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Cal Gov Race: Poizner Calls in the Cops

February 1st, 2010 at 8:28 pm by Tim Mak | 4 Comments |

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Today Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a candidate in the GOP gubernatorial primary in California, accused Meg Whitman’s campaign of making “crystal clear… threats” to get him to drop out of the race against the former eBay CEO.

Poizner went further, saying that he had referred these “threats” to the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the California Attorney General.

The Whitman campaign was incredulous, responding with a press release that questioned Poizner’s sanity. In a statement obtained by FrumForum, senior Whitman campaign advisor Mike Murphy responded:

After reading the ridiculous charges made by Steve Poizner during today’s strange press conference, all I can say is that I’m starting to worry about the Commissioner’s mental condition.

In the press conference today, Poizner cited an email that Murphy had sent to one of his pollsters, Jan van Lohuizen, as proof of the threat. The email reads, in part:

Is there anything we can do to get [Poizner] to reconsider this race?…I hate the idea of us each spending $20 million beating on the other in the primary, only to have a damaged nominee…we can spend $40M+ tearing up Steve if we must. … Bad for him, bad for us, and a crazy waste to tear up a guy with great future statewide potential — really the only guy on the CA GOP bench for the future.

Steve Poizner’s campaign has been relatively idle in recent polls despite Tom Campbell’s decision to drop out, transforming the gubernatorial primary into a two-way race. With this change, Whitman increased her lead in the polls, and Poizner barely peeked into double-digit support. A poll taken just five days ago by PPIC shows Whitman beating Poizner 41%-11%.

The question now is: has Poizner gone rogue?

“I know the staff inside Poizner’s campaign. I’ve worked with them in the past. They’re not crazy. There’s no way they advised Poizner to call for an FBI investigation into whether people think he’s electable or not. It only hypes his own negatives… which is nuts,” said one Whitman campaign staffer.

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4 responses so far

  • 1 rbottoms // Feb 1, 2010 at 9:42 pm

    Glad to hear Republicans are still inclined to act like loons in their primaries.

    BTW, missile defense still doesn’t work. Oh well, better spend another 200-300 billion on it.

    WASHINGTON, Feb 1 (Reuters) – A U.S. attempt to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed after a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon Co (RTN.N), the Defense Department said.

    The botched $150 million test over the Pacific Ocean coincided with a Pentagon report that Iran had expanded its ballistic missile capabilities and posed a “significant” threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East region.

    In the exercise on Sunday, both the target missile, fired from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and the interceptor, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, performed normally, the Missile Defense Agency said.

    “However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected,” the agency said on its website. Officials will investigate the cause of the failure to intercept, it said.

    The SBX radar is a major component of the ground-based midcourse defense, the sole U.S. bulwark against long-range missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.

    It was the first time the United States had tested its long-range defense against a simulated Iranian attack.

    Clearly it makes more sense to spend a trillion dollars, racking up one failed $100 million dollar test after another, trying to hit one bullet with another bullet.

    hat kind of sense does it make to station a couple of Ageis class attack boats off the coast of North Korea to shoot the missiles down in the boost (or as I like to call it, sitting duck) phase. Because as we all know, making Raytheon richer benefits the American taxpayer so very much.

  • 2 2-1-2010 The Day in Review | F i a t Lux // Feb 2, 2010 at 3:00 am

    [...] The Republican Primary in the California Governor’s race is turning ugly. [...]

  • 3 GOProud // Feb 2, 2010 at 9:10 am

    rbottoms, why are you so intent on still defending Obama’s CO status in the War of Terror and building a strong natl defense? With the way the WH Democrats are wasting money on no-bid contracts for political cronies, fraud in the Stimulus Spending Spree and diverting TARP repayments away from the US Treasury and into more wasteful, fraud-ridden, political payoff schemes that make Madoff look lame… I’d think you’d support full employment for Raytheon workers?

    Oh, I forgot… that spending would actually generate jobs… not promise to create them… or promise to save them like Obama & his spinning liars claim.

  • 4 rbottoms // Feb 2, 2010 at 3:15 pm

    rbottoms, why are you so intent on still defending Obama’s CO status in the War of Terror and building a strong natl defense?

    Well there goes that narrative.

    Republicans may have a hard time keeping up their talking point about how reading Miranda rights to the Christmas Day bomber represented a dangerous new direction under President Barack Obama.

    It turns out that that back in December 2001, Richard Reid — the “shoe bomber” — was read or reminded of his Miranda rights four times in two days, beginning five minutes after being taken into custody.

    Furthermore, the Bush administration specifically rejected the idea of a military tribunal — another step that Republicans have argued should have been taken in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day and was read his rights after 50 minutes of FBI questioning.

    After Reid attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight out of Paris, Massachusetts State Police officers boarded the plane at 12:55 p.m. on Dec. 22, 2001, handcuffed Reid, and removed him from the plane, according to U.S. District Court records.

    “At around 1:00 p.m., one of the officers (it is unclear who) read Reid Miranda warnings,” according to a court order in Reid’s case. “The officers then placed Reid inside a police cruiser. … At some point while in the cruiser, Trooper Santiago … asked Reid ‘What happened on the plane?,’ which Reid answered by stating that nothing happened on the plane. … Reid then asked Trooper Santiago ‘Where are the reporters?’”

    Republicans. Lying jerks. Again.

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