California Watch

Following a civil debate with fellow GOP gubernatorial Steve Poizner on Monday, Republican front-runner Meg Whitman yesterday dropped an expanded manifesto outlining the key policy goals she will no doubt be pressing as her campaign moves forward.

A black-and-white, academic policy paper it is not. The 48-page document is splashed front-to-back with colorful pictures and infographics. At least one of our press corps colleagues described it as a "coffee table book."

The book is clearly geared more toward Main Street voters than Sactosphere policy wonks. But in this age of short attention spans, we've done you one better. Here's a Wordle outlining Whitman's key themes:

Once you get past the self-referential stuff like "Meg" and "California", you start seeing a lot of focus on economic issues: "tax", "economic", "jobs", "business", etc.

Jack Chang at the Sacramento Bee has a good summary of the other new points, including merit raises for state workers.