PLEASANTON — Gov. Jerry Brown rallied Democratic troops Monday for a pair of ballot measures, a local Assembly candidate and — almost, sort of, not quite — for his re-election.
“When you’re voting for a Democratic candidate, you’re voting for someone who cares about people, who cares about the future” but also cares about protecting taxpayer dollars, the governor told a cheering crowd at a storefront Democratic campaign office in a strip mall.
“Don’t worry about having too many Democrats in Sacramento. … If they get out of hand, I’ll keep them in check.”
His speech was ostensibly about Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion water bond, and Proposition 2, to beef up the state budget’s emergency reserve fund while paying down debts, as well as to tout Democrat Tim Sbranti, who’s locked in a tight race with Republican Catharine Baker for the East Bay’s 16th Assembly District seat.
But his comments at least obliquely played to his own strengths as he seeks an unprecedented fourth term.
By talking about how he rides herd on Democrats eager to spend more than he’ll allow and by touting ballot measures supported by both major parties, he appears gubernatorial without giving his Republican challenger — former Treasury Department official and asset manager Neel Kashkari of Laguna Beach — a foothold for an attack.
Four polls in recent months have shown Brown leading Kashkari by an average of almost 18 percentage points, and as Brown raised $23.6 million for this race, Kashkari’s lackluster fundraising made him put $3.1 million of his own money into his campaign.
When Brown finally did start spending money this month, he put $3.3 million into television ads for the ballot measures. The newest ad, unveiled Monday, is the closest thing Californians will see to a Brown re-election campaign ad this year, but still not quite that.
“We’ve made tremendous progress: stabilized the budget, once again we’re creating jobs and supporting schools,” he says in the ad. “With Propositions 1 and 2, we can lock in progress for the future.”
At Monday’s event, Brown said Democrats and Republicans collaborated on Propositions 1 and 2, but the GOP “is being collaborative because the Democratic Party has the majority. … It’s good to have a decisive majority.”
Brown indirectly referred to Kashkari’s main line of attack — blasting the governor for appealing a court ruling that voided certain state laws dealing with teacher tenure and discipline. State and local governments work in tandem on education, he said, so the state “has not been McDonaldized” with one-size-fits-all solutions. “We have a more diverse approach to what we do.”
Another example of state-local cooperation Brown said, was “realignment” of the state’s overcrowded prison system, which directed low-level offenders to county jails instead.
“I’ve been doing this for a long while … but I still think there’s a lot to learn,” Brown said.
“That’s why we’re sending you back,” a woman yelled from the crowd, bringing cheers and applause.
Speaking to reporters after the rally, Brown dryly assessed Kashkari’s recent television ad on the teacher-tenure ruling — which has a child drowning in a swimming pool until Kashkari rescues him.
“I would’ve thought that ad was about water when I first saw it,” the governor quipped.
Brown said disciplining the state’s small population of bad teachers is important but pales beside the more important task of training, hiring and retaining the much larger population of good teachers.
Asked why he hasn’t aired ads or made campaign appearances specifically for his own re-election, Brown replied that the ballot measures are “two important pillars for our future” while he already is “very well known” to voters after almost three terms in his nearly half-century in California politics. “I’ve laid markers in the ground that people can look at” in weighing whether to give him four more years, he said.
Kashkari was scheduled to speak Monday night to the Young Republicans of San Diego at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant and to address a Pasadena Republican Women’s Federated luncheon Tuesday.
Brown, who spent the weekend at his Yale Law School class’s 50th reunion in Connecticut, apparently will continue in semi-campaign mode this week. On Tuesday, he’ll stump at Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi’s re-election campaign headquarters in Torrance and meet with reporters at Orange County’s groundwater replenishment plant in Fountain Valley.
The rest of his team is hitting the road, too. “First dog” Sutter Brown, the governor’s Corgi, is scheduled to “bark out the vote” for Propositions 1 and 2 on Monday night in Long Beach.
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
