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: