The LA Times Begrudgingly Endorses Jerry Brown for Governor

The LA Times’ endorsed Jerry Brown for governor in his race with Ebay billionaire Meg Whitman. But they didn’t seem too happy about it.

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.

Um, hate to break the news to you guys, but you’ve just described the last…hmmm…30 years of American democracy. And no, we don’t need another Ronald Reagan to delude us into misguided and largely destructive notions of our own self-importance so we can carry on with business as usual.

The Times offered a more hearty, if somewhat contradictory endorsement of Barbara Boxer for senate, over Republican Carly Fiorina. The Times’ editorial suggests Boxer struggles in  “exercising influence commensurate with her seniority,” but at the same time suffers from an “assertiveness that often is perceived as arrogance.”

So you’re telling us she’s assertive to the point of arrogance, but fails to assert herself? Alrighty then.

Happy election season everyone!

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