Democratic candidate Jerry Brown was on defense most of the night in the final California gubernatorial debate as Meg Whitman delivered mostly smooth answers and attacked consistently. But his worst moment came when moderator Tom Brokaw asked about a recent telephone recording, during which a Brown staffer unaware he was being recorded called Whitman a “whore.”
Instead of immediately apologizing and putting the issue to rest, he made several excuses before half-heartedly apologizing to his opponent. The audience, unusually vocal for a political debate, winced and booed at Brown’s answer.
Brokaw: “We’ve heard no outrage from you about the use of that kind of language, which to many women, is the same as calling an African-American the n-word. Have you been in charge of the investigation to find out who made that comment?”
Brown: “I don’t agree with that comparison, No. 1. Second, this is a 5-week-old conversation picked up on a cell phone with a garbled transmission, very hard to detect who it is. This is not, well, I don’t want to get into the term and how it’s used, but I would say the campaign apologized promptly and I affirm that apology tonight.”
Whitman responded by saying “the people of California deserve better than slurs and personal attacks,” but mistepped herself when Brown asked if she had chastised her campaign chair Pete Wilson for calling congress “whores” to public employee unions. Whitman said the two incidents were entirely different, but without further explanation, eliciting her own groan from the audience.