Meg Whitman likes to lay claim to the mantle of Silicon Valley – even though she didn’t create eBay and was merely brought in as a hired corporate gun once the company had become successful. As far as Whitman is concerned, Silicon Valley and the high-tech economy is merely a prop for her extreme right-wing claims that California is somehow inhospitable to business and that we should just give all money and power to the wealthy – even though this same high-tech economy somehow thrived amidst the tyrannical regulations and oppressive taxation she whines about.

Yesterday Whitman thought she’d use Yelp, the successful online reviewing site, as a prop to argue that the state needed to follow her reckless and damaging plan of destroying state government and further enriching the wealthy. But the Yelpers had other plans. They weren’t about to be used as props, and instead showed that Californians aren’t going to be fooled by Whitman’s campaign lies.

One Yelper, Susan McKay, asked a damning question of Whitman during the Q&A:

Why are you refusing to remove an ad that has been proven to be false and therefore misleading? Why would you knowingly and purposely run a campaign that is based on lies?

Why have you made smear tactics and an overall negative focus such hallmarks of your campaign? It doesn’t seem to me that defaming your opponent will help California in any way?

This is in reference, of course, to the Whitman ad attacking Jerry Brown as being a tax raiser – an outright lie (I wish it were true!) as acknowledged by the CNN reporter in the clip, who now heads Factcheck.org and who said he got it wrong in 1992 and that Brown had been right all along. Yet Whitman’s ad is still running, and the Yelpers called BS on Whitman’s approach. See the video at right, from Joe Garofoli at the SF Chronicle.

Whitman’s response was to claim that she was just “setting the record straight” on her opponent and that she had to get her message out to the voters. But in a later interview with McKay, Garofoli found that she didn’t believe Whitman had even directly answered her question.

Whitman got hit hard by the Yelpers on a range of other issues, including Whitman’s opposition to marriage equality and what one Yelper called Whitman’s “cynical and disingenuous” decision to hide behind scripted ads and her unwillingness to have more debates with Brown.

Overall, it showed just how deeply out of touch Whitman is from Californians and their beliefs. Whitman is trying to lead a right-wing corporate takeover of government, yet voters want something else – progressive policies that will create jobs while providing for true democracy and ensuring full equality.

My guess is that Whitman will retreat back into her turtle shell and not hold very many more of these public Q&A sessions, choosing to hide behind misleading ads full of lies. Every time she comes out and deals with the public directly, her flaws are exposed, and it becomes clear that Whitman is deeply out of touch with the people of the state she hopes to lead.