Meg Whitman paints herself as a moderate leader who loves California, loves her family and wants to “make California great again.”  Her ad, “Executive Leadership” has come under fire as misleading. It doesn’t even mention she’s a Republican. The ad stresses Whitman “listens to people around her.”  Certainly, she’s listening to her campaign manager, Jillian Hasner.

Most California voters probably have no idea Hasner’s husband is Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, one of the most rightwing politicians in the largest southern state, where even the political middle is far to the right of California.

The once popular Florida Governor, Charlie Crist, is now fighting for his political life just for having embraced the federal stimulus plan.  Adam Hasner is proud to pronounce he "helped reject the federal dollars."  And yet, when Whitman was asked about the stimulus plan in 2009, she said to California voters there were “many good ideas in it.”  Why wouldn’t she?

And Jillian Hasner has her own far right bona fides.  Her father ran for governor of Ohio in 1994 as an "ultraconservative."  She directed George W. Bush’s infamous 2000 Florida campaign and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush says she is “involved in politics for the right reasons.”  A look at Adam Hasner may shed some light on those “reasons.”

Hasner is on the national advisory board for the “Save Our Secret Ballot” (SOS) campaign designed to block the federal Employee Free Choice Act at the state level in much the same way as the coordinated state efforts to block federal health care reform that are underway now. The national SOS campaign is backed by big business and ultraconservative contributors who want to diminish labor’s influence and push through policies that starve public schools, ease safety and health regulations on companies, and cut spending on basic community needs such as police and transportation. Under Hasner’s direction, the Florida “secret ballot” measure passed the House in 2009.

In serving on the national advisory board for Save Our Secret Ballot, Hasner is working alongside principals in signature gathering firms who have long histories of fraud and deceit resulting in several investigations and in many initiatives being removed from state ballots.

Hasner is working with strategists with shady track records in California: principals in the SOS campaign include former Arno Political Consultant Tim Mooney, as well as Charles Hurth, the attorney behind a nefarious 2008 initiative to alter California’s electoral system.  The Hurth initiative was funded by New York millionaire Paul Singer, confidant of then-presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani.

The SOS committee prides itself on keeping its operations and contributors secret and uses the promise of anonymity to raise money to fund SOS campaigns.

In Florida Hasner played a key role in getting the legislature to put a constitutional measure before voters that if approved, attempts to allow Florida opponents of health care to defy the just-passed federal health care law.  Even as a top Republican leader and chair of the House Rules Committee says "the state Constitution is not the province to amend the federal law," Hasner has been working to amend anti- health care language on to unrelated legislation to do just that.

Hasner also owns and operates a health care consulting practice, Dynamic Value Inc., which earns him a reported $100,000 per year, according to his House financial disclosure reports.

Hasner is among the most prolific fundraisers in Florida legislative history: he runs three PACs to help other legislators and set a record for the most expensive House campaign of all time in the last election.  He relies on many secret-ballot proponents – corporate contributors from sugar, medical and service-industry companies – to support his political campaigns. One of the biggest recent contributors in the last year is the American Council of Life Insurers, which has fought a provision in federal health care reform legislation that adds a tax to some annuities.

A reliable supporter of Florida’s voucher and tuition tax credit programs, Hasner has pushed 65-percent-style legislation to choke off funding for public schools.

Whitman uses slick packaging to soften the image of her proposed education reforms and stresses the importance of “recruiting” teachers in California but a closer look reveals a policy approach very similar to the Patrick Byrne-funded “65 % deception” Hasner has been hocking in Florida.  His House Republicans are waging an all out war on Florida’s teachers and public schools where just this year they made moves to overturn the state’s popular class size amendment and shove a flawed “merit pay” bill down the throats of public schools despite objections from many members of his own party.

Hasner, who supports layoffs in schools and other drastic budget-cutting measures, has even been caught up in the Tea Party movement in Florida. “If the common-sense approach of reducing government spending and cutting taxes makes me part of the tea party movement, then pass me some sugar,” Hasner said after a Tea Party rally in early February 2010.  Hasner was among the speakers at an April 15 Tea Party rally in Tallahassee; one sign at the rally said, “We vote with bullets.”

In California, candidate Whitman distanced herself from a supporter using racist rhetoric towards illegal immigrants while in Florida Hasner made a public spectacle of his intolerance when, as reported by his hometown paper, “On Muslim Day at the Capitol…Hasner aligned himself with a group of neoconservatives to paste Ahmed Bedier, who organized the 200 Muslims who visited the Capitol, as a ‘terrorist sympathizer.’"

Ahmed Bedier said, "The only people listening to Hasner are the radicals with extreme views and yet, in 2009, the Palm Beach Post reported “Despite his party loyalty, he often pushes a bipartisan image on the campaign trail” and noted an ad he ran, “without referring to him as an incumbent or mentioning his leadership position in the Republican Party.”  Sound familiar? 

Makes you wonder who Meg Whitman is listening to and what she really has in mind for California.