CA Governor Debate: Brown v. Whitman

I’m a little surprised that no one has posted about the governor debate yet. Anyways…I watched the debate in parts and some of the videos wouldn’t load for me. But these are the topics that I actually watched: budget, death penalty, job creation, pension reform, and voting.

Budget:

Whitman is for cutting down the people while Brown is for cutting down the state. Whitman stated that she would “reform” welfare, euphemism for “cut it down.” Brown talks about reducing the state governor and legislature. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to salaries or all expenses included for those jobs though. Brown’s proposal sounds good, but how is it going to happen? Even if he can cut down his salary, how is he going to cut down the Legislature’s salary? He’s going to have to get through a lot of people, from both parties. For this round, I would say that Whitman wasn’t off to a good start because from the sound of it, it seems like she’s going to make the underprivileged who need welfare even more underprivileged. Also, Brown snuck a comment at the end saying that money from the schools in CA will go to rich people like Whitman instead. Being a student, I choose to believe that’s true and so one for Brown.

*just a side note, Brown talked about how many times we have all seen Whitman’s face and TV and I would like to corroborate that point because even my mom knows who Whitman is. And my mom rarely watches TV or follows politics. So Whitman definitely got her face out there.

Death Penalty:

Both candidates are in favor of speeding up the death penalty appeal process, but through different means. Brown says the right to a proper trial and lawyer belongs to the condemned and that can speed up habeas corpus. Whitman is tough on crime and will appoint conservative judges to the bench. She says that a federal program in the Criminal Justice League would accelerate the appeal process but never says what the program is. She made a good point saying that CA shouldn’t waste money on death row infrastructure anymore. Brown rebuts saying that law enforcement agencies have his back and talks about his record in Oakland, but I feel that the point regarding Oakland was to his disadvantage because Whitman got the last word in this round. She ended with giving stats that showed how ineffective Brown was as mayor of Oakland. Whitman said that Oakland is the fourth most dangerous city in America and the homicide rate doubled after Brown’s term. She was also quick to attack that Brown suddenly changed his moral stance on the death penalty last week (Brown had been morally opposed to it for the last 40 years and changed his mind last week). I say this round goes to Whitman partially because of her last arguments.

Job Creation:

Whitman began by throwing out more stats at the audience. Starting in this round, anyone can tell that she was very scripted and her body language was restricted by the podium. She repeated a lot of same phrases over and over again. She proposed factory tax cuts and startup tax cuts that both favored businesses (predictable since she is Republican and a businesswoman herself). She argues that tax revenues will be higher if we lower factory tax because that creates more jobs and more companies. She talks about Texas as a good economic example here. Brown compared Whitman to George Bush first thing on the rebuttal. That’s a smart move because a lot of things associated with George Bush have negative connotations to it. Brown focused on expanding green jobs and the energy of the future, and did not have any other ideas for job creation. Both candidates acknowledged that job creation is not an overnight job and will take years to accomplish.

By this round, it was visible what themes each candidate focused on. I won’t go into details about the rest of the issues because this page would get too long, but here’s a quick debrief:

1. Whitman focused a lot on statistics. At first it was effective, but it was overused. She started to sound like she was just showing off her brain after a few rounds. She was more scripted compared to Brown and always had a smile on her face (sometimes it was a smile/scold/smirk). She had a good flow in her speeches but also had a lot of repetitive phrases. Of course she had to deal with the fact that she wasn’t registered to vote for something like 20 years, but she addressed it, apologized for it, and moved on. That was fine for me.
2. Brown was more animated and emotive. He wasn’t afraid to stutter at times. To me, it didn’t take away from his points and instead made him seem more human. He focused a lot on his past records as governor and mayor of Oakland (Oakland wasn’t always a good idea b/c I believe that the people around the Bay Area are more informed about the city than people from other parts of California. So an advancement that he made in Oakland may seem great compared to Oakland, but not compared to some other city in CA). He has an advantage over Whitman in that he is a more experienced politician. His humor was more approachable (as opposed to Whitman’s hunting story with the governor of Texas). He explained a lot of government vocab that I didn’t understand like the “big five group” and “AB32” and so it was easier to follow.

I say Brown won this overall (from the five rounds that I was able to watch online) because he had a better connection with the audience and didn’t seem as elitist. He didn’t do an awesome job regarding some of the content in debate such as job creations (his only idea was green jobs) and that seemed too limited. But overall, he did better compared to Whitman.

Links to the videos on ABC (Thanks Jessia!):

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news%2Fpolitics%2Flocal_elections&id=7694586