UPDATE: Monday, 11:17 am, it was announced this morning that Tuesday’s radio debate between Brown and Whitman has been canceled. No word yet as to why.
Curious.
As we all know, last week the media was obsessed with the Meg, Gloria and Nicky show. (I’m not casting stones; I admit to being among the obsessed).
Over the weekend, however, Tim Rutten pointed out in his column that there were several larger immigration-related issues embedded within the nannygate kerfuffle, issues like the general Come Here/Go Away manner in which undocumented immigrants are treated.
Here’s a clip from Rutten’s column:
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the fact that the billionaire former EBay chief executive and her neurosurgeon husband employed an undocumented immigrant. At some point, most Californians knowingly or unknowingly employ a worker without papers or do business with someone who does. Merely going out to dinner, having your car washed or hiring a contractor to work on your house makes that so.
What really ought to concern people most are Diaz Santillan’s allegations that during the nine years she worked for Whitman and her husband, they repeatedly forced her to put in more than her agreed-upon hours without compensation and refused to pay her mileage even though she had to use her own car to perform household errands. Whitman denies all this, but she does agree that she fired Diaz Santillan within days of the June 2009 conversation in which the housekeeper asked for help in legalizing her status. That may not be labor code-style mistreatment, but it’s an odd way to treat somebody who’d worked in your home and taken care of your children for nearly a decade and who Whitman herself describes as “a member of our extended family.” Lots of tough love, one surmises, in that house….
He goes on from there. The column is a bit muddled, but still worth the read.
NATURALLY THE IMMIGRATION ISSUE CAME UP IN SATURDAY’S DEBATE
For those of you who didn’t see or listen to Saturday’s Whitman-Brown debate, the issues of housekeepers and immigration came up early.
CalBuzz has a fairly amusing take on that portion of the event.
Here’s a representative clip:
“Why did you not show compassion for this longtime employee?” asked the moderator, Univision’s Maria Elena Salinas, setting the stage for the money moments of the debate, which will probably be replayed, oh, no more than 12 or 13 million times between now and November 2.
“This is a very sad situation,” Whitman replied, first describing her own hurt feelings because Diaz in her recent press conference called her “Ms. Whitman” and not “Meg” as she had for all those years.
“The real tragedy here is Nicky,” she added. “After Nov. 2, no one’s going to be watching out for Nicky Diaz.”
Then she turned directly to Brown and… attacked:
“Jerry, you know you should be ashamed. You and your surrogates put her deportation at risk. You put her out there. You should be ashamed for sacrificing Nicky Diaz at the altar of your political ambitions.”
In that instant, Calbuzz had a deeply profound thought: OMG!!
For reasons that remain unclear, eMeg used her spotlight moment to point a finger of blame at Brown, with absolutely no evidence, for exposing her hiring and long-term employment of an undocumented housekeeper, Which big-brain adviser thought that was a good idea? Perhaps the same one who suggested she not mention the matter back in June 2009, when she could have disposed of the issue with a couple of page 8 stories, if that.
When he had a chance to respond a moment later, Brown, whose greatest strength as a debater is the counter-punch, denied he had anything to do with the Diaz affair and let fly.
“Don’t run for governor if you can’t stand up on your own two feet and say, ‘Hey I made a mistake, I’m sorry, let’s go on from here…
You have blamed her, blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions but you don’t take accountability. You can’t be a leader unless you’re willing to stand on your own two feet and say, ‘yup, I made a mistake and I’m going on from here.
There’s lots more.