Monday, October 4, 2010

Los Angeles Times Endorses Jerry Brown

I'm not convinced:
For its next governor, California is in dire need of a dynamic and optimistic grownup, one with the personality, perspective and presence to remind voters that theirs is a fabulously wealthy state and not the downward-spiraling mess that national media reports delight in comparing to Greece or Portugal. We need someone with a Reaganesque talent for revealing to ourselves our own exceptionalism and dismissing the self-doubt of the last decade. We need a Pat Brown or Earl Warren-style focus on our future, with investment in education and infrastructure. And we need a leader deft and clever enough to move Californians away from a three-decade pattern of undermining our own government, checking and counterchecking ourselves with selfish initiatives to lock up special program spending, lock out political decision-making and accountability and lock in a perpetual and destructive budget standoff, year after year.

Fate presents the state instead with two candidates who fall well short of our current needs. They come to us from the partisan political version of Central Casting. Republican Meg Whitman, utterly devoid of background or experience in state government or policymaking, rarely deigning to cast a vote, moves toward the Nov. 2 election on the power of millions of dollars of personal wealth. Whitman argues that her role as chief executive of the online auction website EBay somehow makes her the right person to govern the nation's most populous state, yet her slate of policy positions is seemingly more calculated to win the approval of angry voters and profit-seeking business leaders than to address the actual problems facing the state. Then we have Democrat Jerry Brown, the governor of California's baby-boom youth, now seeking the office again more than 30 years after his first run, having advanced on a personal and public journey that made him at times a gadfly outsider, a stolid party leader, a spiritual seeker, a presidential candidate, a nuts-and-bolts mayor of a troubled city and the senior statesman of Sacramento.

We will have to wait for the governor with the talent and courage to shake the state loose from the structural dead-ends into which voters continue to push it. In the meantime, we must choose between Whitman, with her disappointing and empty policy approaches and her assertion that having no experience in government is the best experience, and Brown, whose nonlinear, unscripted style sometimes leaves his listeners wondering what exactly they're going to get. Again, Brown is not the ideal candidate for California, but what he does bring is the reality-based, seen-it-all-before wisdom of a political veteran, and of the two candidates before voters in November, The Times endorses him without hesitation.
More at the link. I'm still not sure if I'll vote in the governor's race. I don't like Meg Whitman, although she's hammered Jerry Brown for months with a string of killer ad buys:

2 comments:

Montana said...

Griff Harsh, the husband of California gubernatorial candidate Nutneg Whitman, acknowledged in a statement on Thursday that "it is possible" he received and wrote notes on a letter from the Social Security Administration back in 2003, regarding the former housekeeper. The Whitman/ Harsh household then fired their housekeeper in June 2009 (after nine years of service), when Nutmeg handlers decided that she was an election liability.

Meg, Meg, Meg, where do I start, you have reportedly spent $119 million of your own money to get elected Governor but you couldn’t use some of it to get your housekeeper (after nine years of service) some legal help to get her papers, and worse you lied about it. Wow, what a WITCH, of course I meant it with a “B”.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#39450925

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGRrNs8-s5w

But your comments on holding employers accountable for hiring undocumented workers real takes the cake, I assume you exempt yourself and your husband, or will you be turning yourself in.

Meg on holding employers accountable:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4fWLHiw8zA

Meg you think you can buy the election, but what puzzles many is if you real cared and loved California then why not do your civic duty and vote, seems more rhetoric than anything else.

In good times we might give you a try but not in our disaster mode that we find ourselves in after that so-called outsider Independent Republican, named Arnold Schwarzenegger (sold to us by radio personalities John and Ken), ruined our state, yah we will trust another one of you liars, think not. And another thing nine years this maid was in your house, in your house and you failed to learned this major thing about her, come on this sounds like a huge lie that no one can believe in.

Ebay paid out $200,000 because Nutmeg assaulted an employee, so it’s not the first time she has mistreated an employee. Good luck winning Nutmeg, money will buy you admiration from the majority just from the Gay Old Party (GOP), but not from all of California.

dave in boca said...

At least the clowns there didn't endorse Barbara Boxer. I worked with Jerry Brown in the [Gene] McCarthy campaign in '68 out of the Westwood LA HQ & we were both Jesuit seminarians, so we bonded for 15 seconds or so.... Sort of the weak, silent type back then. Hasn't changed much, only he's a bit noisier...!