly ahead, and many independents still on the sidelines. To be frank, Brown had virtually run an invisible campaign until right after Labor Day. Many Democrats thought he could afford the luxury of sitting on his laurels (maybe) because of his legacy. But the reality was that Meg could not and she had to spend early and often to create her brand. Many of feared that she a runaway train in hand-to-hand combat with the invisible man. Talk about a scary election for Democrats. It is one that will become a case study in politics and branding for years to come.
Well the wheel spun and the dice were thrown. Lady luck came down on Jerry this week. It’s kind of like watching Apple’s latest iPhone launch and their goof. The question is will Team Meg will have the staying power to sustain a frontal attack. Their campaign is now playing defense, and under fire that the candidate never saw coming. The domestic help issue is a big no-no. It has taken down many political candidates and appointments over the years. She probably did not understand the severity because if she had it would have been cleaned up. Let’s face it, Meg is a political virgin but her advisors are not. It remains to be seen how this potentially fatal crisis is handled by Team Meg. How will this react, and how will the Brown campaign handle itself? Dancing a jig on an open casket won’t cut it for them. Will Team Brown leverage the avalanche of earned media? Will they play well with social media? Or will they sit on the sidelines? It remains to be seen as this California soap opera continues to unfold.
This article posted to the Huffington Post earlier today.
Category Archives: California
What Conservatives Mean By “Freedom” and “Big Government”
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.
Many of us have wondered what conservatives mean by terms like “big government” and “freedom.” Today the vice chairman of the California Republican Party gives us a hint. In Constitution guarantees freedom, not a cushy life, published in the Rev. Moon’s Washington Times (do Christians know he’s writing there?), Thomas G. Del Beccaro writes,
Today, politicians literally speak of the “rights” of people as they attempt to guarantee a certain standard of living for their constituent-subjects. Of course, most recently, the federal government took on the role of guaranteeing that Americans had a minimum standard of health care because, to the government, it was a right – however unenumerated.
Now, it would be one thing if a government could actually guarantee such standards of living, but it cannot. After all, before the Great Society was enacted to take on the War on Poverty, the government-measured poverty rate was 14 percent.The pre-Great Society federal budget was less than $130 billion.Since then, we have spent tens of trillions of dollars in good intentions and have a nearly $4 trillion budget, yet the poverty rate remains virtually the same 14 percent.
In the process, of course, we have diminished freedoms immeasurably – whether by forcing people to pay for those trillions or by being forced to be subject to government rules….
So “big government” means more rights for Americans, like the right to health care. And by “freedom” he means not being “forced” to help out other Americans. (Of course, the poverty rate was much lower before conservatives took over the government a few years back…)
Conservatives opposed civil rights for women, minorities, and now gay people. They opposed and fought to the last against Social Security, Medicare, unions, public schools, libraries, parks, worker safety rules, food safety riles, consumer safety rules, bank regulation, even public health programs. These are the “cushy life” big-government programs he complains about. And by “freedom” he means not pitching in to pay for things like roads, bridges, education.
Government is We, the People watching out for, empowering and protecting each other. It means WE make the decisions and “big government” means WE make decisions that help US. Think of the alternative to We, the People making the decisions and you will realize what opponents of government are pushing for.
Apparently conservatives want us all to be disposable economic units with no value beyond what we are able to consume and how much money we make for the wealthy few.
Californians
Take a look at this: Leadership, not Politics | Peter Schurman for Governor
Bailing Out The Banks Changed The Way People Think
Tax-free municipal bonds are selling like crazy because they pay a very high yield. The thing is, they have a high yield because so many states and municipalities are on the edge of going broke, like California. If they go broke the bond holders are supposed to lose their money. But California’s bonds are assumed by buyers to have no risk because everyone believes the government will step in and bail the state out, like they did with the big banks.
From Lockyer Sells 25% More California Bonds Than Forecast
The state, whose budget deficits have left it with the lowest credit rating among U.S. states, raised $2.5 billion, paying a top yield of 5.65 percent on 30-year bonds.
5.65 percent tax-free, when money in a bank might pay you half a percent, taxable.
meanwhile California’s Republicans are working to force the state to go bankrupt, thereby forcing the federal government to come in and bail out the mess they leave behind.
Cost Of Tax Cuts Catching Up To Us
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
The following letter appears in today’s San Jose Mercury News:
State not geared up for high-speed rail
Is high-speed rail really the answer in California? I think not. I originally thought, great, let’s match Europe’s and Japan’s advanced transportation with our own high-speed trains.
However, California is not Europe or Japan. We do not have convenient trains and buses running everywhere you could possibly want to go in every city.
Consider that if you traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles by high-speed train in 2½ hours, what do you do when you arrive? Catch a bus or light rail to your destination? Sorry, too inconvenient and time-consuming. Rent a car? Sorry, now you have lost the economy of train travel as well as the time savings.
Either alternative adds at least two hours to your trip making the time equivalent to driving.
I say, “no on high-speed rail.” Let’s save the money and reduce our debt in California!
Let it sink in what the writer is saying here: We should not even try to catch up to the rest of the world, because we have already fallen so far behind that it will cost too much. Instead let’s just try to pay off some of the accumulated debt.
The writer is bearing witness to the results of many years of tax cutting and cutbacks in our government. After the tax cutting started in the 70s and 80s we stopped maintaining the infrastructure, so now we do not have convenient trains or buses or mass transit to use after the high-speed rail reaches your destination. We instead accumulated debt.
So here we are. The consequences of decades of cutbacks are arriving. The rest of the world leaps ahead of us. China has nearly completed a network of 42 high-speed rail lines connecting the major cities, and we can’t even get one project off the ground.
It’s certainly not going to get any better until we start asking corporations and the wealthy to pitch in and pay back some of what they gained from the infrastructure that we built in California, back in the decades before they got tax cuts.
Click through to Speak Out California
$108 Million Income = NO State Taxes
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times today,
To everyone who claims that our wealthiest citizens pay more than their fair share of income taxes and we should cut them a break because they’re the ones who, you know, create jobs in our economy, I have four words for you:
Frank and Jamie McCourt.
The McCourts, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers (so she says; he says he’s the owner and she’s not), jointly pocketed income totaling $108 million from 2004 through 2009, according to documents Jamie McCourt recently filed in the couple’s divorce case in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
On that sum, they paid zero federal and state income tax. Jamie suggests that some tax breaks will apply this year too.
The McCourts have eight houses. Eight. Houses.
California is laying off teachers, closing parks, etc. — killing the state — just to protect the wealthiest and biggest corporations from paying their fair share of taxes. Millions of dollars in corporate contributions pay for the nasty smear campaigns — and all the lies about how the wealthy are “hurt” by taxes and will “leave the state” — all to protect THIS!
California needs to take a cold, hard look at the game-playing and the holes in our tax system that allow the rich to get away with paying less taxes than “the help” while at the same time we’re telling teachers we can’t afford to keep them teaching our kids.
And please, let’s stop all this nonsense about “they’ll just leave the state” if we try to make the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share.
Click through to Speak Out California
California Closed
GO HERE: Meg Whitman’s California
What is the Puzzle with Jerry Brown?
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
Why won’t Jerry Brown just announce that he is running for Governor? Why won’t he campaign? Why is he letting Meg Whitman get so far ahead of things in this campaign? Does he just assume he has it “in the bag?”
I suspect that is exactly what he assumes. My take on Brown is that Democrats who were around when he was Governor and later when he ran for President in 1992 are going to support him, many quite strongly, and they regularly let him know this. I suspect it is hard for him to go anywhere without stopping to shake a hand and hear from someone who tells him what a great Governor he was, that his ideas on energy and the environment were so far ahead of their time, that he should have been elected President, etc.
So he probably feels a wind at his back wherever he goes. This is for sure: the “moonbeam” things Brown was about like energy and the environment and unions have proven to be the right things. I wrote about this almost a year ago,
He was called “Moonbeam” and mocked, but he was right, and we were right, and the country needs to come to terms with this so we can move on and finally DO right.
. . . It is 30 years later and the country needs to get past that mocking of the people who were right. But the mocking and obstruction by entrenched interests are still in the way of letting us move on and do the things we need to do for the economy, the country, and the planet.
The problem with this is that it really is 30 years later now. This is 2010, and that pool of people just isn’t big enough by any means. You have to be “a certain age” to even care. He needs to find a way to reach out and be relevant to people who were not around when he was Governor or when he ran for President.
Does he realize this? If he is not meeting a lot of the people to whom he just isn’t and who just don’t care, he might not be picking this up at all. But it just is the case. He needs to start campaigning and saying things that are relevant to the 21st century of he is going to win this election.
Click through to Speak Out California
“But” Watch
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.
“But” Watch is when you see Republican junior propagandists write letters to the editor, call radio stations, etc. and begin them with, “I’m a Democrat, but…”
Today we have this comment to the post: Senator Reid: Why Should We Help You Win Re-election? | California Progress Report,
I’m a Democrat, but I appreciate that we have an opponent party. It’s too bad that both parties cannot work more harmoniously together. Bi-partisan is a funny word the way it’s usually interpreted…when one party is in the majority, it says that bi-partisanship is for the other to roll over dead.
If it were not for the Republicans, we would be in a worse financial mess than we are with “pork” gong hog wild.Of course, they did not to a very good job of balancing the budget when they were in power under Bush.
More and more “pork” comes to the surface everyday. E.g., BART wants billions to build a not-needed train to the Oakland airport. Or, Fremont wants $385,000 federal dollars to study how to use the about-to-be empty NUMMI plant. If the city fathers and city staff are not capable of doing that, then they should be voted out of office or fired.
It’s interesting the liberal media don’t use the word “pork” anymore; they use the cleaner word: “earmarks;” or , more recently “stimulus.” In any case, it’s all “pork.”
This is from a “Democrat”? Seriously, how many Democrats talk about “the liberal media?”
And considering that Republican deregulation caused the financial crisis this line is astonishing: “If it were not for the Republicans, we would be in a worse financial mess than we are.”
Nice try. Didn’t work.
Click through to Speak Out California.
Low Taxes Destroy Our Small Businesses
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.
Remember last year when the Republicans laid out the price of a budget deal and it was a giant tax cut for the biggest corporations? So in the middle of a revenue crisis they forced … less revenue. Well, imagine that you are a struggling small or medium business in California, and the Republicans gave your nemesis even more power to crush you.
Corporate taxes are on profits. So a tax cut means that the more profitable companies pay back less to the government for their use of the roads, schools, police and fire protection. The very infrastructure that supports new businesses is weakened.
Meanwhile, smaller businesses that are struggling don’t pay corporate taxes, so tax cuts do nothing for them. And small businesses that make modest profits only pay modest taxes, and don’t care.
On the other hand, the giant monopolistic corporations that are chewing up small businesses, destroying local and regional retailers, take those tax cuts and use them to turn themselves into even better small-business-destroying machines.
For example, the giant Wal-Marts are destroying local and regional retailers. But it is the Wal-Marts, not the local and regional retailers that are the beneficiaries of tax cuts. This is why the “usual suspects” who get their campaign funds from the giant companies, and work with lobbyists for the largest corporations are the same ones who always advocate corporate tax cuts.
Click through to Speak Out California.
Lessons for CA From Massachusetts
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
The Republican candidate won the special election in Massachusetts to replace Senator Kennedy, giving them 41 Senate votes. Senate Republicans have filibustered every single bill this year, and this clinches their ability to block the President’s agenda. If this sounds familiar to Californians, it’s because in California the Republican minority is able to block budgets, and we have seen the results.
There are lots of sophisticated explanations for the election’s outcome, mostly involving people being upset at particulars of the health care bill. But I don’t really think that the people who voted for the Republican candidate were all that well informed about differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, the “public option,” or other intricacies of in-progress legislation.
Instead, when looking for the reasons people voted this way, I think we should take the Republican candidate’s word for it. On his website he says it is for the following reasons:
At his September 12 announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Brown articulated a core set of beliefs that guide his thinking
- Government is too big and that the federal stimulus bill made government bigger instead of creating jobs
- Taxes are too high and are going higher if Congress continues with its out-of-control spending
- The historic amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren is immoral
- Power concentrated in the hands of one political party, as it is here in Massachusetts, leads to bad government and poor decisions
- A strong military and vigorous homeland defense will protect our interests and security around the world and at home
- All Americans deserve health care, but we shouldn’t have to create a new government insurance program to provide it
Here’s the thing. Most of the assumptions underlying these statements are simply wrong – factually incorrect. They have been pounded out by a corporate/conservative misinformation machine that just makes stuff out and puts it out there on TV, the radio, email forwarding and every other channel they can find.
But the facts are that the federal stimulus didn’t “make government bigger,” the “out-of-control spending” occurred under the previous Republican president, we spend more on military than every other country in the world combined – and it is the largest government spending program contributing to the debt, and the health care reform specifically doesn’t create a government insurance program (it should) and saves money rather than increase spending.
The Right has a message machine that has been repeating misinformation and getting away with it, because:
1) The leadership of the other party has let them get away with it.
2) There is no comparable megaphone with which to refute the misinformation.
The same is true here in California, and we may be heading for similar election turnovers. Republicans repeat things that simply are not true, but there is lack of leadership from elected democrats and almost no megaphone with which to counter the untruths. The example we regularly bring up here is the assertion, repeated over and over, that businesses and rich people leave California because of taxes and regulations. Of courase this just isn’t true, but is formulated in a way that sounds like it could be true if you just don’t think about it, and leads to large corporations having even more power over our lives and the wealthy having an even greater share of all income and wealth.
Of course, people and businesses that do leave the state do so because of the high cost of living, which is the result of so many poeple wanting to live here. It just costs more to live in a nicer place.And as I wrote last week, it is a nicer place because of the government and the public structures that We, the People built. In other words, California is a nicer place because of those regulations and taxes!
Click through to Speak Out California
CA Cons Still Trying To Live Off What We Built In The 60s & 70s
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.
Lots of people want to live in California. This is a good thing. Conservatives try to portray this as a bad thing. Let me explain.
George Will repeats the conservative narrative that people and companies leave California because of taxes and regulations. He writes,
It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: “Between 1990 and 2007,” Voegeli writes, “some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.”
Actually, any people and companies that move from California do it because the cost of living is so much higher and that is because it is a desirable place to live. California was the envy of the rest of the country through most of the 20th century. The best state government in the country used our taxes to build the best public structures — the schools, colleges, roads, courts, water systems, etc. that attracted the innovative industries and the economy prospered even more.
What conservative propagandists like Will leave out is that so many people want to live here because of what the taxes and regulations created. These public structures are what attracted so many people and businesses that the cost of living here went up. They are trying to make people think this is a bad thing, and are trying to make people think the government and the public structures it builds are the problem rather than the source of our prosperity. In essence they want to sell off what We, the People built and keep the proceeds for themselves.
The social contract used to be that We, the People built up the infrastructure of “public structures” like the legal system, schools, roads, water system, etc. And this is what enabled businesses to prosper. Then the businesses and people who did well paid back by pitching in with the proceeds to keep that system of public structures up to date.
It worked. California built up the best schools and colleges, etc. so places like Silicon Valley and biotech grew up and thrived, and the state became a great place to live, attracting so many people and industries. But this infrastructure was taken for granted. Because this system was so solid and well-maintained people were able to start deferring maintenance, cutting everything, etc so that the big corporations and wealthy could have their taxes cut. (Yes, the middle class got a bit of that through Prop 13 but even that primarily benefited commercial property.)
In essence the state has been living off of the past savings account of infrastructure that was built up in the 60s and 70s. But now we’re in 2010 with a 70’s system. The schools are near the bottom in the country and the college and university system has been gutted.
We’re STILL just getting by on living off of the last of what we built up in the 60s and 70s, but that is at an end now and the savings account is exhausted. It is time to start to rebuild the infrastructure we used to be so proud of. It is time to ask the wealthy and corporations that are here because of what the taxes and regulations built to pitch in again and start to rebuild that savings account of public structures and infrastructure.
Click through to Speak Out California!