Updated below (on Sunday, March 21, 2010)
The Field Poll, California’s most prominent polling organization, released a series of fairly surprising polls this past week that got plenty of media attention here in the nation’s most populous state.
The first poll, released Wednesday, shows that Repugnican gubernatorial wannabe Megalomaniac Whitman, a billionaire former CEO who has pumped tens of millions of her own dollars into her ubiquitous television ads, not only trounces her closest Repugnican rival for her party’s gubernatorial nomination, but holds a three-point lead over Democrat Jerry Brown, the state’s current attorney general and former governor who has no (serious) competition for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
The poll puts Nutmeg Whitman at 46 percent to Jerry Brown’s 43 percent, with 11 percent undecided.
After the disaster that Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger has been as governor — the state that he promised to “save” from twice-elected Democratic former Gov. Gray Davis has only gotten worse under his watch since 2003 — are Californians really going to allow another Repugnican governor?
Moreoever, are they really going to allow someone to buy the governorship? That’s not an exaggeration — that is billionaire Nutmeg’s game plan. The Megalomaniac has never held any elective office before but wants the top elected office of the most populous state right off.
As governor she would be catastrophic. Already she wants to kill the state’s climate-change legislation that even Schwarzenegger supports and she wants to lay off 40,000 state workers in a state that already has enough unemployment problems and already has suffered enough damaging hits to government services.
As Brown has pointed out, as The Associated Press recently paraphrased him as having put it, “California needs an elder statesman who can broker deals to lead it out of its current fiscal morass, not an autocratic CEO who is used to giving orders.” Reports the AP:
[Brown] said CEOs are used to hand-picking their employees, but a governor must confront an independent and sometimes hostile state Legislature and deal with public employee unions and courts that are constantly second-guessing their decisions.
“The political process is about civic engagement, not autocratic executive decision-making in the corporate suite. The two have virtually nothing in common,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press at his campaign headquarters in a converted warehouse in Oakland.
Yup. The autocratic, spoiled rich bitch Nutmeg is not cut of the same cloth of which good governors are made. She’s much more like the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” — “Off with their heads!” she already has said of 40K state workers — than she is anything like a stateswoman.
If Californians think that Schwarzenegger is bad — and they do; his approval rating is around 30 percent and about six in 10 Californians believe, correctly, that the state is worse off now than it was in 2003, when he took 0ffice — then they should elect Nutmeg, who knows as much about being governor as Sarah Palin-Quayle knows about being president.
Speaking of stateswomen, Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California can claim that title, but her election to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate seems uncertain.
A second Field poll, released on Thursday, shows the top Repugnican challenger for the Repugnican Party nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that Boxer now holds, Tom Campbell, with 44 percent to Boxer’s 43 percent. When matched up against the No. 2 Repugnican contestant, the Nutmeg-like Carly Fiorina (who also is a former CEO who wants to buy high office), Boxer beats Fiorina by only one point, 45 percent to 44 percent.
Like we really need more Repugnican white men — or more Repugnicans, period — in the U.S. Senate. What the fuck?
It wasn’t that long ago that the stupid white men of and led by the unelected BushCheneyCorp ran the nation into the ground, a stupid white man continues to run the great state of California into the ground, and yet the voters of California are poised to replace Barbara Boxer with another stupid white man (or with a stupid white man in woman’s clothing, like Palin-Quayle is).
I recognize that a lot can change in the coming months before the November 2010 election, but I find these 40-something-percent matchups between the Democratic and Repugnican candidates in the blue state of California to be way too close for comfort.
The culprit, I think, is the same phenomenon that put Repugnican pretty boy Scott Brown into the U.S. Senate for Massachussetts in the wake of the death of Ted Kennedy: the dumbfuck vote, which consists mostly those who identify themselves as “independents” or “swing voters.” They get the bulk of their political “information” from the candidates’ television ads. Because TV commercials are a great source of complete and unbiased information. Every intellectual knows that.
So, if you are just filthy rich, like Nutmeg Whitman is, you can buy office, since your base consists of the dipshits who don’t know anyfuckingthing about politics but who vote anyway.
The third Field poll released this past week (yesterday) perhaps is the most encouraging of the three. It shows that Californians’ favorability rating of President Barack Obama has fallen since he took office, but still remains at a majority, with 52 percent of Californians approving of the job he’s doing. Obama’s highest point among Californians was a year ago this month, when he had a 65-percent job-approval rating.
The poll showed Californians evenly split over Obama’s handling of health care, with 45 percent favoring his handling of it thus far and 45 percent disfavoring it thus far.
Of course, I’m not sure how many of those Californians who disfavor Obama’s handling of health care are wingnuts who buy the health care = “socialism” crap that the wealth care weasels — whose only concern is to continue to profit obscenely from Americans’ pain and suffering — have been pushing and how many of them oppose his handling of health care because it’s not aggressive and/or progressive enough.
After health-care reform legislation finally fucking passes — which apparently will be as soon as tomorrow — we might see increases in the number of Californians who state that they approve of Obama’s job performance and his handling of health-care reform.
And a coattail effect of the Democratic Party actually having accomplished something, and having accomplished something pretty big, might help Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown in the polls, too.
Of course, it’s also important for long-time Democratic politicians like Boxer and Brown not to take their support by the fickle voters of California for granted. It is my impression that California’s voters will vote for a Repugnican in order to punish a Democrat whom they believe takes their vote for granted — even though voting Repugnican almost always is against the voter’s own best interests.
And those who don’t understand politics (those who get their political “information” from candidates’ TV commercials) really seem to believe that the solution always is to just change parties — even if the party they are thinking of switching to just recently trashed the nation and the state.
That problem — abject stupidity — I don’ t have a quick and easy solution for, unfortunately.
Update (Sunday, March 21, 2010):
Today the Field Poll has released yet another poll, this one showing that Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s approval rating has hit an all-time low of 23 percent.
“This is the poorest assessment that voters have ever given Schwarzenegger and is statistically equivalent to the all-time record low job appraisal that voters gave to [Democratic Gov.] Gray Davis shortly before he was recalled from office in 2003,” the Field Poll notes.
The Sacramento Bee quotes Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo as deeming this fact to be “ironic.”
Repugnicans are distancing themselves from Schwarzenegger, claiming that his low approval rating doesn’t really matter because he isn’t really a Repugnican — that is, he isn’t enough of a Nazi for them, even though his father was a Brownshirt…
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