Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman ended months of hide-and-seek with the news media Friday by spending nearly an hour talking to reporters at the California Republican Party convention in Santa Clara.
She pledged to talk more with news reporters and has planned round tables with news media in the coming week.
Since the last Republican convention in September, Whitman has talked selectively to reporters, largely from the broadcast media. The strategy backfired on Tuesday when she shunned most of the reporters who had been invited to a public event she held in Oakland.
"It is the first of more to come," Whitman said of Friday's impromptu news conference. "We are now getting to the short strokes of the primary."
Whitman talked about a range of issues, including immigration.
She said, for example, that she was not proposing an amnesty for illegal immigrants in October when she told the San Diego Union-Tribune: "Can we get a fair program where people stand at the back of the line, they pay a fine, they do some things that would ultimately allow a path to legalization?"
Whitman explained Friday: "What I did not mean by legalization was amnesty. Sometimes that's a code word for amnesty. If it was, I didn't know it." She said she supported a type of guest worker program instead. She added that she does not support allowing illegal immigrants to attend publicly funded colleges and universities.
Whitman also said she had voted for rival Steve Poizner when he ran for the state Assembly in 2004 because he was the Republican candidate. Whitman lives in the district Poizner was seeking to represent.
She said she would release up to 25 years of her tax returns if and when Democrat Jerry Brown releases his tax returns and said she would look at cutting corrections and higher education personnel to help reduce the state work force by 40,000 people.
She added that she supported a voter initiative reining in public employee pensions but said she wouldn't fund it. She's already spent $39 million of her own money on her campaign.
"This is turning out to be really expensive," she said about her campaign.
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