Posted by Kathy Ryan, LBTA
How would Brown, Whitman handle state’s crisis? Who knows?
By Union-Tribune Editorial Board,

"Even in bad times, being the governor of California is a jewel of a job. Besides having great power to guide events in America’s most populous state, the governor is almost automatically considered to be of presidential timber. (Even Gray Davis, early in his first term, was the subject of White House talk.) How many other jobs can that be said of?

Yet this allure hasn’t been evident in the 2010 gubernatorial race. The vigorous competition one would expect is barely in evidence.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, governor from 1975-1983, has no serious opponent for the Democratic nomination. In a state full of ambitious Democratic politicians, it’s hard to fathom how a candidate with as rich and checkered a past as Brown could win without breaking a sweat. He has so much baggage he could overload an airport carousel.

On the Republican side, Meg Whitman, the former eBay executive, and Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner are having a slightly more conventional race. But Whitman increasingly seems to treat Poizner, who trails badly in the polls and in fundraising, as if he isn’t a real rival at all.

This may have prompted Poizner’s odd attempt to depict as extortion a routine e-mail from a Whitman adviser to his consultant urging that Poizner get out of the race and promising Whitman support for a Poizner 2012 Senate bid if he did. Poizner needed to change the narrative – Whitman on cruise control to the nomination. It didn’t work.

So Whitman probably will continue her refusal to debate Poizner in an open public event, even if it means stiffing not just the media but state GOP officials. And she will continue to limit her access to journalists with lots of germane questions to ask the political novice who wants to run California. This week, Whitman abruptly canceled an appearance on a Los Angeles PBS radio station because the host had the temerity to want to ask her questions about her candidacy and not just about her new book. This is extremely dismaying.

We are not naive. What Brown and Whitman are doing is effective strategically. But California is in truly desperate financial straits. Even when the economy rebounds and revenue surges, huge budget imbalances will persist because of vast unpaid bills for jobless benefits, promised but unaffordable retirement benefits for millions of public employees and other daunting obligations.

A reasonable parallel can be drawn between now in California and what happened nationally in September 2008; then, the economic crisis was so severe that presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain suspended campaign events to join President George W. Bush and other lawmakers at the White House to discuss emergency measures.

But Brown is so removed from the fray that it is unclear what if any views he holds on many key issues confronting the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as they try to resolve a $20 billion budget gap. And Whitman, for the most part, is content to offer Ross Perot-style it’s-that-simple nostrums.

In normal times, such evasiveness and vapidity might be tolerable. But these are not normal times. California is in an enormous mess, and the two people who are most likely to have to govern this mess come next January need to give us much more specifics on how they would do so.

Starting now."