Read “Part 1: A lesson from cephalopods”

Part 2: The message isn’t medium

Marshal McLuhan famously said the medium is the message, and that was certainly true in late August as the release of a Hollywood blockbuster and two campaign ads drew attention to a central issue of the governor’s race, one of Meg Whitman’s favorite targets: public employees.

At theaters everywhere, state workers rallied in protest at the opening of “The Expendables,” a routine but top-grossing summer action flick made exceptional in California by the appearance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a cameo role. Playing on the movie’s title, state workers wanted the governor to know that expendable is what they are not.

Unlike his brief cameo, Arnold has made a long-running play out of hammering state workers in his increasingly desperate and aggressive budget gambits, smiting them with furlough after furlough like it were the only way to raise the annual tribute of a billion-dollar tax break the corporate gods demand and receive each year from the state’s Republican lawmakers. Whitman pledged long ago to sacrifice 40,000 state workers outright on the stone of actual layoffs — in a state whose unemployment rate could best described as vertiginous, a nosebleed-inducing 12.3 percent, three points above the nationwide rate. [Source: CA Employment Development Department]

It doesn’t ad up

The week “The Expendables” came out, a new Whitman radio ad tried to link Brown to the City of Bell scandal. The ad claimed that Brown’s “mismanagement” of Oakland while mayor differed not at all from the plundering of public monies by top Bell administrators.

The lameness of the comparison was almost palpable, but for all its targeting of Brown, the language and sneering tone of the ad made it sound like an attack on public employees too, despite the fact that all its horror stories concerned non-union city officials, not unionized city workers. In this regard, the ad is entirely typical in how the moniker “public employee” turns the abuses of “public employee managers” into the fault of “public employee workers.”

Whitman and Brown could hardly be farther apart on the issue of public employees and unions, but this conflation of “public employees” is one of the most confounding (for unions) part of the debate.

When voters hear that “public employees” in Bell basically got away with grand larceny at taxpayer expense, or others elsewhere by spiking their pensions, they blame the “public employees” who belong to “greedy” unions instead of the real culprits: greedy managers. It’s not so much guilt by association as guilt by wordplay, and it’s become endemic in political discourse; not just in California, of course, but in a state with powerful public employee unions, the attacks are especially virulent.

The result everywhere is that working people get pilloried in the town square for the crimes of their bosses. What goes reported and then forgotten, however, is that it’s usually people in the community (often union members) who first call it out. The Bell scandal was exposed by do-gooder local muckrakers, not the mainstream media or state legislators, who are finally looking into it.

For instance, members of the SEIU local I work for [Disclosure: See my statement below] have called out overpaid and intransigent CAO’s and human resources directors in counties like Marin and Sonoma; abusive hospital executives who endangered staff and patients at the Alameda County Medical Center; discrimination in big cities like Oakland and pension spiking in small ones like Lathrop, and many other places where we work and live; most of these led to the dismissal or resignation of top officials under public pressure that we helped to raise. Our members have received praise from local elected leaders for saving thousands of jobs and public services. As we see it, that’s part of a public employee union’s role in the community.

The last laugh

Long before the Bell ad, Whitman got nailed for another fabrication when the FAIL Blog castigated her for using a screen shot of the popular humor site in a video:

In fact, the screenshot portrayed in the video never existed because the Whitman campaign faked the content within the screenshot. … We demand a written apology from the Whitman campaign and the removal of the video.

Sincerely,

Ben Huh, Founder of the Cheezburger Network

P.S. Jerry Brown, you better not be thinking of using this image or post in your political ad either.

No worries on that score. By Labor Day, Brown had not aired a single ad of his own. It’s been like a huge, mismatched snowball fight of ads, with Whitman’s fort throwing its huge stockpile over snow-packed walls against a handful lobbed by the unions from behind a bush. Against Brown’s paltry spending, the cost of Whitman’s ad war only drew attention to the vast sums of her own money she seemed willing to throw at her campaign with complete abandon. By mid-summer, Brown had spent barely $600,000 on his entire campaign; the unions, about $6 million; Whitman, $104 million of her own, plus tens of millions from corporations.

Unlike Whitman’s corporate sponsors, however, at least the unions are willing to show their faces. Just days after Meg’s radio ad, days after California’s Fair Political Practices Commission said it would wait until after the November elections to crack down on political ads skirting disclosure requirements through carefully crafted issue advocacy, the Sacramento Bee reported:

…a business group took aim at Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown with a blistering example of such ads.

But because the advertisement does not explicitly mention Brown’s gubernatorial candidacy, the group does not have to identify who donated to pay for the effort.

By the end of August, the big news was not just the size of Whitman’s pocketbook, but the fact that after spending something like $3 million dollars a week for months, she had still barely broken even in the polls, even with former Republican rival Steve Poizner no longer a distraction. And Brown had barely even launched his own campaign yet. Speculation is that Whitman may have peaked early; perhaps too early.

Money where her mouth is

Even against Brown’s paltry war chest, all the money pouring into Whitman’s ad blizzard would make at least a little sense were it for a candidate who’s demonstrated a commitment to public service by actually voting during her lifetime.

On August 26, nurses, firefighters, truck drivers and other union members marked the 90th anniversary of women’s right to vote (the 19th Amendment) by calling out the hypocrisy of Whitman’s own voting record. After nearly 30 years living in California, Whitman has almost never voted in its elections, although she seems to recall voting for US President back in the 1980s.

“She is just almost precisely the opposite of the leaders of the suffragist movement,” said one union leader: The whole time she’s lived here, Whitman couldn’t be bothered to vote, but now that she wants to be governor, she thinks she can just buy the office with TV advertising.

Some of the signs the union members carried read “Women Vote for Women Who Vote.” The very wording captures that beat of bouncing a basketball, of bouncing between walls, of echoing inside your head, that’s mostly what California politics sounds like these days. It’s in the airwaves, and what it mostly says is: Meg Whitman doesn’t know how to be governor, just how to play one on TV.

Read “Part 3: The many (actually just two) faces of Meg Whitman”

About me: I work for SEIU Local 1021 as (among other things) editor of its weekly e-newsletter, the 1021 NewsWire, and its political blog, the Live Wire (www.1021votes.org). I am also a vice president of the International Labor Communications Association (www.ilcaonline.org).