The new Jerry Brown ad (above) skillfully shows how much the rhetoric of Meg Whitman matches the more vacuous rhetoric of Gov. Schwarzenegger. And it speaks volumes about the campaign.
It's not merely that, as Brown argues with this ad, that the politically inexperienced pro-business outsider model of a governor was discredited by the Schwarzenegger experience. (Schwarzenegger, for his rhetoric, never really fit in that box, but that's another, longer story). It's that -- despite all the changes in the world and in California's economy -- candidates for governor are telling voters the same, old tired stories that they have before.
This makes no sense, now that the challenges the state faces are historic. A huge and persistent budget deficit that won't go away. And a broken governing system that has made it impossible for the state to address serious, obvious problems in education, health care, prisons and water.
Whitman isn't the only candidate recycling old stories. Brown is doing the same. In fact, one could surely come up with a video showing similar Brown and Schwarzenegger comments about working together with everybody and taking budget proposals to the people.
