Barbara Boxer skips questions, sticks to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’
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Sen. Barbara Boxer pounded on her campaign themes of job creation and protection of the environment at a campaign stop in Sacramento on Thursday, breezing through an event at a clean-energy company’s warehouse without taking questions from the media that might distract from her message.
‘Jobs, jobs, jobs -– clean-energy jobs,’ Boxer, the three-term Democratic incumbent, said, flanked by local Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.
Boxer was briefed by Clean Energy Systems board chairman Brian Griffin on the company’s progress toward generating ‘power without pollution.’ Its efforts have been aided, he said, by $30 million from the federal stimulus package, which has been a point of contention on the campaign trail.
Griffin said the money would more than double the size of the business.
Carly Fiorina, Boxer’s GOP challenger and the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, has said the stimulus package failed to create jobs and that she would have opposed it.
‘If she was there [in the Senate], we wouldn’t be here,’ Boxer said, standing behind a podium with a sign that read ‘Jobs for California.’
Fiorina and Boxer each made almost-simultaneous campaign stops near Sacramento -– separated by only 12 miles -- on Thursday, as they crisscrossed the state in the campaign’s home stretch. Thursday marked Fiorina’s first public appearance since her hospitalization earlier this week due to an infection related to her bout with breast cancer last year.
Boxer urged everyone to get out and vote: ‘We’ve got five days left in the election.’
After her prepared remarks, Boxer told the crowd she would take ‘political’ questions from the media, but quickly introduced Locke to the podium and exited through a side door before the event ended, dashing off to the airport.
-- Shane Goldmacher in Rancho Cordova