GOP California Candidates Abandoning Environment As Issue - Typically Used To Lure Independents

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For decades, Republicans who won statewide office in California found success, at least in part, by showing sensitivity to voters' commitment to protecting the environment. But with state unemployment hovering at more than 12%, the two GOP candidates at the top of the ticket this year are betting that voters' concerns about jobs and economic uncertainty will trump any desire for environmental crusades.

Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina has spent months charging Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer with driving an extreme environmental agenda instead of tending to jobs. She has been sharply critical of national and state climate change legislation — deriding Boxer's concern as being about "the weather" — and has argued that the state should expand oil drilling off its shores.

Gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman has been more equivocal than Fiorina, but she also has cast the state's landmark climate change measure as one that kills jobs. She favors delaying its execution for a year to allow further study of its effect. With those positions, both women are eschewing the strategy that Republicans have used for years to make inroads with Democrats and "decline-to-state" voters, sometimes called independents or nonpartisan.

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When asked in early June whether she would have to pivot to appeal to environmentally minded voters this fall, Fiorina said it was clear that voters' priorities had shifted: "It's not that people aren't concerned about the environment. It's that they have come to a place that says we've got to be sensible about this," she said. While Boxer touts both the state and federal climate change legislation as jobs-generating policies — a central theme of her campaign — her opponent has slammed the federal climate change bill Boxer helped craft as "a huge job-killing piece of legislation." Fiorina has called AB 32 a "disastrous law." And though her spokeswoman insists she has not taken a position on Proposition 23, she has often left her listeners with the impression that she supports it. The state law, she said in a late June appearance on CNBC's "Closing Bell," "has killed jobs, so much so that there is a bipartisan effort to have that law suspended until unemployment reaches 5%.... If that isn't an admission that legislation can kill jobs, I don't know what is."

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-environment-20100729,0,5523418.story

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1. Yes, Republicans create lots of jobs. In China.