Opinion: How green was my gubernatorial candidate? Ask Meg!
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Can it be that the only growth sector in California state government is the money that Meg Whitman is willing to spend to make herself governor of it?
The primary is just over two months away, and she’s already gone through $46 million -- $27 million of that in the last 11 weeks, in a carpet-bombing ad campaign that’s reaching shows like ‘American Idol.’
She could save herself some money if she actually took part in what campaign strategists call ‘free media,’ and which we reporters call ‘news coverage.’
Yet Whitman hasn’t been exactly been convening news conferences regularly. Can you blame her? One last year, when she was asked about what she characterized as her ‘unacceptable’ record of not voting, ended up as YouTube fodder.
And a recent ‘press event’ – a Bay Area TV station put those words in quotes in its graphic – turned out to be an invitation from the Whitman campaign to take pictures of the candidate talking to railroad officials. When reporters tried to ask questions at an event they’d been invited to cover, Whitman turned to her spokeswoman to deflect questions; eventually, reporters were given the bum’s rush, and security ended up setting up some kind of screen to block their view of Whitman.
But in these times, we’re all grateful that she’s buoying the economy by spending money like it was Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck cabernet [water’s too scarce]. Allowing for 12 years of inflation, Whitman is on course to outspend Al Checchi, who famously spent $40 million trying to get the Democratic nomination for governor in 1998. [If it’s slipped your mind, Gray Davis won that one.]
Whitman is, of course, the former CEO of EBay. I mention this because she has pledged that one of the first things she’d do if she were to become governor would be to slam the brakes on AB32 for a year. AB32 is a signature achievement of Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – a measure that would cut carbon emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020.
I thought of Whitman’s promise, or threat, depending on how you regard the global warming threat, when I saw an advertisement in fashion magazine this week.
There was a brightly illustrated fold-out EBay ad (labeled a ‘promotion’) bragging about how green the online shopping site is. ‘The greenest product is the one that already exists,’ it insisted.
Buying a ‘previously loved leather handbag saves as much energy as a flight from London to Paris,’ it calculated. A pre-owned espresso machine ‘saves 90% of the CO2 needed to produce a new one.’ And a secondhand watch ‘saves the energy equivalent of 39 days of refrigerator use.’
It’s good to know that Whitman supports one kind of green – the kind she’s spending. One of these days we may find out more about what she thinks of the environmental kind of green; she might even hold a news conference to clear the air on that one.
-- Patt Morrison
