Welcome to the site for the California Relief and Restoration Committee. This site is intended to identify and analyze the multiple crises that are facing the Golden State like when the Committee of Fifty was formed after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I would like to talk more about the committee, but for now we begin with the state of the race for governor of California. While the San Jose Mercury News did a feature you can find here, I hope this introduction will be enough.
A few months ago a bunch of people formed exploratory committees to start raising money for the governor’s race. Among them were mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom, former House representative Tom Campbell, state attorney Jerry Brown, state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, and former CEO of eBay Meg Whitman.
On the Democratic side, Newsom declared his candidacy and received an endorsement from former president Bill Clinton. After gaining little support from unions and other Democratic Party loyalists, Newsom dropped out of the race. Jerry Brown has not yet declared his candidacy.
On the Republican side, three candidates toured the state in preparation for the June primaries. Steve Poizner and Tom Campbell even had a debate. Campbell, having massive disadvantages in funding and popularity, bowed out of the governor race and switched to the U.S. Senate. He is leading in the polls against state senator Chuck DeVore and former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina.
The two Republican candidates are noticeably different in campaign style. Billionaire Meg Whitman has been running radio advertisements for months and has been advertising herself on television, but she has been avoiding close scrutiny of her background and proposals for the most part. Multimillionaire Steve Poizner has spoken at length about his policy positions and qualifications, but as of now he has not been advertising on radio or TV. His campaign maintains that the advertising will start closer to the June primary when people are actually paying attention.
The deadline for filing for the governor’s race is March 12. Meg Whitman will not be attending the first California Republican Party Convention a few days prior to the deadline, but she will debate Poizner in Orange County a few days later and a second time to be determined. Poizner is trying to pressure Whitman to debate him at the convention and is accusing Whitman of threatening to use her sizable wealth to crush Poizner’s chances of election. Additionally a group called Level the Playing Field is attacking Whitman for refusing to disclose financial information relevant to her tenure at eBay.
About a hundred days remain before the California primaries begin. Whitman has responded to some of the attacks from Level the Playing Field and has launched a site to attack Poizner. Dan Schrur, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California (Unruh himself warrants plenty to talk about with respect to California politics), comments, “Poizner can take some encouragement from this because Whitman wouldn’t be doing this if she didn’t feel a little bit nervous.”
Jerry Brown, Steve Poizner, or Meg Whitman is expected to be elected the next governor of the state. More on this story will be available as it develops; watch the site for more in-depth analysis of the campaigns.
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