Jerry Brown for governor (LA Times endorsement)

[pinto]

"The Times endorses him without hesitation." ~ Some good points made here. :kick:

Jerry Brown for governor

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.

Whitman has built her campaign on a checklist of popular but in the end incorrect and cliche-ridden assumptions about California's current condition and what got us here. Illegal immigration is a real and serious issue, but Whitman's solutions range from adding National Guard troops at the border — although illegal crossings directly into California account for little of the problem — to denying higher education or job opportunities to tens of thousands of children brought to the state by their illegal immigrant parents. To Whitman, it makes sense to educate those children in public schools so that they are incorporated into U.S. society, but then when they become adults to cut them loose with no place to go and no chance at earning anything but the most basic living. It is an approach that reflects the high emotional charge of the immigration issue, but none of the understanding that a leader needs of the nuances.

Los Angeles Times, 202 West 1st Street, Los Angeles, California, 90012 | Copyright 2010

[yurbud]

1. pretty faint praise for Brown, but good enough

[pinto]

2. Yeah, in some ways, while contrasted with a damning assessment of Ms. Whitman.

I think the Times does well here to note the perception as well as the reality of each candidate's experience in its endorsement.

[onehandle]

3. They endorsed Der Gropenfuhrer in 2006. nt

[yurbud]

4. I don't read them on a regular basis anymore. I had an email exchange with some of the top editors

years ago and go the kind of evasion we'd expect from politicians. In this case, I was writing about their lack of coverage of articles of impeachment against Cheney and greater public support for impeaching Bush than Clinton:

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2007/04/la-times-email-defends-token-coverage.html