The 2006 California gubernatorial election thread (plus other propositions, scandals, what have you)

Angling over on the Democratic side, Controller Steve Westly and Treasurer Phil Angelides, both of whom seem to be the result of a Gray Davis cloning project, a truly distressing prospect. I think we all know who the GOP candidate is. According to Bradley, the recent state GOP convention in San Jose saw Arnold's crew stifling some complaints on the right (the squashing of all of Arnold's ballot measures in November has seen him veer more 'left,' if you use an extremely loose definition of the term).

“This was a fork in the road,” says ex-state Republican chairman Mike Schroeder as he and other angry conservative leaders expressed their displeasure and lack of support for Schwarzenegger. “He could have allowed a real debate here. He didn’t.”

Looking on with amusement was Democratic strategist Garry South, who quipped, “It seems every even numbered year the Republican Party turns into the Donner Party.”

Meanwhile, there's also an amusing little scandal starting to bubble up involving none other than Rob Reiner, up until very recently head of the First Five Commission, which is all very nice and lovely sounding. There's just one small problem, as Dan Morain at the LA Times first noted and which Bradley initially summarized here:

In 1998, he got a statewide initiative passed to raise the cigarette tax by 50 cents a pack to fund early childhood development programs. Then he got himself appointed head of the commission overseeing the fund, which amounts to $4 billion so far.

Some of what follows was previously known. What Morain and the Times added in terms of value, and it is a great deal, is the sheer breadth and magnitude of it all. It is breathtaking.

Out of that $4 billion total, according to the Times, the Reiner commission tossed nearly a quarter-billion dollars worth of advertising and PR contracts to firms that worked on Reiner’s campaign. Some of Reiner’s consultants went on the state payroll personally to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And out of that total mentioned above, $23 million went into advertising for “Preschool For All,” one of the biggest governmental ad buys in California history, from November to mid-January. In January, Reiner’s new initiative, calling for a tax on the rich to fund universal preschool, not so coincidentally called “Preschool For All,” qualified for the June ballot.

As Bradley noted in a follow-up post:

To put this massive amount of public spending in perspective, for all of last year, the California Lottery spent $27.4 million on advertising.

In other words, the Reiner commission spent 84 percent as much money advertising the theme of the upcoming Reiner initiative as the state lottery spent on advertising, in just one-fourth the time. While signature gathering was underway to qualify the initiative.

Making matters more entertaining -- his term officially expired over a year ago. After some public blustering, Reiner has gone on a 'leave of absence' in an attempt to smooth this all over. Uh-huh. (Enjoy a bit of catfight flackery in the comments section of this post.)

Anyway, post thoughts, links, slams, etc. here.