Brown’s crucial dog and pony tour

04 April 2011 |permalink | email article

On Day 85 of the governor’s failed effort to secure a state budget deal, Brown responded with unusual calm not so evident in terms one and two. “I’m not giving up. I’ve been around a long time. I know we can do it,” the Sacramento Bee reported.

Brown did begin budget talks early and was able to enact $11.2 billion in spending cuts, but his proposal mistakenly assumed that Republican support would permit a June ballot measure to extend higher taxes on vehicles, income and sales. He wrongly concluded, as Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a USC political analyst noted, that a bipartisan solution would work.

So Brown will travel to Riverside and other GOP strongholds in coming days, part of a statewide tour he said will focus on warning voters of steep budget cuts that will be required if temporary tax increases expire this summer.

He hopes that shock treatment will create enough pressure on Republican lawmakers to back down which is far from certain. “It is very important that people know what the stakes are,” he said taking another dig at GOP opposition to the tax-extension vote. Unresolved are other issues like killing redevelopment agencies and enterprise zones

It’s noteworthy that barnstorming efforts by previous governors to put big issues on the ballot – Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind as a colossal flop – have failed. Brown is staking his governorship largely on a budget solution.

One of the great ironies, as Brown continues to struggle, is the recent death of A. Alan Post, 96, the longtime legislative analyst who watched over the budgets of California governors from Earl Warren to Jerry Brown. It was Brown who picked Post to head a panel to study the effects of controversial Prop. 13 in 1978. He retired in the governor’s first term.

A Los Angeles Times editorial last week said Post “felt the rage of more than one governor for killing pet projects that did not measure up to his criteria – and the slim, cool, tweedy analyst was the winner in most of the confrontations.”

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