Not enough

Sometimes words are not enough.

I’ve always thought of words as magic. They evoke things that aren’t present. They construct realities. They preserve legacies. They enable civilizations — every bridge, skyscraper and automobile started as an idea articulated with words.

Ever since I was a child, words have helped me not just navigate the world but find a place in it. “You’re a writer,” my dad tells me. To him it’s a casual truism. The L.A. sky is clear after a storm and his daughter is a writer. That’s just the way it is because if I’m genuinely good at anything, which I might not be, it’s writing. It’s the one thing I couldn’t not do. If I couldn’t run anymore, I would take up swimming. If I couldn’t play the violin, I would still listen to recordings. But not writing? Unthinkable.

Right now, though, words feel beyond inadequate. What do you say to a friend whose brother has just died? What good are words spoken over the phone, 2,200 miles away? No matter what you say it feels like giving a starving man a blanket. It might make him slightly more comfortable, but it’s not what he needs.

Sometimes I think about my relationship with my two younger brothers, which is unique in the same way that all sibling relationships are unique. Nobody but us knows what it was like to grow up in our household with our family. We have intuitive understandings of one another based upon years’ worth of shared experiences. Sometimes watching my brother speak I notice that he, like my father, can become the center of attention with a few well-timed quips. I don’t know if it’s learned, inherited or both, but they can both command a room. Other times I can see a brother going to bat for someone the way my mom does; still other times I see adolescent insecurities peeking through. Most of all I notice how uncanny it is that despite how different the three of us are on the surface, we think in remarkably similar ways. The thought of my friend losing the one person with whom he shared that bond leaves me paralyzed.

On the rare occasions that I have really, truly suffered (and even that suffering was not on par with the death of a sibling), I’ve tried to take note of what made me feel better so I could remember it for when I needed to console someone. The thing about being human, though, is we tend to forget those moments as some sort of coping mechanism. How can we maintain any type of optimism about the world if every past trauma still feels raw and present? I just remember knowing intellectually that I would get through it — but not really feeling like I would. What helped most was being able to acknowledge that I felt shitty and it was okay. James Morrison summed it up well: “I know that it’s a wonderful world but I can’t feel it right now.” I also reminded myself that one day I would wake up and it wouldn’t be a surprise to remember that things had changed for the worse. I think the only thing that helps is time because only time brings acceptance and new memories. The new memories are the key. But I can’t give time; I can only give words. So here they are, shortcomings and all:

It breaks my heart to think about what you and your family are going through, G. He was such a good person, and you know what? It’s not fair. Not fair at all. But you and your family will get through this. We love you. And even if your world is never the same again, you will find a way to live and be happy in the new one you’ve been stuck with.

It gets better — 1970s style

More than 30 years before there was the “It Gets Better” campaign in which prominent Americans assure struggling LGBT youth that things will improve for them, there was Harvey Milk and a telephone in the back of the Castro Camera store in San Francisco.

Calls came in almost daily from youth around the country who were struggling with their sexuality and had no one to turn to, Milk’s campaign manager Anne Kronenberg said today. “Some were disturbing. Some were sad,” she said. “Some were suicidal youth, youth who were feeling desperate.”

Kronenberg would answer the phone in the back of the office at 575 Castro St. and then hand it off to Milk, who was receiving national attention on his way to becoming the first openly gay city supervisor in the country.

“He would say (to the callers), ‘You’ve got to have hope,’” Kronenberg said. “That the world is not a bad place. That there’s a place for each of us, and you can come someplace that will accept you.”

Today, 575 Castro St. came full circle on what would have been Milk’s 81st birthday. The Trevor Project — a nonprofit that provides suicide prevention and crisis counseling to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth — opened a call center in the back of the Human Rights Campaign store that now occupies Milk’s former office space.

Dustin Lance Black (pictured above) won an Academy Award for the screenplay he wrote for the 2008 biopic “Milk” and sits on the board of directors for the Trevor Project, which has two other call centers and receives about 3,000 calls every month. The film he wrote has been credited with bringing global attention to Milk, who was the first openly gay politician in the U.S. when he and then-Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by their colleague, Supervisor Dan White, on Nov. 27, 1978.

In honor of Harvey Milk Day, held every May 22, Black took a few minutes to talk to me about what the call center means to him and why he has spent the last decade working to revive and preserve Milk’s legacy.

What was it about Harvey Milk that has made you embrace him as a model for the gay rights movement?

When I started reading about and researching Harvey Milk, I came face to face with this strategy of being out and open. Basically it was a strategy of coming out and self-representation, meaning we needed to tell those stories and dispel the stereotypes that had been used against us for so long. That also meant electing gay and lesbian leaders — actually electing (gays), not just allies. He believed we would look out for own interests more than others, which makes sense.

The second thing was outreach — outreach to other minority groups and working for them as hard as we were working for ourselves. That had not been happening in my lifetime. I had not seen outreach to the minority movement or the labor movement or the women’s movement in a way he had done, which I think was responsible for winning elections.

And then, he was not afraid to advocate. When we lost an election and someone said something against our community, he did not believe we needed to be polite. I saw our leaders had become so incredibly polite in my generation, and then I thought, “Boy if we could revive this guy’s story and the strategy, we might start winning again.”

But today is more about his other message, which is until we have full equality, we have to make sure young people across the country have someone to turn to. At the time, he was the only one. He was the one they were turning to because he was the most visible, out gay man in the country.

Does it frustrate you that more than 30 years after Harvey Milk was killed, we still need this type of crisis prevention call center for LGBT youth? This must be a bittersweet moment in some ways.

I will never be happy that there is a need for this. My other foundation is the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is responsible for the federal case against Proposition 8 in California. And until we win all those fights for equality against those messages from our government that these young people are worth less, from the churches that these young people are less —

— Until those stop, we have a need for (the call center). I would be remiss if I didn’t pay as much attention to our equality movement as I did to the kids who are being left behind until we get to that place. I am not pleased that we need this, but I am very pleased that we are providing it, because there is a need.

Who came up with the idea for the Harvey Milk call center?

Cleve Jones and I came up with the idea probably six months ago. There was a groundswell within the Castro saying, “Hey, we need actual services and to honor Harvey’s legacy.” It was the first time the shop had come open, the site of the space, since the film came out. So we heard that call and thought this would be a solution that the community would embrace. Thankfully they seem to have done so.

Any final thoughts?

I just think this is a beautiful way to celebrate Harvey’s birthday: to continue his legacy of spreading hope.

** You can also read the article I wrote for work on this topic here. Thanks to my brother, Nico Brancolini, for taking these lovely photos for us!

This is what I would paint if I were an internationally renowned guerilla street artist

I jumped on the Banksy bandwagon before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences but after Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, which means I was a little late to the game. Banksy is an anonymous British street artist whose social and political commentary has appeared on walls and billboards around the world, including the Israeli West Bank barrier. Of that partition, which is controlled by a series of checkpoints, he says, “Palestine is now the world’s largest open-air prison and the ultimate activity holiday for graffiti artists.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 2010 documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” about the evolution of street art. Several Banksy-esque pieces popped up around Los Angeles in the days leading up to the awards. (He lost to the film “Inside Job” about the financial meltdown.)

In his 2006 book “Wall and Piece,” Banksy explains his philosophy on street art:

“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless.

[...]

The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back. Well, they started the fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.”

Some of my favorite pieces of his include:

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A lot of Banksy’s work includes monkeys and rats, the latter because, “They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role models.” That last image was done near the Bethlehem checkpoint at the Israeli/ Palestinian apartheid wall. It shows an Israeli soldier getting frisked — an act that, reportedly, Palestinians commonly experience and that likely does more to humiliate and control the population than to actually promote public safety.

These Banksy pieces were brought to mind last week when I wrote a story about a first grader in Oakland, Calif., who accidentally brought a 9mm handgun to school in his* backpack. This 7-year-old gets to school at about 8:45 a.m. and starts taking things out of his book bag and putting them on his desk when he and the teacher both notice, at about the same time, that there’s a gun in there. The kid has no idea where it came from or why it’s there, and police have to come remove it. It turned out there was one bullet in the chamber.

This struck me as a pretty powerful symbol of the challenges schools and students face. Violence follows these kids literally and figuratively into the classroom — literally in the form of weapons and figuratively in the sense that students have to cope with the effects of it every day, even when they’re coming in to learn. One study conducted in South and East L.A. found that almost 30 percent of public-school students suffered symptoms of PTSD. Marleen Wong, an L.A. Unified crisis counselor, explained in a 2008 interview, “A person in that kind of mental state is not ready to learn, because they’re focused on survival, and it’s a different part of the brain that’s operating than the frontal part of the brain, which is relaxed, open to listening to what the teacher is saying, thinking about what does this mean, taking in new information.”

Writing about the first grader also made me wonder what that moment when the gun was discovered looked like. I thought about all the levels of meaning that would have been inherent in a photograph of the student’s surprise or of the teacher grabbing away the backpack. Since nobody will ever be able to capture that moment on film, I thought it would be interesting to try to illustrate it. Banksy could do a pretty incredible rendering of it, I thought. And hopefully he would do it on the side of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s mansion.

* The spokesman wouldn’t tell me the gender of the student, so I went with “him” in this post to keep it simple. The article I wrote is available here.

Speaking of the president

Last month, I covered President Obama’s West Coast campaign kick-off. Here are some photos I took and the story I wrote:

To me she’s still House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

San Francisco politics are not nearly as much fun to cover now that the spectacle that is Gavin Newsom has abandoned us for the Lt. Gov’s office.

NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice pumps up the crowd at President Obama’s first public fundraiser in California for the 2012 re-election campaign.

Nice bling, Jerry

Would a Muslim Kenyan bring such an enormous American flag to his fundraiser? I think not, Glenn. I think not.

If I had my notebook with me, I could tell you who this performer is. Alas I cannot. It starts with a G.

The 2,500-person venue was sold out. Those poor suckers who don’t work for the media paid between $25 and $10,000 per ticket. They probably make a living wage, though, so hey. Trade-offs.

David Plouffe, political genius, blah blah blah

President Obama “Some things have changed since the last election. I’m older and grayer…”
Random lady in the crowd: “You’re still fine!”
Obama: prolonged laughter

Pause/ serious face so the weight of his words can sink in

That black blob in the lower right-hand corner is a cowboy hat worn by a giant man sitting right in front of the press area. Yes, a cowboy hat ruined half my shots at an Obama fundraiser in San Francisco. Universe, you have a sick sense of humor.

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) — President Obama touted his administration’s accomplishments Wednesday night and urged about 2,500 boisterous supporters to “finish what they started” in 2008 at a sold-out fundraising event in San Francisco that was part of the start of his West Coast reelection effort.

The audience at the Masonic Center auditorium booed, cheered, and joked with the president as he touched on topics including Wall Street reform, education, scientific research funding, alternative energy investment, and the nation’s debt.

He also mentioned he was older and grayer than during the previous election, prompting a woman in the audience to call out, “You’re still fine!”

The speech elicited several standing ovations — particularly when Obama discussed the 2010 health care reform law, and then again when he said the government needed to eliminate tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.

“Because of you we’ve been able to make great progress over these past two years, but that progress can’t make us content,” Obama told the crowd. “It should remind us that change, yes, it’s possible. But we’ve got to finish what we started.”

The speech was the president’s third stop and second fundraising effort during a 21-hour trip to the Bay Area today and Wednesday that also included a virtual town hall at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

Prior to speaking at the Masonic Auditorium, Obama attended a private dinner that cost attendees $35,800 each, a Democratic official said. The dinner was held at the Pacific Heights home of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, according to reports.

Obama is also attending a similarly priced breakfast event this morning at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco before heading down to Los Angeles for more fundraising, the official said. The Masonic Center’s audience members paid between $25 and $10,000 per ticket.

Despite the friendly crowd — which included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, and John Garamendi, D-Walnut Creek — Obama seemed to be trying to regain some of the enthusiasm of his 2008 campaign.

He announced he would be running his reelection campaign from Chicago — the first time a reelection effort hasn’t been based in Washington, he said — and poked fun at his supporters from 2008 who have apparently become disenchanted with him.

“They say, ‘How come he compromised on this or that? He should have done it that way.’ Everybody’s a political consultant,” Obama joked. “‘I’m sure if he had done it that way, we could have gotten health care done in two weeks.’”

Several speakers appeared before Obama, including NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice, and encouraged those in attendance to respond affirmatively to the Obama 2012 campaign slogan: “Are you in?”

(Originally published April 21, 2011)

I think this says it all

Like everyone else, I was shocked to hear last Sunday that Osama bin Laden had been killed by Navy SEALS. Although I didn’t feel inspired to run to streets and shout, “USA! USA!,” I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of relief and closure. I remember watching the second tower fall on live TV from the library of my high school in Indiana. I was 14 years old and just a couple of weeks into my first-ever journalism class, and I remember one of the seniors coming back from the library and saying, “The World Trade Center has been attacked.” Nobody really knew what that meant, so after a few minutes of hesitation, my teacher hurried us through the halls to the big-screen TV near the library check-out area that always played the news. On Sunday, I watched the president’s statement with several 30-somethings who didn’t understand why college students in Washington, D.C., were flocking to the White House and celebrating bin Laden’s death. I tried to explain what a profound effect 9/11 has had on the social and political development of my generation.

“No, Facebook and Twitter have had a profound effect on them,” one early 30s-something replied. “They don’t care about 9/11.”

I didn’t pursue the point in part because I didn’t know how to phrase it. But I did point out that young people today are more likely to condone torture because they grew up in the terror age instead of in an era when traditional, “just” warfare existed. The New York Times noted that bin Laden has been like a boogie man hanging over Millennials, but to me it was more than that. In some ways, I think older generations were more jarred by the attack because they were so used to America’s dominance. We weren’t old enough to truly believe in American hegemony; we knew America was “the best” or the “safest” because that’s what we’d been told, but it wasn’t ingrained in us in any experiential way. We weren’t there when WWII was won or the Berlin Wall fell (okay technically I was alive, but I was a toddler). Older generations kept these crises across the ocean and were probably therefore more stunned when the war crossed our borders. I don’t think I understood until later what a big damn deal it was that the attack happened on American soil.

I’ve touched on this in older posts, so I don’t want to harp on it too much. But what really shaped the younger generation was what happened after 9/11. We came of age in uncertain times — particularly today’s college students, who were in late elementary and middle school in 2001. Osama bin Laden represents a long chain of events that led to America’s battered image both abroad and at home. Young people rallied around then-candidate Barack Obama in part because he represented a turning point — a departure from the fear and cynicism that marked our adolescence. It’s only fitting that he should be the one to oversee the take-down of Osama bin Laden. That he did it while be being bombarded by would-be politicians trying to capitalize on what is arguably humanity as its worst — the “birther movement,” aka modern manifestations of racism — makes it that much sweeter.

Wherein I conclude that I too am a paparazza

Until two weeks ago, it had never occurred to me that I had much in common with with the photographers who follow reality TV stars out of nightclubs and cause crashes on Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles by tailing black SUVs carrying Lindsay Lohan and the like. That was until I observed the madness that is the mainstream political press, of which recently I have had the pleasure to be a part.

On April 12, Gov. Jerry Brown gave a speech touting his budget proposal before hundreds of members of the Bay Area business community gathered in San Francisco for an annual conference. After his speech, the reporters — who were given two tables at the very back of the room — exited the hall and walked briskly to the front exit, where we talked to a Brown spokesman until the governor himself emerged. At that point the reporters abandoned the spokesman mid-sentence and began to follow Brown.

The governor was accompanied by just one handler — which is apparently quite a departure from the entourage that surrounded the Govenator at all times — who ushered him through the common area. Not to be deterred, the press corps broke into a run — not a jog, but a run — and caught up with Brown as he reached the escalators. The conference was held in the sub-basement of the Marriott Marquis hotel, so Brown had to take several flights of dual escalators to get to the main level and exit through the lobby. Members of the media were huddled in front of and behind him, as well as on escalators parallel to his, leaning over the rails to hear what he was saying. Cameras and recorders were shoved in his face, and people buzzed around the periphery of the group trying to get a better angle. Watching the crowd travel up out of the basement, I was struck by a single thought: we are like flies swarming an animal carcass.

I had always assumed the name “paparazzi,” which is Italian for flies, was given as an insult to photographers who follow famous people — a derogatory descriptor for those who make celebrities’ lives so difficult. That may have been the case, but I realize it’s probably also the most accurate way to describe a hungry media corps that has to mob its subjects for a living. The best quotes we got from Gov. Brown came not during his speech but during the feeding frenzy — including jabs at Republicans who think $13.5 billion can be “magically conjured,” and a demonstration of the contents of his wallet:

“Now, if I were to kind of look in my wallet, let’s see how much I can contribute…well, we have $20, we have a $1…

“You know what? Getting that $13.5 billion is going to take some taxes. If it’s not going to be taxes, it’s going to take a radical restructuring of both public safety and public education. And if there’s a third way, I’d like to see it.”

In other words, swarming public figures: embarrassing but effective.

The article I wrote appears here: Brown optimistic on GOP support for tax extensions

(Notice at the very bottom where is says, “Wire services may have contributed to this report”? That’s as close as I get to a byline sometimes, even though I wrote and reported the entire story.)

Obama’s remarks at Tucson memorial

President Obama, as he is wont to do, gave a moving and powerful speech tonight at a memorial service for the victims of last weekend’s shooting in Tucson, Ariz. My favorite part:

“… If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives – to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud. It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations…”

The other highlight was of course when Obama told the crowd that Giffords had opened her eyes for the first time that night. You can read a transcript of the speech here.

Hiding behind the wagons

It’s been astonishing to watch the GOP and its constituents try to absolve themselves of all culpability in last weekend’s shooting in Arizona. A gunman opened fire Saturday on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ regular “Congress on the Corner” gathering at a Safeway supermarket, killing six and wounding 14. Giffords was shot point-blank in the head and remained in critical condition today. Yet Republicans quickly circled the wagons to try to claim they played no role in the attempted assassination. In fact, they’ve accused moderates and liberals who blame the crime in part on a climate of hate of using the shooting to their political advantage.

Certainly nobody is claiming Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or any other reactionary hate monger is legally or directly responsible for the shooting. Nobody is accusing them of murder, of making criminal threats, or even of aiding and abetting the crime. But just because they’re not legally responsible doesn’t mean they’re not ethically responsible or even a contributing factor, and their arguments to the contrary show how morally bankrupt they really are. As Paul Krugman pointed out in today’s New York Times column, did this really come as a surprise to anyone? Was anyone surprised that with Rep. Michele Bachmann urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous,” radio personalities joking about shooting government officials and beheading journalists, and Sarah Palin’s famous “Don’t retreat, reload,” somebody finally resorted to violence? These are not fringe members; they’re the GOP’s royalty and rising stars. Is it any wonder Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed in May 2009 for performing abortions, or that threats to Congressional representatives rose 300 percent after the 2008 election and then surged again last spring?

The graceful thing to do would be for Beck, Limbaugh, and their regional offspring to take this time to say, “You know what? We didn’t cause this. But just in case we played even a miniscule role in the tragedy, we will try to tone things down.” That’s asking so little, and yet I would drop dead from shock if it happened. As one NYT commenter put it:

“The recent shootings raise two issues for an observer from across the Pond: the foolishness of a gun culture which allows an apparently mentally unstable young man easy access to a semi-automatic weapon; and a political culture that encourages bigots to share their hatred and contempt for anyone they disagree with.

A sensible and mature society puts limits on both, by legal restraint and through a political discourse that does not tolerate the manipulation of the most basic instincts of hatred and violence. Sheltering behind a constitution drawn up in a different world to the one we now inhabit in order to defend the indefensible seems bizarre and infantile. We Europeans sometime despair about the future direction of your society.”

In case there’s any doubt that words do matter and people should be held accountable for them — morally, at least — we need look no further than the winter issue of Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. One of the briefs involves a story my news wire actually reported, although they uncovered some relevant details that we missed. On July 18, parolee Byron Williams engaged in a shoot-out with California Highway Patrol officers in Oakland on Interstate 580. Williams was wearing body armed and carrying heavy ammunition because he was on his way to kill people of importance at the Tides Foundation — which provides money and other services around the world “to individuals and institutions committed to accelerating positive social change through philanthropy,” according to its website — and the ACLU in San Francisco. Here’s the interesting part:

“It’s not definitively known what caused Williams to target the Tides Foundation, which is little known to the general public. But, as it turns out, the foundation had been attacked verbally on repeated occasions by Glenn Beck of Fox News, who sees Tides as a sinister organization, hell-bent on destroying capitalism. A review by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America found that between Jan. 19, 2009 — when Beck’s TV show debuted — and the July 18 California shootout, Tides was mentioned on 29 editions of his program, as well as on two occasions by Beck’s Fox News colleague Sean Hannity. Media Matters could not find a single mention of Tides on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC or PBS during those 18 months. [...]

“Just four days before the Oakland shootout, Beck was on the air suggesting the foundation was all about seizing power. A day before that, Beck said the foundation ‘saw under Ronald Reagan that capitalists were not for all this nonsense, so they infiltrated. Now, they are using failing capitalism to destroy it.’ In a June broadcast, Beck said that a Tides-funded video was shown in schools throughout America ‘to warp your children’s brains and make sure they know how evil capitalism is.’”

Further, Williams’ mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her unemployed son had been watching television news and was upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”

Maybe this is all a big coincidence; maybe Conservatives are so unhinged that they will threaten and shoot people even without their party’s endorsement of radical action. But frankly, I don’t buy it. It seems clear that political vitriol is no longer just an issue of opportunity costs; it no longer simply drowns out the legitimate debate we could be having and obscures the relevant facts. Instead, it now contributes to tangible outcomes that should concern all of us deeply. If nothing else, maybe we can agree to tone down the rhetoric because we understand the tragedy implicit in it. Comments about government takeovers and the like are not cute. They’re not funny, and now that we’ve seen an actual assassination attempt — in which six people died — maybe we can agree not to be flippant about those words.

You can read the SPLC’s article here.

You probably count as a “special interest”

The general election is still more than two months away, and already it’s clear the most over-used — and therefore most meaningless — phrase of this campaign season is “special interests.” It’s applied so often, so broadly and in such contradictory ways that we might as well take it out back and put it out of its misery. The Republican candidates are largely to thank for this confusion as they have bastardized the phrase to mean, well, basically anybody except the people it was originally intended to describe.

According to Meg Whitman, California’s short-sighted and delusional yet eerily likeable Republican candidate for governor, special interests include:

Firefighters
Teachers
Faculty
Nurses
Hotel workers and other service employees
Construction workers
Iron workers
Elderly iron workers
Electrical workers
Boilermakers
Blacksmiths
Homecare workers
Gay people
Building insulators
Condom providers
Engineers
Scientists

and… communications workers! Meg considers me a special interest! I suddenly feel so blessed.

So every middle-, upper-middle- , and lower-middle-class person in the state who wants a living wage and health benefits for his or her kids is a special interest. The only Americans who aren’t special interests to Meg are Texas oil companies and banking behemoths. Hm.

Anyway it seems we special interests are also fiscally responsible because we’ve spent less than $4 million this year to keep the governor’s race tight. Meg, who would remind you of your grandmother if your grandmother had a net worth in the billions, has spent more than $85 million this year alone to catch up to Democrat Jerry Brown in the polls. News reports are saying she’s at $104 million total.

In May, Jerry Brown was leading the polls 48% to 36%. Meg’s now leading by about 1 percentage point: 44.8% to 43.8% on average. That’s $104 million for an increase of 12 percentage points, or almost $8.7 million per point. Here’s a fun graph illustrating what $104 million gets you when you’re an anti-amnesty, anti-environment California candidate who wants to balance a $19 billion budget deficit by cutting K-12 school funding in a state that already ranks 48 out of 50 in per-pupil spending.

Anyway Meg’s campaign donation sheet is like my credit card bill but with six zeroes attached to the end of each purchase. Four dollars here. Five dollars there. Thirteen earlier this month. Twenty last month. Oh wait, make that $13,000,000.

Wise words from women in business

Photo by the New York Times

Last week I covered the Professional Business Women of California conference for work. Not only did I get to meet Geena Davis, star of my favorite movie of all time (hint: “There’s no crying in baseball!”), and cover her keynote address, I also got to hear an amazing speech by Safra Catz, arguably the most powerful woman in business. Catz is president and CFO of Oracle Corp., a software and database company with more than 115,000 employees worldwide. The company earned $23.3 billion in 2009. Catz has been referred to as Oracle and CEO founder Larry Ellison’s right hand, and she has been described as low-profile and “somewhat of a mystery” both within Oracle and the larger business world.

What Catz’s profiles fail to capture about the woman is she is absolutely hilarious. At her speech last week she shared with the audience the ten things she thinks about when she’s in a competitive situation:

1. You can never become No. 1 by chasing No. 1 You can’t run fast enough. You have to do something new. To beat the competition you have to think differently and make them react to you. At Oracle we have a saying: No. 2 is first loser. You will be criticized by convention, but it’s just noise. Ignore it. You’re an idiot until you’re a genius.

2. Scale matters. More customers means spreading costs over more bases — and more money to invest in research and development. Scale is not just size.

3. Focus on what your business is really about. Bigger can distract from your core business. (ed. note: The example she cited was Oracle buying American Airlines. Yes, it would make the company bigger. But it wouldn’t increase the company’s scale; it would just detract from the core business.)

4. If it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense. Conduct business in plain English. I try to make Oracle acronym-free. Just because it’s said with authority, and just because it’s in a PowerPoint, doesn’t make it true. Don’t watch and not ask questions. Don’t watch like a dog watching TV.

5. Don’t stand still. You can’t beat the competition by standing still. Motion is progress. Make decisions knowing you will make mistakes. It’s clearly preferable to not making decisions.

6. Don’t chase fashion. Execute on a strategy; don’t change just because of a new analyst phrase. You will be fashionable when you’re right.

7. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

8. Just because everything can be put online doesn’t mean it should be put online. As executives we need to think about what makes sense to have online.

9. Integrity. You can either be stupid or a liar. You can recover from being stupid, but you can’t recover from being a liar. Integrity is perishable. No short cut is worth losing your integrity.

10. Look at your own success and know you didn’t do it alone. Business is a team sport. Get on a team even if it’s the guys’ team. 110,000 people got me up here. The difference between being up here and down there (in the audience) is luck.

I think Catz’s point about luck and teamwork is a very feminine attitude. I can’t remember the last time I heard a male executive say he was lucky. Her remarks also reminded me of some interviews I conducted in March 2009, when I did a media emark aboard an aircraft carrier and interviewed fighter jet pilots. I spoke with five or six male pilots and one female, all of whom fly Super Hornet jet. These $60 million planes are basically the cream of the naval aircraft crop; they are why people join Officer Training School, and literally everybody wanted to fly them.

The men I talked to all said similar things: I trained hard to be here, I earned this position, I deserve to fly the best aircraft. The woman I interviewed said something different. She basically said yes, I’ve worked hard to get here, and yes, I’m good at what I do. But she also said luck and politics were involved in aircraft assignment. A pilot’s assignment depends largely on what the Navy needs while that particular person is in officer training school. When this woman was in OTS, there was a need for jet fighter pilots. Other years, there is more of a need for helicopter pilots or cargo plane pilots or whatever else. So a great candidate might not get the best assignment, and someone less qualified than a Super Hornet pilot from another year might end up getting assigned to a Hornet fleet. The men conveniently left that part out. The woman I spoke with also explained that evaluations are done very uniformly and quantitatively, so someone who is good at the evaluation criteria is in a better position to advance than someone who might have different strengths. But I digress.

The other interesting business advice I’ve heard from a woman recently was a quote from Kelly Cutrone, fashion publicist and founder of fashion marketing company People’s Revolution. Cutrone appears on a few reality TV shows, some of which are scripted and one of which seems to a docu-reality show. One semi-scripted show is the “The City,” a MTV program about the fashion industry in New York City. It’s very glossy and seems somewhat fake, but Cutrone appears to be one of the few genuine characters on it. She had a great line in last week’s episode:

“You know where nice gets you? On welfare. She’s professionally dangerous to you. You have to show her you’re not this nice California girl she thinks you are. Scare the shit out of her, but never do it in e-mail or writing.”

As someone who has analyzed FOIA request documents, I can attest to this. E-mails last forever, kids. If you write it, expect it to come back to you. At least it’s illegal in most states for someone to tape a conversation without your knowing about it.

You can read a CNN Money profile of Safra Catz here.