Washed It!

The two Republicans at the top of California’s November ticket fanned out across the Central Valley this week, denouncing government dysfunction and asserting that their business experience would help them rescue the region’s unemployed workers, small firms and struggling family farms.

“I have spent a lot of time in the valley, and what is going on here due to lack of water is a humanitarian crisis,” gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman told scores of supporters on a recent afternoon in a sweltering feed warehouse in Lemoore, about 30 miles south of Fresno. “It just breaks my heart.”

A hundred miles south at a technology company in Bakersfield, Senate nominee Carly Fiorina ticked off statistics about the slowing recovery and Kern County’s unemployment rate — contending that incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer had failed the region by neglecting its water woes and by embracing what Fiorina described as the failed federal stimulus program.