Washed It!

Defections from Meg Whitman’s ranks on the part of women, Latinos and nonpartisan voters have fueled a surge by Jerry Brown in the race for governor, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.

The shift comes after a tumultuous month for the Republican candidate that has led some voters to question her veracity and her handling of accusations by an illegal immigrant housekeeper.

Brown, the Democratic attorney general and former governor, led Whitman 52% to 39% among likely voters, the poll found. His advantage has more than doubled since a Times/USC poll in September.

The abrupt movement in the race for governor came as Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer held onto her 8-point margin over Republican Carly Fiorina in the U.S. Senate contest. Boxer’s 50% to 42% lead was statistically unchanged from September’s 51% to 43% edge.

For both Democrats, the month between the two polls found the party’s strongest supporters rallying to the candidates’ sides: liberals, women and Latinos either solidified or expanded their backing for Brown and Boxer. Nonpartisan voters, whom Republicans had counted on to overcome the Democratic advantage in voter registration, moved away from the two Republican candidates, and moderate voters also tilted toward the Democrats.

Paula Bennett, a schoolteacher in the Sacramento-area town of Acampo, said she was drawn to Brown in part by the blizzard of cash Whitman has thrown at the race.

“I like the little guy; he didn’t have the money behind him like she did,” she said in a follow-up interview, adding that she sided with Brown for the same reason that she favors a mom-and-pop establishment over a retail behemoth.

“We don’t shop at Walmart. We shop at the local store. He just seemed like more of a down-home candidate.”

Although she is Republican, Bennett is also siding with Boxer. She said she was offended by both Whitman’s and Fiorina’s infusions of personal cash into their races.

“That message that they’re sending to people is a very bad choice,” she said. “We’re looking to people to act their values rather than throw money at causes. People are holding their money really closely and those candidates are really splurging.”

Most of the nation has seen pronounced enthusiasm by Republican voters as the midterm elections approach. In California, however, Democrats have gained strength and GOP motivation has ebbed slightly in the last month, the poll showed. The current standings represent a reassertion of a more typical profile for the state after an election year convulsed by a foundering economy, widespread discontent about the future and record-breaking spending by Whitman, who has dropped more than $141 million of her own money into her campaign.

The poll was conducted for The Los Angeles Times and the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from Oct. 13 to 20 by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm American Viewpoint. It included a random sample of 1,501 California voters, including 922 likely voters. Results for likely voters have a margin of sampling error of 3.2 points in either direction, with a larger margin for subgroups.

The survey was taken as the two gubernatorial candidates pummeled each other over the state’s airwaves and flooded telephone lines and mailboxes with entreaties for the election — now nine days away. And it came at the close of a particularly difficult period in the race for Whitman.

A turning point appears to have been the Sept. 29 announcement by her former housekeeper, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, that she had been employed by the former EBay chief for nine years, a period during which she said Whitman became aware of her illegal status. Whitman countered that she had not known of Diaz Santillan’s status until shortly before firing her in 2009, and she released copies of falsified documents presented to her by Diaz Santillan.

Diaz Santillan, accompanied by attorney Gloria Allred in a series of sob-wracked news conferences, displayed a copy of a 2003 government document sent to Whitman and her husband that could have alerted them that their employee was using a false Social Security number.

The subsequent days of controversy upended Whitman’s carefully nuanced position on illegal immigration and whipsawed her between voters who thought she was too easy on Diaz Santillan and those who thought the housekeeper deserved better than banishment. Whitman slipped among both groups in the new poll.

Among likely Latino voters, support for Brown grew from a 20-point lead in September to a 34-point advantage in the new survey. His lead among women voters expanded from 9 points to 21 points. Among nonpartisan voters, who in California register as “decline to state” and tend to recoil from tough stances against illegal immigrants, Brown’s lead over Whitman grew from 6 points to 37 points.

At the other end of the ideological scale, Whitman’s standing among conservatives ebbed slightly, from 77% to 70%. She continued to outdistance Brown among those voters, although his support grew slightly from 16% to 21%.

Overall, by 52% to 41%, voters said that Whitman had not handled the housekeeper controversy well. The same key voter groups — women, independents and Latinos — offered the harshest verdicts. When asked how Brown had handled the matter, voters were more divided, with 37% saying he did well and 43% saying he did not. Among independent voters, a plurality approved of Brown’s actions.

Jerry Brown’s lead doubles in a month; little change in Senate race

Suicide attackers burst into the main United Nations compound in the western city of Herat on Saturday, setting off a battle with Afghan police and troops. All four assailants were reported killed, but the U.N. said there were no casualties among its staff.

The incident roiled the aid community in Afghanistan at a time when a number of international humanitarian and development groups are considering curtailing or halting projects in response to an upcoming ban by President Hamid Karzai on the use of private security guards. Western diplomats are pressing the Afghan leader to ease the restrictions, which are to take effect at the end of the year.

The attack in Herat, the biggest city in western Afghanistan, began with a detonation at one of the complex’s entry gates, according to provincial officials, and three assailants then managed to push their way inside. One or more of them wore a burqa, or a body-length veil, said Naqib Armin, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

The compound, on the city’s edge near the airport, houses several U.N. agencies which employ both foreign and Afghan staff. There would have been about 40 people inside at the time, said U.N. spokesman Dan McNorton.

One of the attackers was killed at the outset of the strike when he set off explosives inside a car, provincial authorities said. Two others apparently detonated their suicide vests, and the last was shot dead by police.

Herat province is considered a relatively calm part of the country — so much so that it is being considered as one of the first places where the NATO force will attempt to hand over security responsibility to Afghan forces.

With Western military officials claiming major success in driving the Taliban from strongholds in Kandahar province, however, the insurgency has been making a push into parts of the country that were previously considered relatively safe, such as the north.

Attacks inside Kandahar have diminished since the Western military offensive began in earnest about a month ago, but insurgents are still able to move about despite the security cordon around the city. A motorcycle-borne suicide bomber at a main traffic circle in the city killed one passer-by and injured two others on Saturday, provincial authorities said.

Outside Kandahar city, veteran New York Times photographer Joao Silva was seriously injured Saturday when he stepped on a buried bomb, the newspaper reported on its website. Although NATO officials say Taliban fighters have been mainly driven out of the district, Arghandab, the insurgents have seeded the area with IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, which are the principal killer of Western troops.

Most of the 30,000 American troops who arrived this year under President Obama’s “surge” are deployed in the south, mainly in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

NATO troops were not involved in responding to the attack in Herat, said Lt. Col. Regina Winchester, a spokeswoman for the International Security Assistance Force. However, witnesses said Western forces were seen helping cordon off the scene, and a NATO helicopter circled overhead. NATO troops in the west of Afghanistan are under Italian command.

McNorton, the U.N. spokesman, said it was “too early to speculate” about steps the world body might take in response to the attack on its compound. The U.N. sent hundreds of foreign staffers out of the country after a Taliban attack last October on a U.N. guesthouse in the capital, in which five of its foreign staff were killed.

This year has been a perilous one for foreign aid workers in Afghanistan. In August, insurgent gunmen killed a 10-member medical team, including six Americans, in Badakhshan province, in the north. Earlier this month, a Scottish development worker was killed during an attempt by American troops to rescue her after she was abducted by the Taliban.

laura.king@latimes.com
Suicide attackers hit U.N. compound in Afghanistan

President Barack Obama rallied thousands of loyal supporters at the USC campus Friday, urging them to defy skeptics who have predicted losses for Democrats and turn out in force on election day to give his administration more time to turn around the nation’s flailing economy and deliver the change he promised in the 2008 election.

“We need all of you to fight on. We need all of you fired up,” the president told the roaring crowd of students and admirers — 37,500 of them, by USC officials’ estimates — who spilled out across the sun-soaked lawn of Alumni Park and the streets beyond. “We need all of you ready to go, because in just 11 days … you have the chance to set the direction of this state and of this country, not just for the next two years but for the next five years, the next 10 years, the next 20 years.”

“Just like you did in 2008,” the president said, “you can defy the conventional wisdom that says young people are apathetic, the conventional wisdom that says you can’t beat the cynicism in politics.”

In the combative tone that has defined his remarks in recent days, Obama offered a sharp rebuke of the Republican agenda, accusing the opposition party of embracing a strategy of “amnesia” after sitting on the sidelines saying “no to everything” while blaming him for the nation’s troubles.

“They figured that y’all would forget that they caused the mess in the first place,” he said. “…But Los Angeles, as I look out on this crowd, this tells me you haven’t forgotten.”

With a new Los Angeles-Times/USC poll showing a narrowing enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, the president’s trip to California served the dual purpose of motivating his troops and raising money for endangered Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and attorney general candidate Kamala Harris. Boxer, Harris and state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, all spoke briefly at the event, asking Democrats to match the fervor of Republicans.

Actor Jamie Foxx also underscored the Democrats’ precarious position by alluding to Obama’s encounter with a woman earlier this year who said she was exhausted by defending him — and then prompting the crowd to chant: “We’re not exhausted.”

Boxer, who has been hit with millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outside groups, said the other side has “giant, wealthy, unlimited-spending special interests with them.” But, she said, “We have our own army.”

Unlike on his last visit to Los Angeles, the President sought to avoid the wrath of the city’s commuters by flying from LAX to USC on Marine One for the event organized by the Democratic National Party. He also attended a luncheon fundraiser for Boxer and sat for an interview with Spanish-language radio host Piolin in Glendale. Then he jetted off to Nevada for another Democratic rally and a dinner to benefit Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is in an uncomfortably close race of his own.

While some Democratic candidates have kept Obama at arm’s length — distancing themselves from the administration’s controversial healthcare legislation and the $814-million stimulus package — Boxer has welcomed his help in California. In this state, 56% of likely voters said in a recent Times/USC poll that they wanted a senator who supports the president.

Boxer has been an unfailing defender of Obama’s policies, even in the face of relentless criticism of Obama’s policies from her challenger, Republican Carly Fiorina. The White House has rewarded Boxer’s loyalty with multiple trips to California on behalf of the three-term senator, who is clinging to a slim lead over Fiorina.

The president’s visit will be followed next week by a fundraising event for Boxer featuring First Lady Michelle Obama. The efforts will provide a much-needed boost to Boxer’s coffers in the final stretch.

New fundraising reports covering the period from Oct. 1 to Oct. 13 showed Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, raising slightly more than Boxer, though Boxer still had twice as much cash on hand as her opponent. But Fiorina announced a new $1-million loan to her campaign Friday for the final push, in addition to the $5.5 million she gave herself for the primary.

At Friday’s rally, the candidates took care to avoid mentioning the names of their rivals but drew distinctions between themselves and their opponents.

Brown signaled that he would reject what he has criticized as the divisive tactics of his opponent: “We don’t scapegoat anybody, not public workers, not immigrants, not anybody because we’re all Californians together.”

And Obama argued that if Republicans were to regain control, they would cut “middle-class families loose to fend for themselves.”

“Their basic philosophy is — you’re on your own,” he said.

Fiorina spokeswoman Julie Soderlund called Obama’s visit “another rescue mission for Boxer” and said the fact that Boxer did not mention Friday’s new unemployment figures or her specific plans to address them in her short speech proved “just how out of touch she is with the reality that 1 in 8 Californians is without a job.”

Brown’s Republican rival, Meg Whitman, meanwhile, campaigned in San Jose on Friday with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He had held the all-time record for self-funding a campaign until Whitman, who has put $141.5 million into her gubernatorial bid, surpassed him.

The former EBay chief executive said the Obama administration’s efforts to revive the economy had been a failure.

“The progress has been terrible,” Whitman said. “Look at the unemployment rates we face in California and we face in the country.”

maeve.reston@latimes.com

seema.mehta@latimes.com

Times staff writer Michael J. Mishak in San Jose contributed to this report.
In USC speech, Obama urges 37,500 Democratic voters to ‘fight on’

One night a few years back, a California communications executive named Deborah Bowker was worried about her husband, who was sick and hospitalized. An old friend told her she shouldn’t be alone, that she should come over and stay the night.

The guest bedroom at the friend’s house was used most often by grandchildren, and contained two tiny beds. That night, Bowker was crying herself to sleep in one of them when the door cracked open. Without a word, Carly Fiorina padded across the room and crawled into the other bed.

Bowker and Fiorina have been close friends since they went to MIT together, and little changed for 20 years — until Fiorina decided to run for the U.S. Senate, with Bowker as her chief of staff.

That fretful night doesn’t seem like a big deal now. Bowker’s husband recovered, and Fiorina might not even remember it, Bowker said with a laugh. Bowker said she hadn’t told the story before and wasn’t sure why she was telling it now — except that she hardly recognizes Fiorina in the image that’s been created through the veneer of politics.

Those closest to Fiorina, 56, describe her as loyal and fun-loving, witty and bright. But they are well aware of the other image — of a pompous diva, aligned with the most strident factions of her Republican Party, pampered by a golden parachute after being fired from her high-profile job.

Fiorina the candidate hasn’t always helped matters. Her tone on the stump can be caustic. At one point in her dogged campaign against the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Barbara Boxer, an open microphone caught her belittling Boxer’s hair as “so yesterday.”

In a sneering attempt to connect with a “tea party” crowd near Fresno recently, she referred to San Francisco — the center of the metropolitan area where she spent nearly half of her life, the city just up the road from her 5,400-square-foot Los Altos Hills estate — as “that faraway world.”

And her critics tend to roll their eyes when Fiorina — who was raised on opera and French lessons, was the daughter of a powerful judge and has a sterling academic pedigree — pitches herself as a kind of Horatio Alger. Her journey, she said at one recent campaign event, was “only possible in the United States of America.”

Getting to know the person friends call “the real Carly,” meanwhile, can be a confounding task. Stung by several episodes in her life, including the unraveling of her first marriage and the brouhaha surrounding her firing from Hewlett-Packard, where she was chief executive, president and chairman, she is private and guarded.

Fiorina’s work ethic is legendary, and her discipline is one reason Boxer — a lioness of the left seeking her fourth Senate term — is in arguably the toughest race of her career. But Fiorina can be so on-message that she comes across as a machine.

During a recent heat wave, Fiorina met with business leaders in a sweltering City of Industry warehouse. A visitor joked that the record heat might cause her to rethink her position on global warming. Fiorina was not amused, launching instantly into her talking points about climate change — contending that she reserved the right to “challenge the science.”

On the campaign trail, it can be difficult to envision the Fiorina who could often be found dancing with the interns and the secretaries at the end of corporate parties, long after the other executives were gone. Or the woman who, on a recent boat trip, suddenly disappeared; she had jumped off the stern and hauled herself onto a tiny raft with her step-granddaughters.

Friends say she’s a fair cook and has a nice touch on the piano. She was raised Episcopalian but is not a regular churchgoer. She does Jane Fonda-style aerobics, whether she’s home or on the road.

She reads policy briefs on her iPad but reads books the old-fashioned way. She’s a voracious shopper, said one friend of 20 years, and gave one Hong Kong jeweler enough business that he put her picture in the window. She has at her disposal a household net worth estimated as high as $121 million and yachts on both coasts, and will be one of the wealthiest members of Congress if she wins.

She and her husband, Frank Fiorina, a former AT&T executive with blue-collar roots in Pittsburgh, have been married for 25 years. It is a second marriage for both; she calls him a “hunk” with some frequency.

Last fall, she threw him a sock-hop-themed 60th birthday party, tracking down friends he hadn’t seen in 30 years. Fiorina was stylish as ever, said an old friend, Kathy Fitzgerald, in a black dress and textured stockings — and, since she was being treated for breast cancer, bald.

Cara Carleton Sneed was born in Austin, Texas. Her mother, a talented oil painter, was a refugee from a troubled childhood in Ohio. Her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, was a University of Texas law professor whose ambition in academia meant that she was perpetually “the new kid,” she wrote in her autobiography, as the family moved repeatedly.

In 1969, while teenagers across America experimented with a new counterculture, Fiorina was in Ghana, where her father was teaching students about the country’s new constitution.

Fiorina’s father soon joined the Stanford law faculty, and she graduated from Stanford with a degree in philosophy and medieval history — which, she jokes, rendered her unemployable. She bounced from job to job, working as a typist, a temp, a receptionist. In 1980, she signed on as a management trainee with AT&T.

Fiorina presents a sharp contrast in images

NPR’s decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams for remarks he made about Muslims on airliners was not only roundly criticized by conservatives Thursday, but also was viewed with alarm by some Muslim American activists and scholars.

Williams said Monday on Fox News‘ “The O’Reilly Factor” that he worries when he sees Muslims in traditional garb on airplanes. NPR fired Williams on Wednesday, saying that his comment violated the news organization’s ethics guidelines and undermined his credibility.

Some prominent Muslims expressed concern Thursday that his firing would widen a gulf between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States.

“The greater American public remains unsure about Islam and very often hostile about Islam,” said Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University, who examines the divide in his new film and book, “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.”

Ahmed said he was disappointed by Williams’ comments. But he added that NPR’s abrupt firing “does not bring the temperature down against Muslims…. Now the debate is, are we being oversensitive to Muslims?”

The flap over Williams’ remarks is the latest example of how the topic of Islam has become a political live wire in this midterm election year.

An emotional fight over the construction of an Islamic community center blocks from the site of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York erupted into a national controversy this summer and became fodder for campaign ads that have aired in Iowa and North Carolina.

At the same time, a threat by a Florida pastor to burn copies of the Koran swelled into an international issue, drawing condemnation from leaders, including President Obama.

The latest furor began last week when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on ABC’s “The View” and declared, “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” That prompted co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the stage.

That was the incident O’Reilly and Williams were discussing Monday night when Williams said, “I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.” He also noted that it was not fair to cast all Muslims as extremists.

“We as a country are engaged in a very wild and wooly conversation about Islam and Muslim Americans,” said Suhail Khan, a conservative activist who is a Muslim American, noting that minorities such as Catholics, Jews and Japanese Americans have faced similar hostility throughout U.S. history. “Sometimes the conversation is thoughtful and sometimes it’s ugly.”

But Khan said NPR overreacted in letting Williams go. “While Juan’s comments may have been a little rough around the edges, he was voicing an honest opinion and trying to articulate his personal questions and struggles with perceptions in regards to Muslims,” he said.

The decision drew an avalanche of complaints against the media organization. By Thursday evening, more than 5,400 comments had been posted on NPR.org, many of them angrily accusing the organization of political correctness. Conservative leaders such as Newt Gingrich and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called for cuts to NPR’s funding.

NPR receives no direct federal money for its operations, but between 1% and 3% of its $160 million budget comes from competitive grants awarded by publicly funded entities such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts

Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president for communications, said that Williams had been warned several times in the past for comments that violated ethics guidelines that prohibit NPR journalists from participating in programs “that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis.”

“We felt we really didn’t have an alternative,” she said. “And it was not without regret and it was not a decision that was made lightly by any means.”

In a piece for FoxNews.com, Williams called his firing “an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff.” He said his discussion with O’Reilly included “no support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind.”

Fox News moved aggressively to turn the controversy to its advantage, signing Williams to an expanded role at the cable news network.

matea.gold@latimes.com
Prominent Muslims fear NPR analyst’s firing may fan hostility

Airline passengers can expect ticket prices to be 7% to 18% higher this holiday season than last year, as an economic recovery — however modest — spurs growing demand for air travel.

Travelers can also look forward to more crowded flights: The airlines have added few new planes or routes in the last several years.

“I expect prices to be quite high compared to the last couple years, as demand is strong and supply is weak,” said Rick Seaney, chief executive of the travel website FareCompare.

Already, airlines are packing more passengers per plane, with the nation’s top carriers recording 86.3% of all seats filled in June — the highest rate in 10 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

About 41 million Americans are expected to fly during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, making it one of the busiest travel seasons of the year.

Passengers took advantage of bargains last year, when airlines dropped prices to the lowest levels in decades to entice recession-battered travelers back into the air. But now, travel experts say, demand has begun to pick up, partly a result of pent-up demand and growing optimism about the economy.

“Travel demand for the peak travel days is increasing, driving prices higher as availability diminishes,” said Jack E. Richards, president and chief executive of Pleasant Holidays, a travel agency in Westlake Village.

For example, a nonstop round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to New York departing the day before Thanksgiving and returning the following Sunday was running between $641 and $881 on the major airlines. According to a spokesman for the travel website Expedia, those prices were about 20% higher than last year.

For travelers hoping to relax in the sun, a round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to Cancun, Mexico — departing the Wednesday before Christmas and returning the Monday after — cost about $561 to $939. Those prices were up about 31%, the Expedia spokesman said.

The prices are so high that Marilyn Fils, a frequent traveler from Tarzana, canceled plans to meet her daughter in New York for Christmas.

“I expected somewhat

Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman go round and round: quibbling over the slur someone in Brown’s camp used to describe Whitman and how offensive it was (or wasn’t) and whether Brown should (or shouldn’t) be more contrite. This drives Kim DuPont crazy.

DuPont, a political independent and Whitman supporter, said after Brown apologized in their last debate, “She should have just accepted, and they both should have gotten on with it.”

DuPont ticks off her concerns: jobs, the economy, making Sacramento more business-friendly. “Those are the issues affecting the state and our place in the world,” said DuPont, 50, a financial consultant in the agriculture industry. “Those are what matter.”

The race for governor has been long, contentious and, by far, the most expensive in history. To many in this rural stretch of Central California, it has also been a disappointment: feeding their cynicism, taxing their patience — they long ago tuned out the incessant advertising — and instilling little faith that either candidate can deal with the state’s paralyzing dysfunction.

The last several weeks of the campaign, dominated by debate over an inadvertently recorded epithet and Whitman’s illegal immigrant housekeeper, have seemed especially pointless.

“A sideshow,” said Margo Michael, a cook. “Silly,” said Jerry Caperton, a retired firefighter.

For the last 16 years, San Benito County has been California’s political bellwether, a slice of rich farmland just south of the San Francisco Bay Area with an unparalleled record of matching statewide voter sentiment. In 2002, Gray Davis won reelection with 47% of the vote; in San Benito County he received 49%. In 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cruised to victory with 57% support. In San Benito County, he got 56%.

If the pattern holds this November, and if San Benito again speaks for the rest of the state, then neither candidate will run away with the contest.

Democrat Brown and Republican Whitman have their partisans: people who believe political experience (in Brown’s case) or business acumen (cited by Whitman backers) would be just what’s needed to shake up Sacramento (the way politicians always pledge).

But many more voters echoed Chuck Obeso-Bradley, who was not particularly enamored of either candidate and regarded their promises, and their charges and countercharges, with a good dose of skepticism.

A Democrat, he leans toward Brown (“holding my nose a bit”). But he thinks it will be some time before the state cycles from recession to recovery, regardless of the outcome Nov. 2. “I’ll support whoever wins and wish them both Godspeed,” said Obeso-Bradley, 56, the sales manager for a software company. “They’re going to need it.”

With about 55,000 residents, roughly the population of Arcadia or Cerritos, San Benito is more rural and Latino than California as a whole. There are relatively fewer college graduates and a slightly higher proportion of registered Democrats.

But the economic hardship — the bankruptcies, jobs lost, homes foreclosed, businesses hanging by the merest of threads — are familiar to many Californians battered by the Great Recession.

In some ways, San Benito County had it worse. Even before the housing bubble burst, regulators imposed a local building moratorium until a new sewage plant was built. The work was finished just in time for the recession, which devastated the construction industry. Unemployment, always subject to the vagaries of the agricultural season, peaked near 22% in February.

There have been hopeful signs of late. Unemployment was 14.8% in August (compared to 12.4% statewide.) A long-awaited expansion of the Hollister airport may finally go forward, and the county could land a new solar farm, with the promise of as many as 650 jobs.

Still, not one person in more than 40 interviewed felt good about the direction things were headed, a contrast with 2006, when business was robust and state lawmakers passed a budget the day before the July 1 start of the fiscal year — with a surplus.

“Sacramento keeps rolling on, like it always has, but things are out of control,” said William McDonald, 39, a courier for the San Benito County Health Department and an undecided independent. “It’s October, and they’re just now barely passing a budget?”

Even though Schwarzenegger is not on the ballot, the governor loomed large in the minds of many. That has not helped Whitman. She is running on the same outsider message Schwarzenegger used in the 2003 recall election, and several voters suggested his years in office didn’t work out too well.

“He was new. He was fresh. I thought, give it a shot,” said Bob Rowlands, 59, a Democrat who sells evidence-tracking software to police agencies. “Now Whitman is talking about running Sacramento like a business, but running a business and running the government aren’t the same. Brown may not have all the answers, but at least he knows the lay of the land.”

Whitman has spent more than $140 million on the campaign — the vast majority from her own pocketbook — and that alone has put some people off, including Peggy Neubauer, a Republican who may vote Democratic for the first time in her life.

“It’s all about feeding her ego: ‘I’m going to be the governor of the biggest state in the union,’ ” said Neubauer, 55, who owns a struggling real estate and property management firm. “Well, you can’t buy it. And if she gets there, she’s going to have all the problems Arnold had, without his finesse.”

The controversy over Whitman’s illegal immigrant housekeeper — the candidate said she did not know her status until just before the woman was fired — apparently swayed few people. Mary Martinez, 67, a retired bookkeeper and political independent, was ready to back Whitman but will skip voting in the governor’s race. “I don’t like the way she was treated,” said Martinez, referring to the maid’s brusque dismissal after nine years of employment.

But most of those interviewed waved off the matter as a diversion cooked up by Democrats. That included many Brown supporters, like Lauretta Avina, 46, who suggested that candidates “do what it takes to get elected. They play dirty on both sides.”

While Schwarzenegger shadows Whitman’s campaign, Brown has to contend with the record of another California governor: himself.

“I remember him saying they weren’t going to spray for the Medfly, and then all those planes came overhead spraying all over the place,” said Jan Van Erven, referring to Brown’s equivocating stance during the 1980s agricultural infestation. Van Erven also remembered Rose Bird, the state Supreme Court justice who overturned 64 death penalty convictions and became a soft-on-crime symbol to Brown critics.

“Brown had his shot,” said Van Erven, 62, a Republican-leaning independent. “I think Whitman could do a better job dealing with the Legislature, which is nothing but a bunch of hard-core liberal Democrats.”

Unless asked, no one talked about the latest campaign flap involving someone close to Brown using the word “whore” to describe Whitman for allegedly cutting a deal to win an endorsement. The private conversation was picked up on voicemail, after Brown thought he had hung up the phone.

Caperton, 70, the retired firefighter, was typical of the overwhelming majority who rolled their eyes or simply shrugged off the remark. “You have to wonder what she calls him back in her office when no one’s listening,” he said, laughing. Unhappy with the choices, he may not vote for anyone for governor.

mark.barabak@latimes.com
State’s bellwether voters want more attention paid to issues

President Obama laid out a broad case Saturday for rejecting Republican candidates in the upcoming midterm elections, accusing his political opponents of cynically refusing to cooperate in difficult times while accepting help from secretive special-interest groups pumping millions of dollars into various campaigns.

Obama spoke at a rally for a longtime political ally and friend, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who is locked in a tough reelection campaign against Republican Charlie Baker. The president also spent part of his quick trip to Boston at a fundraising event for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. A Democratic official said people paid up to $30,400 apiece to attend a VIP reception and have their picture taken with the president.

With unemployment at nearly 10% and people anxious about job security, Obama has struggled to articulate a single compelling message for keeping Democrats in power. At the Patrick event, he rolled out a range of arguments for voting against Republicans on Nov. 2.

While he and fellow Democrats labored to fix the economy, he said, the Republican leadership watched from a safe distance, hoping they would founder.

Speaking to more than 15,000 people at the Hynes Convention Center, Obama said that Democrats were enmeshed in the “grinding, frustrating work of delivering change inch by inch, day by day.”

Republicans, in turn, made the “tactical decision” that if they stay “on the sidelines and don’t lift a finger to help … they figured they could ride people’s anger and frustration all the way to the ballot box,” Obama said.

Obama reverted to a favorite metaphor, saying he and other Democrats had been down in the ditch trying to get the battered car going while Republicans fanned themselves and enjoyed Slurpees.

Now that the metaphorical car’ is on the mend, “they can get in and ride with us if they want, but they’ve got to get in the back seat,” Obama said.

The president’s speech was interrupted by hecklers who shouted their disapproval over his AIDS funding policies. That touched off a counter-chant of “four more years” from supporters of Obama and Patrick.

Obama, wearing a jacket but no tie, stared at the demonstrators, who held up a sign that read, “Keep the promise.”

“Take a look at what the Republican leadership has to say about AIDS funding,” the president challenged.

Obama renewed a charge that special-interest groups aligned with the Republicans were spending huge sums of money in the campaign without revealing their donors. Because the source of funds is unknown, “foreign-controlled corporations” could be underwriting the TV ad buys, Obama said.

“They don’t even have the courage to stand up and disclose their identity,” he said. “They could be insurance companies, they could be banks, they could even be foreign-controlled corporations — we will never know.”

The White House has faced a backlash over such attacks. Critics have said that Democrats have yet to produce concrete evidence that foreign money is fueling campaign attack ads.

They’ve also said that with the economy in such wretched shape, Obama is distracting voters from deeper problems by focusing on campaign finance disclosure.

Obama’s visit to Boston testifies to his special connection to the Massachusetts governor.

Patrick worked in the Clinton administration in the 1990s, yet when it came time to endorse a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary in 2008, he chose Obama over rival Hillary Rodham Clinton.

A recent poll by Suffolk University showed Patrick leading Baker by 7 points.

Partisan emotions were strong at the rally. Before Obama spoke, the audience heard from Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat.

Markey, in a reference to Delaware Senate Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell, said, “We have gone from Democrats who say, ‘Yes we can!’ to Republicans who say, ‘Yes, wiccan.’”

O’Donnell has said that when she was young, she “dabbled” in witchcraft.

With election day about two weeks away, Obama is stepping up his campaign travel, flying across the country to raise money and stump for Democratic candidates. On Sunday he and First Lady Michelle Obama are attending a rally at Ohio State University in what will be the president’s 11th visit to the perennial swing state since he took office.

On Wednesday he leaves the White House for a three-day Western swing that includes stops in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Portland, Ore.

peter.nicholas@latimes.com
Obama says GOP accepts special-interest money while refusing to cooperate in government

WASHINGTON — President Obama made a new pitch for his $50-billion “roads, railways and runways” program Monday morning, saying the need to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure capacity is critical and that American competitiveness in the 21st century depends upon swift action.

Clogged roads, airways and other infrastructure chip away at worker productivity, Obama said, and the longer the country waits to fix it, “the deeper our competitive edge erodes.”

Speaking to reporters in the Rose Garden, Obama pitched the plan almost entirely in terms of its benefit to the economy — though he also alluded to the politics of the moment, noting the steadfast Republican opposition to most of his current plans.

In a “season of choices,” Obama said, one of the decisions Americans must make is between “decline and prosperity.”

Earlier Monday, the administration issued a new report estimating the spending program would create a raft of new middle-class jobs in manufacturing, construction and retail and thereby help boost the economy. More than half of the new jobs would come in construction, where unemployment figures are now higher than 17 percent, according to the report.

First unveiled on Labor Day, the plan figures into the election picture for Democrats, who are under pressure to show how the economy will improve under Obama’s continued stewardship and theirs.

Still, to pass the measure, the president needs to win over Republicans, who generally have opposed his suggestions for government spending as a way out of the country’s economic malaise. And a change of heart did not seem imminent on Monday morning.

If the president were serious about passage, said one GOP aide, it would have been easier if he’d held Monday’s event before the Senate left town to campaign for midterm elections.

“Because the November lame-duck session is all booked up, the very earliest the Senate could consider the president’s proposal now would be December,” said Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “And that’s assuming that the committees could/would want to act in time — a huge ‘if.’ “

cparsons@tribune.com
Obama renews push for $50-billion ‘roads, railways and runways’ program

A trio of economics scholars, including an MIT professor whose nomination to the Federal Reserve board has been held up in the Senate, won the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for their studies of markets and how mismatches between buyers and sellers can contribute to such problems as high unemployment.

Peter A. Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fellow American Dale T. Mortensen, a professor at Northwestern University, will share the $1.5 million award with Christopher A. Pissarides, a British and Cypriot citizen who teaches at the London School of Economics.

The three men pioneered and developed models that help explain, among other things, why there are so many jobless people even as there are a large number of job openings — a problem that is particularly relevant today as the United States and other developed countries grapple with stubbornly high unemployment.

The U.S. jobless figure for September was reported Friday at 9.6%.

“The laureates’ models help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the prize.

“This may refer to benefit levels in unemployment insurance or rules in regard to hiring and firing,” the statement said. “One conclusion is that more generous unemployment benefits give rise to higher unemployment and longer search times.”

The idea that more-generous jobless benefits can provide a disincentive for workers to seek or take jobs has been hotly debated in the U.S. as policymakers have continued to face pressure to extend unemployment checks for millions of people.

Mortensen, in a conference call from Denmark, where he is currently a visiting professor at Aarhus University, said his models do show a negative effect of higher jobless benefits.

But he dismissed that as a major factor in the high unemployment, saying instead that the current job troubles are a function of the impaired financial markets.

“I really don’t think this is the time to worry about that,” Mortensen, 71, said of unemployment benefits.

The works of Diamond, who first developed a theoretical framework on “search markets” in the early 1970s, and Mortensen and Pissarides also offer insights into another ongoing debate among economists — whether the high unemployment today reflects structural deficiencies such as mismatches in skills or problems that are more cyclical in nature because of weak demand.

Some economists have argued the troubles are structural, suggesting that unemployment won’t be going back to the normal range of 5%, while others have emphasized that the terrible labor situation demands more substantial government stimulus to bolster demand for goods and services.

Diamond acknowledged that the process of improving the job market “is going to be slow and painful” for the whole economy and people looking for work. But he didn’t view it as a structural problem, suggesting more optimism for the future.

“I think the economy is very adaptive,” he said. “Workers and employers will adapt.”

Diamond, 70, who received his Ph.D. from MIT and has been a professor there since 1966, is considered by peers as a brilliant theorist whose works on social security systems are highly regarded.

Last spring he was nominated by President Obama to fill one of three vacancies on the Fed’s board. But while two other nominees to the Fed board were cleared recently, Diamond’s confirmation was effectively blocked by Senate Republicans.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, questioned whether the MIT professor had enough practical experience to serve as a Fed governor.

Asked about the Fed nomination during a news conference at MIT, Diamond said he would not withdraw his candidacy but declined to comment further.

don.lee@latimes.com
Three share Nobel Prize in economics