I live in CA, the Bay Area, am a retired public school teacher.

Unless one lives in this state and experiences the political season, one probably has a hard time envisioning that tv ads (radio to a lesser degree), mean everything, especially now that newspapers are dead. There is no such thing as the people meeting a candidate for a state-wide office. It is in this area that Whitman and Fiorina have been ineffective, which is so sad considering how easy it would have been to paint Boxer and Brown as the parasitic lifetime pols they are.

I worried during the primary season that Meg Whitman’s blanketing of tv and radio ads would backfire against her in the general. On the one hand, those ads (you can’t believe how often they played) served to introduce her to the public. On the other hand, I knew that there’d be a skepticism about a woman so wealthy she was financing her own campaign because 1) the American public treats wealthy men (like Bloomberg) differently from wealthy women (like Whitman, McMahon)–just a fact of life, however unfair and 2) because the press, forever liberal, would be in Jerry Brown’s corner and would happily go along with the liberal meme that Whitman was trying to “buy the election.”

It didn’t help that newcomer that she was, Whitman didn’t give the press the kind of access to her they demanded. I thought I read that it was Romney’s people advising her, but someone on this blog said it was Arnold’s people. Whoever they are, they are awful.

The other thing is Arnold–his miserable failure as a governor after touting himself as a person who understood business, serves to underscore that having a pro-business mind-set and business know-how (not that Arnold has that) means nothing.

Many Californians never knew Jerry Brown as governor. They were too young. They don’t live in Oakland so they don’t know what a do-nothing mayon he was. Whitman refused to even try to attack his record as attorney general. What I can say is that she blew it. She let him define her instead of the other way around. How stupid that with all that money, she didn’t get a leg up on defining him right after the primary win. I kept waiting for ads that attacked him, defined him, put him on the defensive, and they never, never came. All that money, and all of it spent to beat Poizner (she overspent there), and all that money which sat somewhere in her bank account, not spent until after Brown attacked and defined her. I just can’t evern imagine amateurs planning such an ineffective strategy. I thought every political strategist had learned from Dukakis’ massacre at the hands of Atwater–you can’t let the other guy define you first or you’ll never recover.

The same can be said for Carly. So many ineffective ads. In all the years Babs Boxer has been around, you’d think that the minute the primary was over, Carly’s people would have had an easy time getting file footage of Boxer being her idiot self….but no, they waited until after Boxer’s very effective defining of Carly as the CEO who outsourced jobs. I mean, how hard was it for strategists to see that that’s all Boxer had.

It does make you wonder what kind of people Whitman would hire to go to Sacto with her to govern if she hired such crap as strategists. Carly? I really thought she’d be a better attacker or, failing to land blows first, a better counter-puncher.

There is an effective way to counter the union support–run ads against union LEADERSHIP, which even teachers hate. But no, no such thing occurred.