The Times has an excellent, lengthy piece on various candidates for governor in California in 2010 — Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, in particular.
We always seem to have a lot of Bay Area types in the comments here, so I ask: what has Newsom been like as mayor of San Francisco? What was Jerry Brown like as mayor of Oakland?
I really liked these comments from Jerry Brown:
It has been falling to Brown, once known as Governor Moonbeam, to bring the discussion back to earth. While other candidates evoke the “myth” and the “dream” and the “epic disaster” that is California, Brown is more likely to speak of “the mundane quality of the enterprise,” that enterprise being state government.
Brown delights in deflating overblown rhetoric. Everything is deemed a “crisis” today, he said with a smirk. “Instead of having ‘stars,’ at some point we had ‘superstars.’ Instead of having ‘stores,’ we had ‘superstores.’ So there is an escalation in the rhetoric because of the difficulty penetrating to the consumer.”
We live in a time where only ex-hippies regard governing as a gig and not as a made-for-tv movie.