Final Brown-Whitman Gubernatorial Debate: Did We Learn Anything New?

Campaign Finance

On the eve of the debate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman had to quietly loan her campaign another $20 million. That breaks all records for personal spending by a self-financed candidate. One wonders why she's willing to use up 10% of her $1.3 billion net worth ($130 million plus) on a campaign she has to come from behind to be able to win. (As of this writing, CA State Attorney General has a 3% lead over Whitman, 41% to 38%.) When you consider that there are 1.38 million voters in California, you have to think, wouldn't it be a better return on campaign expenditures to pay each person $100? Illegalities aside, I only half-kid.

But at the same time I have to admire Jerry Brown's positively skin-flinty campaign spending to achieve a better result. He's only spent a few million thus far, and leads in the polls. He's banked 40 years of results as a public servant with the people of California; it's not merely name recognition, it's his proven past ability to run the state with a surplus. Isn't that a better Return on Investment for Brown? In these tough economic times, I want a governor who knows the ins and outs of the state bureaucracy and knows where to squeeze a few more pennies out of the system as he did recently to save gang task forces formed to reduce criminal activity. Or, looking at it another way, hasn't Meg Whitman just put a price tag of $130 million plus on the value of implicit social and political capital -- in Whitman's words, the "40 years" of "your job is politics" -- that is the sum of Jerry Brown's experience in public life? Given that we've only paid Brown a public servant's salary all these years, I'd say we got more than our $130 million's worth.

Aside from her concern for the state (despite not voting), I can only assume Whitman has to spend so much to overcome her profound negatives: she's a mega-wealthy Silicon Valley gazillionaire in a time when unemployment's at it's highest rate in California and home foreclosures are endemic, she favors a capital gains tax cut that'll benefit the wealthiest Californians, and she was penny-wise and pound foolish in overlooking her housekeeper's citizenship status despite being well-equipped to pay market wages plus Social Security, FICA, and all the rest.

Immigration

On the eve of the debate, Whitman also had to come out swinging given the dent that having hired an undocumented housekeeper put in her approval ratings, especially since she'd just gotten done saying in the first debate that she'd crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers. It's not only Latinos who disapprove, apparently stay-at-home-moms in tony Brentwood think she did wrong by her housekeeper Nicandra Santillan, because they know and sympathize with the women who work for them as mothers and near-family members.

I think this is where Jerry Brown really held his own last night. He said he supports a guest worker program IF it has a path to citizenship, and he insists that the federal government meet its responsiblities to address immigration through comprehensive immigration reform, not states acting as rogue agents. "There's a human point of view as well as a policy point of view" on this issue, Brown said last night. He specifically mentioned deportation's problem of separating citizen children from their undocumented parents and other relatives. Given the large immigrant voting base in California, for whom one generation often has different citizenship status (green card, visa, undocumented, or naturalized) from a citizen child, this should resonate deeply for all of us -- Armenian, a wide variety of Asian Latino ethnicities, Iranian, and so on -- who recently came from different shores.

I wish Brown had also gotten