Whitman, Brown, Obama + Birthers

20 August 2010 |permalink | email article

The billionaire Republican gubernatorial nominee addresses the GOP state convention in San Diego tonight; flays her opponent, Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown, but won’t hang around through the weekend to schmooze with delegates. Steve Poizner, her more conservative primary challenger, will be a no show. 

Whitman, a classic political ingénue, and in a dead heat with the two-term former governor, is obsessed with laying out his record as governor. She calls him a career politician who’s controlled by organized labor, and uses a state plane while preaching frugality in state government. Brown, since taking office in 2007 according to The Los Angeles Times, has taken 10 trips on the state plane while the majority of his trips have on commercial plans.

Queen Meg is unpopular with the dominant right wing – notably the California Republican Assembly – activists that former President Ronald Reagan called “the conscience of the Republican Party.”  Conservatives want the state GOP to approve a resolution backing Arizona’s law targeting illegal immigrants and California Proposition 187, a similar law approved by voters in 1994 but later overturned by a federal judge. Whitman opposed both measures, ironic considering former Gov. Pete Wilson, her campaign chairman, rode Prop. 187 to re-election.

She’s also alienated the right by threatening to vote against Prop 23, the November ballot measure, endorsed by the GOP, which would suspend AB32, the state’s greenhouse gas law.
Tracking O44

Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s guru, on economic and domestic policy: “Obama’s current approval rating of 44 percent beats Clinton, Carter and Reagan. All of them were between 39 percent and 41 percent at this time in their presidencies. And all of them were former governors who accomplished less legislatively than Obama at this point in his presidency.

Read ‘em and weep

“I must stay, never in the history of modern presidential politics has a president confessed his faith in the Lord, and folks basically call him a liar.” – The Rev. Kirby-jon Caldwell, a spiritual adviser to former President George W. Bush, who is part of a small circle of Christian pastors who often pray with President Obama who, despite the so-called birther conspiracy, was born in Hawaii. Get real!

 

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