With less than a week left before election day who would have thought that Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger would all appear on the same stage before an audience of 14,000 women and the person who gets booed is Whitman?
Certainly not me and probably not you.
Yet, that's exactly what happened on Tuesday. Calbuzz, Jerry Roberts blog, has a good analysis of how e-Meg screwed up an opportunity to earn brownie points with voters and how Brown seized the moment and emerged, for once, smelling like a rose that didn't have the last name "Bird."
And Calbuzz was merciless on Today show host Matt Lauer who was the moderator of the discussion which brought a past, present and the next governor of California on the same stage at the California Women's Conference.
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I'm probably the one guy in the universe who knows less about politics than Matt Lauer, but I'd say a big reason why Whitman is behind in the polls and figures to lose on Tuesday is her insistence on keeping her private and family life private. The L.A. Times has an article detailing how little the public knows about Whitman and how Whitman has succeeded in keeping it that way.
If e-Meg had asked for my advice I would have told her to do more to humanize herself, let the public in for an inside peek of her family life and home, do an episode of MTV Cribs for good sakes!
Sometimes elections come down to basic things and this election for governor may come down to the fact that voters prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't know. Given a choice between the old devil and the devil who wears Prada (even if she purchased it at the "Buy It Now" price) voters are going with that old devil, Brown.
Who would have thought that 30 years after he first served in the office "Governor Moonbeam" would become a term of endearment?
© 2010 by Craig Smith and www.craigsmithsblog.com
