In the Right

One of Whitman's opponents, California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, was up on the air and on the web with an attack ad within 24 hours of the publication of the original story.

So the Whitman campaign decided it had to respond, and decided further to play its strongest card -- its candidate -- to push back against the charge.

The venue? A press conference at the California Republican Convention two days after the story broke.

As this YouTube video of Whitman responding to reporters' questions shows, she is a candidate who has a remarkable ability to stay on message when she's been given a script.

In this 3:27 clip, she repeats and repeats and repeats the same phrases, in the same order, over and over again -- seven times, she says "there is no excuse" for having not registered; eight times, she says she "didn't vote as often as I should have;" four times, she "acknowledges mistakes;" and three times, she says it "was not the right thing to do."

In other words, she refuses to answer the reporters' questions, and instead uses her press conference as a vehicle to drive home the message she wants, and only the message she wants. She understands that she cannot be hanged for something she did not say, and that as long as she sticks to the script in front of her, the reporters will eventually run out of different ways of phrasing the same question. And that means that when they go back to their offices, or off to some quiet corner in the back of the convention hall to write their stories, they will only be able to quote her saying things she wants to see in the newspaper.

And that would have been terrific -- if she had simply stuck with that story.

Instead, three days later, on September 29, she was out with a new explanation for why she hadn't voted in 28 years -- this time, she claimed that she was simply "not engaged in politics" as she should have been.

Again, she repeated the same phrases over and over, never veering off message. True, it was the second explanation she had offered in three days, but apparently the campaign figured California political reporters have short memories, and if Whitman just repeated her stock phrases long enough, they'd eventually forget what she had said earlier.

Perhaps that would have worked. Perhaps not.

We'll never know, because someone in the campaign high command -- Whitman herself? -- decided to trot out yet another explanation.

So three days later, on October 2, Whitman posted this YouTube video, with another new explanation.

The oddest part about this is that in three decades of professional political experience, I have yet to see the attack on a candidate for not voting actually work to move voters.

Note to the Whitman campaign: Voters couldn't care less about whether or not you voted in elections twenty years ago, or two years ago.

They care what you're going to do for them two years from now, after you're in office.

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