|
California Democratic
gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown compared his free-spending Republican
rival Meg Whitman with Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels as he
laced into her ambitions for higher office.
Brown made the remark during an impromptu conversation with KCBS
reporter Doug Sovern, who ran into the gubernatorial candidate and
current state attorney general on a jogging path during the past
weekend, before Whitman clinched a primary victory on Tuesday.
Sovern posted quotations from the often-rambling conversation on his
blog Wednesday night.
"You know, by the time she's done with me, two months from now, I'll be
a child-molesting ..." Sovern quoted Brown as saying. "She'll have
people believing whatever she wants about me."
Then he added, "It's like Goebbels. ... Goebbels invented this kind of
propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be
president. That's her ambition, the first woman president. That's what
this is all about."
Brown's representatives did not deny the statement when asked directly
about it but described it as "jogging talk" that was "taken out of
context."
Whitman's campaign blast e-mailed the astonishing comment, which is
sure to raise protests from California's Jewish voters over its light
invocation of a notorious anti-Semite whose name is synonymous with
engineering the Holocaust.
"Just last week, Gov. Brown promised he wasn't going to engage in
mudslinging, but now he is comparing Meg Whitman to Hitler's minister
of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels," said her campaign manager, Jillian
Hasner.
"Jerry Brown's statements comparing our campaign to a propagator of the
Holocaust is deeply offensive and entirely unacceptable."
Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, plowed $80 million into her primary
run, more than $70 million of which was from her personal fortune.
Brown has complained bitterly about the pace of spending on paid media
in the campaign.
Sovern also featured other quotations from the jogging trail,
in which he asked the 72-year-old Brown about reporters wanting to talk
with him.
"No, no one ever wants to talk to me. You're the oddball. You're the
only one," Brown said.
|
