Who is governor of california 2010

Meg Whitman broke the American record for a self-funded political campaign, but ended up with less than 41 percent of the vote. Here is the story of that extraordinary campaign-the backroom strategies, the outrageous scandals, the astonishing amounts of money.

California Votes tells the tale through the words of the campaign managers who made the decisions, the political pros who followed the action, the pollsters who tracked voter moods, the journalists who wrote about it all, and the scholars who studied the outcome. California voters made political history in California voters were turned off by Ms. For Ms. Fiorina, her staunchly conservative, anti-abortion, pro-oil-drilling message proved a hard sell in a liberal state.

They may have hamstrung state officials by approving ballot measures that prevent Sacramento from closing its budget gap by borrowing from municipalities and that make it harder for government agencies to raise certain fees.

Politics Home ». Big Board. Hour by Hour. Exit Polls. Phillip Agee, a CIA expert on Latin America in the s, divulged the names of hundred of American agents before fleeing the United States in the mids; many in America's intelligence community believe information he divulged led to at least one murder. Of Agee's services, Brown allegedly said, he's "a very good travel agent At the time of Brown's excursion, Agee's U.

Treasury, whose approval is legally required before American citizens may travel to Cuba. Any traveler to Cuba who is subject to U. A traveler should not use any travel agent or tour operator in the United States that is not a Travel Service Provider.

Ultimately, Brown would travel to the Gonzalez family home with Castro, take lunch with the dictator twice, join Communist officials in the VIP box at a Castro speech, and make his way back to the Havana airport the night he left in the Cuban presidential limousine, chatting with Fidel Castro all the while.

Back in California, Brown penned an L. Times op-ed against the embargo and talked to the San Francisco Chronicle about his island idyll. State Department, which prohibits meetings between U. State Department. In the summer of , Bill Clinton's administration was unlikely to pursue such a case against Americans visiting Cuba.

Five months later, when George W. Bush assumed office, Washington turned renewed attention to enforcing sanctions and prosecutions became more common. President Bush's father, George H. Bush, once the director of the CIA, numbers among the intelligence officials who believe that Phillip's Agree, Brown's travel agent, leaked information led to the murder of at least one of the agents he compromised.

Jerry Brown's office and campaign spokesmen declined to respond to questions about the trip all those years ago. In early September, both Brown and Whitman were chasing the endorsement of California's police union.

After leaving a message requesting a call back, he turned backed to a conversation with an aide, unaware he had not, in fact, hung up the phone. What was captured on the voicemail recording and handed over to the Los Angeles Times led to an apology from Brown, outrage from Whitman's people, and a fresh round of editorializing on misogyny masquerading as political debate.

Brown was upset that the union wanted something for its members in return for a campaign endorsement. In seeking the union's endorsement, he was under pressure to agree to exempt their members from cutbacks to penions.

Whitman had already gone on the record agreeing to such a deal. Musing aloud on how to respond, Brown says:. It is the next sentence that has caused the uproar. Whether it is Brown's voice or that of an aide was unclear, but the speaker plainly asks, "What about saying she's a whore? Next, a voice that is clearly Brown says, ""Well, I'm going to use that. It proves you've cut a secret deal to protect the pensions.

The original version sounds like the speaker is someone other than Brown. The enhanced version leaves it open to debate whether it is Brown or an aide who makes the damning "whore" comment. Both the original and enhanced audio versions are available online.

Brown's staff confirmed the tapes authenticity but denied it was Brown's voice uttering the key line. Sterling Clifford, a campaign spokesmen, said, ""I am confident it was not Jerry Brown. Whoever said it is speaking over the top of him in several places. The campaign also made an official apology to Meg Whitman. Whitman and anyone who may have been offended," said campaign manager Stephen Glazer. He called the discussion, "a private conversation" and explained, "at times our language was salty.

Sarah Pompei, spokesman for Meg Whitman, responded that even if Brown was not the speaker, his failure to rebuke the staffer who did use the slur is unacceptable. This is an appalling and unforgivable smear against Meg Whitman.

At the very least Mr. Brown tacitly approved this despicable slur and he himself may have used the term at least once on this recording. UPDATE : Brown's campainiannounced the results of its internal investigation and says dtheir candidate did not make the offensive comment, although there was no public announcement of who did.

UPDATE : Proving that not all women tok exception to the recording, the National Organization for Women gave its endorsement to Brown, making the announcement the day after the "whore" recording came out.

In the final debate, asked about the incident, Brown referred to it as a "five week old private conversation" and wondered aloud if releasing the recording had evne been legal.

The point quickly became a sore one and the candidates traded barbs while the audience vocally weighed in. No charges were ever brought, nor were any arrests ever made. The school handled the entire investigation internally and, three years after the alleged incident, "Griff" graduated in the class of However, on October 22, tabloid and gossip website Gawker ran a piece on the story, throwing yet another 'October surprise' at Whitman's campaign.

The blow comes at a time when the Democrat Jerry Brown's polls numbers showed a steady, if small, lead. According to the story, Griff Harsh spent a spring evening in partying along the Street, a row of ritzy private dining clubs connected to various undergraduate associations at Princeton.

He met a female classmate and the two of them went home together. The next morning, the young woman allegedly awoke with severe bruises and with no memory of the previous evening, including spending the night with Griff Harsh.

Gawker cited several friends of the young woman who said she believed she was raped but was also too terrified to make a police report. The day after the incident, she went to the campus health center, at which point Princeton launched an internal investigation.

It led to a hearing before the University's Committee on Discipline. Harsh said in his testimony that he thought the woman was sober enough to consent and that her bruises resulted from an accidental fall. He also testified the night in question had been the third time the two were intimate, something he pointed to as evidence that the woman consented. Ultimately, Princeton ruled that there was insufficent evidence to take disciplinary action against Harsh. Princeton University, Meg Whitman's campaign, Mr.

Harsh, and the woman who made the accusation all declined to comment on the story. Whitman and Brown scheduled three televised debates, with the first round set for September 28, The debates represented an opportunity for both candidates to demonstrate their empathy to voters, nearly a fifth of whom estill undecided before the first debate, and most of whom perceived both candidates negatively - the dividend of months of ads opposing the other candidate.

Whitman's propensity for soundbites and Brown's tendency to wander into tangential topics when he speaks without a script were both bound to be tested. Facing of for the first formal debate, Brown and Whitman both touted plans to downsize the government and wrangle with California's out of control deficit, talking points usually reserved to Republican candidates.

The jabs came early, with Brown accusing Whitman of representing only the wealthiest voters in the state and Whitman shooting back that Brown is in the pocket of unions. With a debate set to air on Spanish language television station Univision, Meg Whitman's then fresh public image problems related to Nicky Diaz, a housekeeper she fired after learning that Diaz was in the U.

Witman and Brown spent nearly half an hour going back and forth over the headlines triggered by Miss Diaz's revelations, though they also touched on healthcare and the state's economic plight. Knowing the rest of the nation was watching, California certainly putting on a captivating show as Republican Meg Whitman and Democratic Jerry Brown vied for votes. No sooner had Whitman sealed the GOP nomination than unions and labor groups began sponsoring ads against her candidacy.

Several groups formed a coalition called California Working Families for Jerry Brown , a group which was the source of many of Whitman's headaches. CWF's spots targeted spending and taxation proposals in Whitman's platform as being damaging to middle-class families and as threatening to strip away vital safety net services.

When FactCheck. But the same Fact Check report cast a scrutinizing eye on the an ad Whitman had just launched, a spot called 'Their Governor'. In it, California's dire pension situation was linked to Brown's policies, something that independent analysis of the seeds of the crisis said didn't hold water. California Working Families began running 'Misleading' on July 9, and 'World' on July 13, ; the former asked voters if they want to live in 'Whitman's World' while the latter presented itself as a fact check on Whitman's record.

The Whitman campaign launched a return volley with 'Their Governor' on July 13, , portraying Jerry Brown as the candidate who was out of touch with voters. On September 1, , California Working Families announced they would take a "less visible" roll in the gubernatorial campaign going forward. Bob Balgenorth and Lou Paulson, each head of one of labor groups under the CWF umbrella, announced they were stepping down as co-chairs of the committee that ran the ads, remarking that they felt CWF had accomplished its goal of, " The announced cessation of the CWF ads came as Jerry Brown, who had yet to run any ads, prepared to launch his first round of campaign spots.

According to Whitman campaign sources, the timing was a bothersome indication of coordination between Brown's campaign and sympathetic political committees.

CWF launched at least one ad, "Billionaire" , in which Meg Whitman's personal wealth and her donations to her own campaign were held out as proof she was not in tune with the average Californian.

The ad, available on Vimeo but apparently not uploaded to YouTube, was tracked to edited and rearranged lyrics to the radio-friendly hip-hop song "Billionaire" , by "Gym Class Heroes" frontman Travie McCoy. Just after Labor Day, Jerry Brown's campaign rolled out its first ad, a second TV spot that began playing state-wide on September 7, If Californian elections didn't already command national scrutiny, Whitman and Brown would have been getting attention anyway.

Meg Whitman's first volley harkened back to , when Jerry Brown was running for the Presidency. The footage, showing Clinton arguing that Brown's record on fiscal management and taxation were lacking, made up the core of Whitman's ad. Newsom later dropped out and refiled to run as lieutenant governor, a primary he won - making him Jerry Brown's running mate. Brown's immediate response to seeing an old political rival's words brought back was to utter a comment that amounted to a play on words on Clinton's infamous, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" denial of the Lewinsky scandal, an assertion the President later had to take back.

Nearly as soon as he'd said it, Brown apologized. Such infighting, along with Whitman's lead in polls at that point, was taken in some quarters as a sign of things to come.

As for the CNN study that Clinton relied on in the clip, its accuracy was questioned over the issue of what year was used as the "base year" for fiscal calculations in assessing Brown's performance. Whitman's camp, however, said Clinton's point was valid then and in , insisting, "Absolutely not, the essential elements of that ad are absolutely true. In political circles, rumors held that Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton had a testy relationship at best.

In a much more tangible gesture, the former President formally endorsed Brown's gubernatorial bid on September 14, Remarking, in part, "he would be an excellent governor at a time when California needs his creativity and fiscal prudence," Clinton made no reference to the Whitman ad or to Brown's own comments.

Whitman responded to Brown's public demand that she take down the ad with an equally public refusal. The next move came from Brown's campaign, who had a pair of second spots out by the end of the day on September 14, ,likening Whitman to Pinocchio, with a penchant for lying and an ever-growing nose.

Whitman's only response was through campaign spokesman Andrea Jones-Rivera, who commented, "Jerry Brown is doing exactly what a year career politician would do: Run from his real record and launch character attacks.