Boxer, Fiorina likely to go negative in debate
By Joe Garofolie at San Francisco Chronicle
Debate season for California’s major political candidates begins Wednesday in Moraga, with a televised U.S. Senate matchup at St. Mary’s College between Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and Republican Carly Fiorina.
Ordinarily, debates are a chance for office-seekers to outline what they would do if elected. Don’t bet on that this year. So far, it has been far easier to bash the opponent.
With voter frustration – and the state’s 12.3 percent unemployment rate – boiling, candidates are finding it simpler to say what they won’t do instead of what they will. Going negative, in short, chops down an opponent’s poll numbers quicker than going positive builds an office-seeker’s ratings.
Analysts say the negative strategy is unlikely to stop when Fiorina and Boxer tangle for an hour beginning at 7 p.m. Wednesday. Republican Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown begin a series of three gubernatorial debates starting later in September.
Better response
From recent research he’s seen, Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin concluded voters respond more when candidates attack than when they express positive messages.
“(Negativity) is working,” said Tulchin, a San Francisco strategist who is advising San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor. “The voters are in such a foul mood that, quite frankly, a negative message is working better than a positive message.”
In her 25-minute speech to the California Republican Party this month, first-time candidate Fiorina mentioned “Barbara Boxer” 21 times. However, she didn’t once mention Hewlett-Packard, the Silicon Valley company where she served as CEO until she was fired in 2005.
That was a slightly slower opponent-name-dropping pace than that set by GOP gubernatorial candidate, and fellow first-time office-seeker, Whitman. Whitman dropped 21 mentions of Democratic opponent Brown in her 20-minute convention speech, with scarcely a shout-out to eBay, which she helmed as CEO for 10 years until 2008. While she has run positive advertisements linked to her eBay tenure, she also has repeatedly pounded Brown in other ads as a “failed” politician.
“Just saying ‘Barbara Boxer’ and ‘Jerry Brown’ is like throwing red meat to the audience at a Republican convention. And it helps because neither (Fiorina nor Whitman) have a long-term relationship with that crowd,” said Adam Probolsky, an Orange County pollster and strategist for Republican candidates.
Plus, with Boxer and Brown being longtime officeholders it stokes “the broad anger toward government that we haven’t seen in a long time,” Probolsky said.
Fiorina repeats Boxer’s name because 52 percent of voters now hold a negative view of the three-term senator, according to a July Field Poll, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a policy and politics fellow at the University of Southern California – and a veteran observer of California politics.
The nation hasn’t seen this level of voter anger since the Republican congressional takeover in 1994 or the youth-led Democratic Party uprisings in 1968, she said.
But that anger isn’t provoking a substantive discussion of the problems facing California.
General McChrystal is Summoned to Washington
It’s now Tuesday, so the weirdness that was Monday has passed. Or so we thought!
I awoke this morning to the same headlines as everyone else: The Runaway General. That’s the name of the incredible new piece in Rolling Stone with the subtitle, “Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.” Yikes!
So, obviously, no shortage of things to talk about today!
We’ll begin the show with Christina Bellantoni, senior reporter for Talking Points Memo, who’s written at least four stories about that story today.
And we’ll wrap things up with an in-depth look at McChrystal– going back to his plan for covering up the real cause of Pat Tillman’s death, the leaking of his plan during last year’s policy review, and more – with Derrick Crowe of Brave New Films and Rethink Afghanistan. Brave New Films has launched a petition on facebook calling on McChrystal to resign. Sign on and pass it along!
The people at BP must be thanking God for Stanley McChrystal today. But while we’re preoccupied with insubordination, the oil keeps spewing from the ocean floor into the Gulf of Mexico. I came across an interesting piece today on BuzzFlash, written by Nikolas Kozloff (author of No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet) entitled “BP Oil Catastrophe Unleashes a Hidden Toxic Killer of Life and Climate: Methane.” He’ll also join in for a quick explanation of this “800 pound gorilla” in the gulf.
Roundup & Recap
Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films is calling on Gen. Stanley McChrystal to resign and the producer-activist has launched a petition drive, saying that his comments reported in Rolling Stone have “undermined the Office of the President of the United States.”