Business Group's Brown Attack Ads
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS)_ Less than three weeks before Labor Day, Democrat Jerry Brown is still holding his fire in the governor's race while a business group starts attacking him on behalf of Republican candidate Meg Whitman.
Voters may already be tiring of the big-money advertising blitz even before the fall campaign begins.
The Small Business Action Committee is the latest entry in the gubernatorial ad war with a TV ad attacking Jerry Brown.
Podcast
One of their founders is a leader of the "birther" movement that claims President Obama isn't a U.S. citizen, and Meg Whitman gave the committee a $10,000 donation. She's already spent $104 million of her own dollars on this campaign, so USC Senior Fellow Sherry Bebich Jeffe doesn't see how a new, independent $1.6 million ad campaign is going to achieve what Whitman herself hasn't been able to, a lead in the polls.
"We may have seen her reach the point of diminishing return on her massive investment. I can tell you from being in a classroom that there are an awful lot of potential California voters who do not know who he is, or what he has done. My students, if they know him, know him as Governor Moonbeam," says Jeffe.
That nickname is a 1970's reference to Brown's proposal to purchase a satellite for the state that would provide emergency communications. A similar proposal to his idea would later come to fruition.
An independent labor group has been countering Whitman's ads with attacks of its own, but Bebich Jeffe says after Labor Day, Brown had better come out swinging.
