California Governor's Race/Jerry Brown: "I'm not an advertisement, I'm a real person"

The PBS Newshour of 10/08/2010 carried a decent report on the California Governor's race. The only weak part I noticed was some spacy, vague and fashionably cynical comments by columnist Dan Walters. Which surprised me, because he often writes good commentary and reports. For instance, this report of his on last Saturday's Brown-Whitman debate is pretty good: Debate No. 2 becomes a slugfest 10/03/2010.

The Newshour segment is online with a transcript, Economic Pessimism Pervades Heated California Governor Race 10/08/2010:



A report by Spencer Michels related to the Newshour segment is available at their website, California Governor's Race: a Hot Campaign Sans Obama, Tea Party 10/08/2010. ("Sans"?) Michels reports:

Another major issue in the campaign is jobs; California has an unemployment rate of more than 12 percent. Brown says green is the way to go, and he's promoting solar and other forms of clean energy. That, he says, will stimulate growth and provide employment. Whitman says her real world experience is in job creation. President Obama's fiscal policies don't seem to get much play in this debate -- at least in California, which has the 8th-largest economy in the world.

And a further point of disagreement is immigration. Focus on that intensified last week when it was revealed that Whitman -- who has advocated tough enforcement of immigration laws -- employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper for nine years. While the tea party has been active in the immigration debate, it appears that this dust-up is fairly specific. Brown accuses Whitman of hypocrisy; Whitman accuses Brown of exploiting the issue for political gain. Quite possibly, the whole dust-up could ease over the next month.

The Spencer Michels article includes this video, which focuses on one of the "horse-race" issues of which our star reporters are so fond. Jerry handles it well, I would say, making an attempt to tie his response back to a policy issue:



Tags: 2010 elections, jerry brown