Brown Officially Runs for Gov.
It's now officially official: Jerry Brown is running for (and undoubtedly will get) the Democratic nomination for governor of California.
And why would anyone want to run our growing disaster of a state? Well, Attorney General Brown thinks he has the experience to take on our grim situation. And also, he likes being in public office. Brown talked to the L.A. Times's George Skelton about what he might have done differently during his last stint in the governor's chair in California:
When Jerry Brown became governor, he rebelled against his dad's political generation and its establishment ways. Preaching an "era of limits" and environmental enlightenment, Brown Jr. pulled back on public works.He now acknowledges it was a mistake not to build more. "I surely didn't expect California to grow like it did," he says. "We had tremendous growth. And when you have growth you've got to build: energy, water, roads, transit, schools, jails."
What you build, you have to pay for, and that's something California is having problems with now and will likely continue to have problems with in a new Brown administration.
This Calbuzz report, which sums up Brown's political appeal above and beyond his duller likely GOP opponents, and his ability to move beyond his old "Gov. Moonbeam" image, also hits on how the money problem is one Brown has to do some serious thinking about:
With no primary opponent, Brown is freed of the strategic need to veer to the left in order to win the Democratic nomination. So the candidate he is now is the candidate we'll see in the general election -- an anti-tax-increase, tough-on-crime moderate....how Brown would ensure funding for schools to pay for expanded civics education -- without sacrificing reading, writing, math and science -- is not something he is remotely prepared to discuss. In fact, Brown avoided specifics about the state budget, other than to say he would "wrestle it to the ground" and develop a work-out plan to get the state out of debt. How he'll handle Poizner or Whitman on the issue of the budget remains uncertain.
Of course, how any of us are going to deal with the issue of state budget reform moving forward is still completely uncertain, as this California Watch report details in talking of big constitutional change movements in California are falling apart.
The image associated with this post is taken by Flickr user Randy Bayne. It was used under user Creative Commons license.
