Chuck DeVore renames Fiorina video and says he’s related to Jerry Brown

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Forget about Hot Air, the name Carly Fiorina’s campaign gave its new surrealistic video short featuring the elongated head of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) floating across the state.

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, a Republican fighting Fiorina for the party’s nomination to run for Senate, came up with a moniker of his own for the video after its release Saturday: the Hindenboxer. Unlike the Hindenburg, the German airship that caught fire and was destroyed in 1937, Boxer’s similarly shaped head (in the video, of course) crashes into the water.

DeVore (R-Irvine), the only Fiorina opponent so far not featured in a creation from ad man Fred Davis, questioned the effectiveness of the nearly eight-minute Web commercial and an earlier one, Demon Sheep. Fiorina’s campaign, he said, is ‘constantly going over the top.’

‘What we’re seeing here is a campaign that’s long on style and short on substance, long on Hollywood and money, and short on principle,’ DeVore said. ‘The average people, they don’t know about Demon Sheep, and I’m sure that they’re not going to ever hear about the Hindenboxer.’

DeVore also told reporters that he, like Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, is a student of Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist. But the Orange County assemblyman said that’s not all that he and the Democratic gubernatorial candidate have in common. They also apparently share some genes.

‘I’m embarrassed to say -- and he’ll deny it -- that I’m a distant cousin of Jerry Brown,’ DeVore said. ‘My mom remembers seeing him at a family gathering in the Bay Area when she was 12 and he was 15. She told me he was weird even then.’ Brown’s campaign has yet to respond to an inquiry regarding the alleged relation to DeVore and the attorney general’s childhood demeanor.

[Updated at 11:57 a.m., March 15: Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford e-mailed this response on Sunday: ‘Jerry has never heard of this connection before, and he’s curious what relative they have in common.’ DeVore has yet to clarify.]

DeVore said he anticipates raising $2.5 million for the June primary election against Fiorina and Tom Campbell, and will probably not run any television advertising because the market will be so saturated with advertisements from the vastly wealthy GOP Republican gubernatorial candidates.

‘What’s the point if I’m competing against $50 million of television advertisements from [Steve] Poizner and [Meg] Whitman?’ he said. ‘But let’s assume Carly Fiorina carves out $1.5 million. You won’t even notice her ads.’

-- Seema Mehta and Michael Rothfeld in Santa Clara