Whitman Floods State with Ads

There's no escaping Meg Whitman, at least for the next few days.

The billionaire candidate has blanketed the state with commercials, across a variety of media. Right now you can't turn on the TV, flip through a magazine, browse the Internet, or pick up the phone without potentially running into a Whitman ad.

The current price tag of her campaign: over $160 million.

Meanwhile, Carly Fiorina has been spending freely as well. She just loaned her campaign another million dollars, bringing her total to $6.5 million.

Experts point out that Whitman's spending above and beyond what's normally called for to blanket the state in ads. A regular ad campaign costs $3 million a week, but she's spending more than $4 million.

And those ads are likely to be negative. Whitman recently rejected a challenge to suspend her negative campaigning. Although Brown said that he was willing to pull his negative ads and focus on positive messages, Whitman maintained that she needed to continue hammering him on television.

In spite of all that, though, Jerry Brown is slowly pulling ahead. Whitman didn't help her cause recently when she talked about the favorable conditions in California 30 years ago, apparently unaware that Jerry Brown was governor during that time.

There are echoes of Ross Perot in the campaign. Sometimes, even a boatload of money can't buy a election.

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