GOVERNOR ’06 – Arnold banks, The Dems spend.
The big news of the day is that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has really put his campaign fundraising into gear, raising millions of dollars since the beginning of the year – out raising each of his Democratic opponents. Actually, this highlights the financial advantage of running unopposed as the Republican Party’s pre-primary endorsed nominee for Governor — Schwarzenegger is not only putting money in the bank for the fall campaign — but his two opponents are spending money like crazy on television ads as they wage a hard-fought campaign for their party’s nomination.
Of course, all three candidates for Governor are quite wealthy in their own right, multi-millionaires all. That said, there are a lot of news stories today that talk about the extremely deep pockets of E-bay co-founder Steve Westly, who has a personal fortune measured in many hundreds of millions of dollars. There is no doubt that he will be spending much more than his opponent, Angelides, in the coming months. That said, both of them will spend more than enough to get out their message, and both of them will have no choice but to put out a ‘contrasting’ message — which is to say that a substantial portion of their advertising dollars will be spend beating the tar out of each other. It won’t be pretty, and you can be sure that the ‘last man left standing’ with be pretty bloodied up.
There are a lot of interesting stories in the news today besides the top stories above:
* The conservative California Republican Assembly, on a 4th ballot, gave their endorsement to the re-election of Congressman David Dreier (pictured with Governor Schwarzenegger). There has been a history of friction in recent years between Dreier and party conservatives — this endorsement was a key one for the Congressman, in terms of trying to put issues behind him. Another key opportunity for the Congressman will be coming up as he will have a chance to champion and vote for the conservative budget proposal being put forth in the House by the Republican Study Committee.
* There is an article from Capitol Weekly that talks about some apparently ‘communications snafus’ that led to two Republican State Senators missing a key floor session two weeks ago. Ackerman was responsible for notifications – McClintock and Ashburn say they didn’t get notice (at least in a timely fashion).
* Rob Reiner has raised over $2 million dollars towards the passage of his Proposition 82 "Cashectomy" on wealthy Californians. Who are these wealthy Californians? Well, they are employers, and they also already contribute a healthy amount of money to the state’s coffers. At a time when we want to attract business to California, why would we want to create disincentive for business owners to come here? What business owner doesn’t live near his or her business? The tax-hike side of the equation doesn’t even get into the folly of a massive expansion in government-run centralized education.
There are a lot of great stories in the FR today – check ’em all out!
Jon
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