Little local focus in Whitman’s Valley stop

Two days after officially launching her quest for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman talked in broad generalities Thursday about her campaign to businessmen and entrepreneurs at the fourth annual Central Valley Venture Forum in Clovis.

Whitman’s speech was billed as “Entrepreneurship and Private Capital; Lessons for the Central Valley and California,” but the 53-year-old’s talk instead hewed to her well-known campaign themes.

During a 20-minute speech, she talked about the challenges facing California, her proposed solutions and how she would implement those ideas. The speech was not tailored to the central San Joaquin Valley, other than to note the skyrocketing unemployment rates in Mendota and Huron. She even mispronounced Tulare.

“I worry that California is at a negative tipping point,” she said.

After Whitman talked, state Controller John Chiang used a lunch speech to give a primer on the state’s financial condition and how it got to this point.

Chiang noted that the state has not been “net cash-positive” since July 2007.

“This state has been operating on borrowed money ever since,” he said.

That includes borrowing money from other parts of the state, such as a fund for disaster recovery and other special funds — and then hoping that money won’t be needed for their intended purposes.

As Chiang addressed the present, Whitman looked ahead, listing her ideas on how to fix state government.

She started with what she said are the biggest challenges facing California: double-digit unemployment, a deteriorating education system, infrastructure built for a population half of what it is now, and a state government teetering on the edge of insolvency.

One of her solutions is to give every school a letter grade from A to F. Those with Fs over a three-year period would be turned into charter schools.

She also vowed to use the line-item veto and the initiative process to push her agenda. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also has used the initiative process — with mixed success. In an interview, Whitman said the better route is to push just one at a time, and not a package of measures as Schwarzenegger has done.

Jeffrey Cummins, a political science professor at California State University, Fresno, said Whitman’s speech shows “she’s just seeing the larger picture right now, and perhaps she’s taking Central Valley voters for granted, given their conservative bent.”

Whitman’s Clovis visit came the same day as a Sacramento Bee story that looked at her voting record, which is almost nonexistent prior to 2004.

“I’ve talked about my voting record before,” Whitman said in an interview. “You know what? People make mistakes, and I want to be accountable for those mistakes. I should have voted. I didn’t vote. And it is a right every single American should take advantage of, and I didn’t, and it is inexcusable.”

The campaign of Steve Poizner, a challenger for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, said in a statement that “it’s understandable that Meg Whitman is ashamed of this record. But it’s unacceptable that she continues to run from the record and deceive voters.”

Said Cummins: “I think it’s going to come back to haunt her.”

Also on the agenda for the event was a group of five local new and early-stage businesses selected to pitch their businesses to a panel of investors.

The winner was Soil and Topography Information LLC, which has offices in Fresno as well as Boise, Idaho, and Madison, Wis. The company does soil analysis and mapping technology that helps agriculture, levee inspection, battlefield inspection and land evaluation.

The victory gives the company an opportunity to present at the prestigious Keiretsu Forum, an investment network based in San Francisco.

By John Ellis / The Fresno Bee