CA: Campaign Visitors

Jonathan Martin notes at Politico:

There were 19 Republicans sitting on stage behind Sarah Palin when she rallied GOP activists here Saturday, but none was named Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina.

And just as the Republican candidates for governor and Senate here were physically absent from the event, they were also missing from Palin’s speech.

Not once during remarks that lasted just over 20 minutes did the former Alaska governor mention two of the national party’s most buzzed-about candidates running in the country’s largest state.

It’s possible that Palin didn’t want to mention Whitman and Fiorina for fear of handing Democrats fodder to use in the final two weeks of the election. She was on safer ground launching attacks against familiar national Democratic bogeymen and the mainstream media to a couple thousand Republicans who paid at least $25 per-person to the Republican National Committee to hear their party’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee.

Maeve Reston reports that John McCain got harshly personal about Boxer:

Former Republican presidential contender John McCain reunited with his onetime advisor Carly Fiorina on the campaign trail Saturday in San Diego, offering a blistering indictment of Barbara Boxer’s record on military issues and calling her the “most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today” -- an assessment he said he’d made while having “the unpleasant experience” of serving with her.

“When you hear her say that she supports the men and women in the military, my friends, she does not,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and half years after his plane was shot down in 1967. “Because she has never supported the mission; she has never supported victory whether it be in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else in the world. Barbara Boxer wants to wave the white flag of surrender and endanger this nation’s national security. It’s time she went back to San Francisco with [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi.”

Carla Marinucci reports at The San Francisco Chronicle:

Bill Clinton, who as president made more than 70 trips to California, has returned on a mission - to ensure that the blue-leaning state does not fall to fired-up Republicans as Democrats struggle to maintain their tenuous majorities in the 2010 midterm elections.

"I am pleading with you," the former president said as he stood before an adoring crowd of 6,000 students and Democrats at UCLA on Friday night alongside Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is running for lieutenant governor.

Delivering an impassioned sermon to young Democrats, Clinton portrayed Republicans - whom he derided as calling for capital gains cuts at the expense of educational funding and health care reform - as the party that wants to go back to "digging a hole" to the past instead of moving into the future and getting out of the current financial mess.

...

"The Democrats are trying everything short of electroshock therapy to wake their base up, which would seem to contradict with their strategy of pot to do the same," said a bemused California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring. "Resorting to Bill Clinton - who had some of the nastiest things to say about Barack Obama - to turn out Obama supporters is like trying to get Col. Sanders to turn out chicken."

But Nehring said the strategy also reveals a national weakness. "When Democrats nationally have to allocate their highest-profile surrogates to try to save their candidates here in California - what does that say about the state of play nationally?"