GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Did Jerry Brown Just Throw the Election?

by

Every once in a while, during a political campaign, a politician says or does something which changes the trajectory of  the race — or prevents it from turning in his favor.  And no matter what he says or does after that, he can’t gain any traction.  You could say a “macaca” is holding him back.

Jerry Brown may have just done that:

The former governor is fuming at an ad that what Mark Halperin calls “the best TV spot by any campaign all cycle” where Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman merely shows footage from Bill Clinton taking Brown to task during a debate in the 1992 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Now, despite Republiccans’ best efforts, the former Democratic president remains popular in the Golden State.  So, it was a smart move for Meg to publicize this exchange.  As Halperin puts it:

Brown’s dissing of Bill Clinton is probably not going to sit too well with the many California voters with whom the former president is still majorly popular. And it surely makes the prospect that Clinton would campaign for Brown — not a sure thing before — even less likely.

And the outburst captured on the video is sure to reinforce the meme that Brown is a gaffe-prone hothead, since he has made more such mistakes than first-time candidate Whitman, a fact much noted by the media and of concern to some leading Democrats.

Brown’s recent outburst (in what looks like a sparsely-attended gathering) will only compound the damage of the ad.  Even Rick Sanchez featured the story on CNN.  Given that most of those who still watch that network tend to vote Democratic, this could cause some moderate (and otherwise Clinton-loving) Democrats to sit this one out.

Moe Lane says the ad “put Brown over the edge into – and I do not make this statement lightly – incoherency.”  Not a quality we want in a leader.  Ed Morrissey reminds us just how much damage this does to Brown’s campaign:

This demonstrates Brown’s airheaded approach to campaigning, his tendency to shoot off his mouth without thinking, and inability to think strategically. Even if Brown wasn’t an old retread from the 1970s, Californians should wonder why they would put their state in the hands of a candidate who can’t even get his opponents straight.

Indeed.

UPDATE:  Yahoo! may be featuring the story of Brown’s apology prominently on its home page to help the embattled former Governor, but it can only hurt the Democrat, reminding people of his loose tongue and of his differences with a popular Democrat who, even before he won the White House, beat Brown on his home turf (winning the California Democratic primary in 1992).

Comments

  2. I do appreciate hard-hitting campaign ads (Harry Reid came out with some monster stuff recently) so I approve of this. There’s no quote mining, that’s what Bill Clinton said, and it’s not flattering.

    Not sure what to predict about the race though. FiveThiryEight has it as pretty much a dead heat at the moment. Whitman has a narrow lead this week, but the race has oscillated a lot, so some more polling is required to see if the last two are part of a trend or not.

    Myself, I sense some low enthusiasm for this race. Jerry Brown’s problem is that he’s surely not the best candidate the Democrats could find for this race, he’s got a lot of baggage and doesn’t seem like a particularly effectual campaigner. Meg Whitman’s problem on the other hand has a name, it’s called Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was seen as a weak leader by Republicans, and a crap leader by just about everyone else. She’s got to walk the tightrope that Schwarzenegger couldn’t, still being a Republican while not getting stuck in a never-ending war with California’s traditionally Democrat-dominated legislature.

  4. I have no idea why Meg Whitman would even want the job. Democrats have destroyed that state, with little to no objection by Schwarzenegger, and made it utterly ungovernable by doing exactly what Democrats are trying to do to the nation as a whole — create a majority of dependents. Government employees making far more than their counterparts in the private sector, union thugs, and other leeches on society wont permit anyone to take their government cheese away, so the state is bankrupt.

    California needs a Chris Christie — and I dont see any signs that Meg Whitman is up to taking on Democrats in Sacramento the way Christie has taken on Democrats in Trenton.

    (Another great reason we need a Republican congress and a republican president — so that California, Detroit, and the other areas Democrats have destroyed stop getting bailouts.)

  7. Jerry Brown has nothing to run-on; he’s the ultimate insider who has spent most of adult life as a politician. Furthermore, I don’t think he’s used to running a proper campaign when he has a strong opponent. Brown is used to being elected because he’s a Democrat in California. Brown has become lazy over the decades as an incompetent Big Government bureaucrat.

  8. I just ‘got’ this bit: Brown saying “I did not have taxes with this state.” Could it be a Freudian slip, an unintended echo of his enemy Clinton saying “I did not have sex with that woman”? 🙂

  11. V, I should know being a resident of the greater metro area… but I don’t.

    You could say that Brown’s tenure has never stood out in my mind, as a time of Renaissance in Oakland. I think he tried to boost downtown economic development, but all mayors do that. (And I’m not sure it’s government’s role.) If you believe Whitman’s ads, crime went up during his tenure.

  12. I have heard that Brown’s tenure as mayor of Oakland was not completely terrible, that there actually was some reform. Any corroboration on that?

    In the same sense that there has been reform in Chicago under Richard Daley, yes.

    Not exactly doing it for the sake of reform; more like doing it for the sake of reducing hideous dysfunctionality that threatens your throne.

    The overwhelming take on Moonbeam is that he’s a lazy-ass who is just going through the motions and doing as little as possible to stay on the state teat for as long as possible — and when he does do something, it’s solely for partisan purposes, i.e. the “investigation” of Sarah Palin’s speaking fee which then proceeded to blow up in his and little glory-hound Yee’s faces.

  13. Big Government ran a story that broke any favorable feeling I ever had for Jerry Brown:

    First, Jerry Brown alerted ACORN to an investigation that was to be conducted by his office.

    Then, on November 22, 2009 while on KFI 640 radio with Andrew Breitbart, the story broke that Derrick Roach had over 20,000 documents ACORN unceremoniously threw into a dumpster in advance of Attorney General Jerry Brown’s visit to the local San Diego office.

    The following day, in a rambling statement on a Los Angeles radio show, AG Brown spoke about ACORN’s “right to privacy” of their trash.

    He promised to whitewash the ACORN investigation brought about by Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, too.

    audio proof here >>>
    http://biggovernment.com/capitolconfidential/2009/11/10/exclusive-audio-from-acorn-claims-jerry-brown-will-whitewash-investigation/

  14. I do think that this will kill Brown’s campaign.

    More reports have surfaced of past derogatory remarks he made about Clinton during his radio shows, in the 90’s.

    He now looks like a politician who will do anything for Clinton’s endorsement, including sacrificing his own convictions, and denying his own words.

    Not good.