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Arizmendi, the Grand Lake Theater, and…the Whitman campaign?

This storefront on Lakeshore Avenue is frequently rented by political campaigns, but I was still a bit surprised to see that Meg Whitman’s campaign had moved in, with a cooperative bakery down the street in one direction and a ferociously anti-Republican movie theater in the other (and just a few hundred yards from where I saw Jerry Brown jogging around Lake Merritt recently). There are more conservatives and Republicans in Oakland than our leftier-than-thou reputation might lead one to believe, but I think it’s safe to say that the Grand Lake area will be fairly solid Brown territory come November.

I wonder if the Whitman campaign’s incursion into Oakland is less about trying to win Oakland votes and more about sending a message to the Brown campaign that the erstwhile eBay CEO is prepared to spend whatever it takes to be the highest bidder in California’s gubernatorial auction—not that those two things are mutually exclusive, of course.

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