This just in from longtime FR friend and senior advisor to the Whitman for Governor campaign Rob Stutzman…
Jerry Brown: Hypocrisy without limits
by Rob Stutzman
The attorney general of California has called Meg Whitman a “Nazi” and now a “whore.” He’s also insulted a former president of his own party. And that’s all just within the past few months. How many times is Jerry Brown going to have to keep apologizing for his erratic and offensive behavior?
This latest incident, a despicable slur left on a voicemail, is not just an affront to Meg, one of our state’s most accomplished business leaders who now could become the first woman governor of California, but also to all California women.
The politics of personal destruction practiced by Jerry Brown do not stop there. The attorney general in the same voicemail suggests Meg last month might cut a deal with a law enforcement union, giving them more favorable pension treatment to gain an endorsement. That’s more Brown fantasy.
Since the release of her policy book last March, Meg has made it clear that under her pension reform plan, front-line public safety workers would be treated differently than other state workers. They put their lives on the line and Meg believes they should retain a defined benefit plan, though she would raise the retirement age before they could collect the pension benefits.
The Los Angeles Times last April laid out Meg’s plan, writing that “moreover, new non-public safety workers would not take part in the pension program but rather in a 401(k).” Five months before Meg received the law enforcement union endorsement that Brown begrudges, she’d spelled out that she was treating public safety differently. Jerry Brown is making another unfounded and salacious attack on Meg’s character.
And while we are talking about unions, how is this for Brown hypocrisy?
Evidence confirms that Brown is the one cutting deals with unions. Brown himself is heard and seen on a video tape last spring urging the unions to run negative ads against Meg so he can be the “nice guy.’’ Sure enough they have complied, and when Brown finally released a statement on his pension ideas, it was all status quo and very little reform.
The unions have held up their end of that deal by pouring $30 million into attacks on Meg.
Jerry says he as the “Experience of an insider, but the mind of an outsider.” Well, from the glimpses we’re getting into Jerry Brown’s mind it’s clear he’s an erratic ruthless career politician that doesn’t have any trouble slurring his female opponent. That’s the wrong leadership for California’s future.