SAN DIEGO — Our guess is that the dueling television commercials pitting Meg Whitman against Jerry Brown and Carly Fiorina against Barbara Boxer for California governor and U.S. Senator respectively have made almost everybody wish that the Nov. 2nd election would have come and gone already – if only to quiet all this quarreling. In our opinion, none of these candidates has distinguished him- or herself with this constant negative campaigning.
This is what has become of politics, unfortunately. The game is to “define” your opponent to the electorate. In that Democrats Jerry Brown, a former governor, and Barbara Boxer, an incumbent senator, were the better known candidates, their Republican opponents joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, started the drumbeat of negative campaigning first.
The seasoned political practitioners say that once you are attacked in commercials, you have to counter-attack, lest the only impression left among the electorate is that which has been manufactured by your opponent. And so with Whitman saying Brown was a career-long political failure and a spendthrift, Brown is saying that Whitman is unethical and uncaring about the common people. With Fiorina painting Boxer as being arrogant and another spendthrift, Boxer counter-accuses Fiorina of being a job exporter and a selfish millionaire. Blah, Blah, Blah.
So amid all this negativity, how do we make a positive decision?
In our opinion, it’s up to the challenger to prove his or her case against the incumbent, or in Brown’s case, the former incumbent, not by tearing them down by building themselves up. The challenger needs to show us that she would do a better job than the better known candidate, and that somehow all of us would be better off if we changed elected officials.
Thus far, in our opinion, neither Fiorina nor Whitman has met that burden. Although we have disagreed with Barbara Boxer on a variety of issues, including her support for an income tax check-off to support church institutions, we feel that this fellow member of our Jewish community has, on the whole, done a good enough job to warrant reelection.
Similarly, we support her fellow Democrat, Jerry Brown, figuring that he already has learned the job of governor and won’t make the kinds of mistakes that Whitman, as a first-termer, would be likely to make. With California’s economy teetering—and education gasping for the lack of financial oxygen—we need people who’ve already learned what works in government and what doesn’t.
– Donald H. Harrison, editor