Have always been impressed with the ferocity of the campaigns waged by Barbara Boxer against hapless opponents over the years. Something seems different this time: Boxer’s liberal brand is stale and the cookie cutter SEIU-style negative class warfare attacks seem weak. Sure, they’ll drive Carly’s negs up a bit, but the rationale for Boxer’s re-election has never been so shaky and illegitimate.
From the Hotline today:
Boxer mgr Rose Kapolczynski said Fiorina’s choices at HP placed “profits over people.” Kapolczynski: “If times were tough and layoffs were necessary why was she able to hire workers overseas? Why was she able to order a new corporate jet? It wasn’t that belt-tightening had to go on across her company, it was that she decided laying off American workers was the best approach.”
Then, just as Meg Whitman begins slamming Jerry Brown as a relic of the 70’s so, too, does Fiorina on Boxer:
“In a sign of the rough contest ahead,” Fiorina “made some overt digs at Boxer’s age.” At one point she noted that Boxerentered politics 34 years ago — “just to put that into context, Microsoft had not been formed when Barbara Boxer became a politician. The median age of Californians is 33-years-old. Barbara Boxer has literally been a politician for a lifetime” (Reston, Los Angeles Times, 6/24).