Whitman Ends Campaign by Lashing Out at Media, Brown

Yeah.

Sounds kinda whiny, actually:

As Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman seeks to regain momentum before election day, she is lashing out at the media and rival Jerry Brown, while trying to soften her persona in advertisements and mailers.

Her campaign insists that she is following a charted course and that the race remains tight. But political observers say that a rapidly changing strategy is a tacit acknowledgement that Whitman's campaign juggernaut — fueled by $141 million of her own money — has stalled.

"It's like in sports: You don't change a winning strategy and you always change a losing strategy," said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. "The fact they're changing strategies … usually signifies they know what the truth is, and the truth is not good."

On the campaign trail and in interviews, Whitman is increasingly interrupting her standard jobs-and-schools talking points to emphasize that she feels under attack.

"I have been called a liar, I've been called a whore and I've been called a Nazi by his campaign," she said Wednesday morning on Fox News Channel's America's Newsroom.

Days earlier, she flogged Brown and his labor allies for exaggerating her position on immigration to the Latino community, repeatedly saying that "It makes me mad."

Whitman is going out of her way to criticize as "bunk" a Sunday Los Angeles Times/USC poll that showed Brown leading by 13 points among likely voters.

Her criticism has not extended to other recent public polls, which have consistently shown Whitman trailing Brown by high single digits.

At campaign events Wednesday, she insisted that her internal polling shows the race to be tight.

"Our polls show this is a dead heat and you're going to start to see some polls come out that show that this is a dead heat," she said in Riverside. "And in a dead heat, we win because the people who want to take back Sacramento are going to come to the polls in huge numbers."

But the candidate is clearly responding to poll findings that suggest voters are skeptical of her character. In the Times poll, more than half of likely voters had a negative view of Whitman. By almost a 2-1 margin, voters said Brown was more truthful.

She's flailing.

See, "Majority Now Views Whitman Negatively."