Rosalea Barker: Let the gesturing begin!

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Saturday afternoon saw California’s first-ever gubernatorial television debate moderated in Spanish, which I watched on Univision with subtitles. Apparently it wasn’t aired live, because I saw none of the technical glitch referred to in this report: “some kind of audio problems thwarted the simultaneous Spanish/English translation, leaving both Brown and Whitman to spend the better part of a half hour camped out in their respective green rooms.”

The problems occurred in the midst of a heated exchange about Whitman’s maid, a story that had suddenly blown up during the previous week, and which the Whitman campaign had tried to deal with by using a “spaghetti strategy”, according to one SF Chronicle political blogger. Since I neither speak nor read Spanish well enough to write about the debate, I can only say that both campaigns must have decided that Latinos use a lot of hand gestures—the candidates seemed to use more of them in this debate than in the one earlier in the week.

The debate moderator was Maria Elena Salinas, the Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of Noticiero Univision, Univision's network evening news program. She asked all the questions except for one video and one email question sent in to Univision by viewers, and two audience questions.

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Meg Whitman looked somewhat battered by the week’s events.

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Brown, on the other hand, was his usual cold-to-cool-to-warmed-over self.

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The debate took place at Cal State University’s Fresno campus in the Central Valley. One of the audience questions was about California’s water problems, and the other was from a student who asked whether the candidates support the DREAM Act—a Federal law first proposed in August, 2001, that would give conditional residency to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as minors.

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Whitman, as is her wont, seemed to speak a lot about tax cuts creating a better business climate in California but in this debate—unlike in last Tuesday’s—she did not hold up Texas as a prime example of a business-friendly state. Perhaps the phrase “hunting trips” and “Texas” carry a different connotation for a Latino audience.

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The moderator’s final question drew a big laugh from the audience and a “Wow!” from Brown—Salinas asked each candidate to list three things that made their opponent the right choice for Governor. Once the debate concluded, Brown did not turn towards Whitman for the usual genial post-debate handshake, instead making her step from behind her podium towards him to shake his hand.

Alas, my camera battery had failed by this point, but that old ploy of Brown’s resulted in one of the more memorable images—Whitman trailing an audio cord behind her, looking for all the world like el Diablo himself.

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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