Senate Candidates Hit Campaign Trail Over Weekend

Three of the four high-visibility California candidates in the Nov. 2 election campaigned in the Southland over the weekend.

Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina was at 30 Years After’s second Civic Action Conference at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Century City. The event aims to promote civic participation among the Iranian-American Jewish community.

Her Democratic opponent, Sen. Barbara Boxer, was at the new Veterans Resource Center at Pasadena City College, where she was endorsed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Political Action Committee and pledged her full support for West Coast veterans facilities.

“A lot of the war’s wounds, these wars, many, many, many are seen and many are unseen, but wounds they are, and we have to make sure we have insurance coverage for post traumatic stress disorder — we’ve been able to do that — increased investments in research on PTSD and brain injuries,” Boxer said.

Boxer has attacked Fiorina for sending jobs overseas when she was head of Hewlett-Packard.

“I’m going to work to see the words `made in America’ again, because that’s where we are in our economy — we don’t want to see jobs shipped overseas,” she said.

Veterans who do not support Boxer demonstrated outside the event, and Fiorina asserted that many veterans oppose her re-election.

The VFW Political Action Committee “has lost a great deal of credibility because they’ve demonstrated once again that all they ever do is endorse incumbent politicians,” Fiorina told reporters after her Century City speech.

“The protests that we’re seeing are evidence of the fact there are a great number of veterans who are offended by Barbara Boxer’s refusal to support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Fiorina said. “There are veterans who are offended by the way she dressed down a general. There are a whole lot of veterans who are offended by the decision the VFW PAC has made.”

Fiorina called a television commercial from the Boxer campaign accusing her of shifting jobs out of California to foreign countries when she was chief executive officer of the Hewlett-Packard Co. “the height of hypocrisy on Barbara Boxer’s part.”

“Jobs are leaving the state of California because of her policies,” Fiorina said. “The California Manufacturers & Technology Association … endorsed me because they said Barbara Boxer has been one of the worst senators ever in terms of her policies which have destroyed jobs.

“It’s also hypocritical because Barbara Boxer has taken tens of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from many, many companies who also have been forced to outsource jobs.

“She can’t have it both ways. Either she gives the money back or she recognizes that it is her policies that are destroying the manufacturing base in this state (and) our nation and we now need to fight to rebuild that manufacturing base. I know what that takes. She apparently doesn’t.”

Fiorina also told the mostly Jewish audience that Israel should not have to stop building settlements on the West Bank for the peace process to continue.

When asked about the flap over someone in Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown’s campaign calling Whitman a “whore” in a discussion of whether to create an ad alleging that she had protected law enforcement pensions in order to win police endorsements, Fiorina said the comment was “insulting to all women.”

“It’s shocking, it’s outrageous,” Fiorina said. “Frankly, I think perhaps Jerry Brown ought to be coming out a bit more forcefully and perhaps calling for resignation of his aide. That’s not the way you talk about any woman under any circumstance.”

Shortly after the Los Angeles Times reported on the comment on its website Thursday, Brown campaign manager Steve Glazer issued a statement saying, “This was a jumbled and often inaudible recording of a private conversation. At times our language was salty. We apologize to Ms. Whitman and anyone who may have been offended.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman campaigned at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys, where about 400 people showed up and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani endorsed her candidacy.

“This is the right person at the right time for the kind of challenges that California faces,” he said. “And your challengers are our challenges, meaning they are the same challenges as America. Sometimes I think California may be more complicated than America.”

Whitman was an economic advisor to Republican presidential candidate John McCain during the 2008 election.

Brown did not campaign today.