Saturday, May 2, 2009

Brown, Newsom foreshadow age-vs.-youth battle

SACRAMENTO — The 2010 Democratic primary campaign for governor hasn't quite kicked off, given that two of the top three prospects have yet to declare their candidacies. But Saturday, state party delegates got a foreshadowing of what could emerge as competing themes among Democrats over the next year: age and experience versus youth and change.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who announced his candidacy last week, played up the change part at the Democrats' convention, and took some glancing, if coded, blows at a presumptive candidate, state Attorney General Jerry Brown, saying, "California can't keep returning to the same old, tired ideas and expect a different result."

The visual differences were stark. With his famously coifed and gelled hair, the 41-year-old Newsom wielded his well-crafted 15-minute speech with the aid of a Teleprompter. The 71-year-old Brown, almost fully shorn of the jet black hair he wore as a new-age governor of the 1970s, bounced from one red-meat topic to another for 15 minutes without a prepared text.

Introduced to an up-tempo Coldplay tune with dozens of volunteers and supporters waiving Newsom 2010 placards on the convention floor, Newsom actually offered a standard stump speech touting his accomplishments in office. But he emphasized how contemporary they were, with references to investments San Francisco has made in biotechnology, life sciences, green technology and digital media.

"If there's Advertisementone thing this past year has proven, the old ways of doing business just don't work so well anymore," he said. "So, what are we going to do next year? Will we offer the voters of California a stroll down memory lane, or a sprint into the future? Will we choose the past, or will we embrace the future?"

Brown, who spoke with none of the fanfare that Newsom had rolled out — toward the end of the program when the crowd had somewhat thinned out and was turning its thoughts to lunch — embraced the past. Or, he tried to show it shouldn't be discounted so easily. He claimed vindication for being a visionary as a 30-something governor who sought alternative energy policies when it wasn't fashionable.

"These were tough laws — we had to fight a lot of people," Brown said. "People said, 'Brown, why do you want to worry about energy? It's not a problem. This is flaky. This is 'moonbeam.' Thirty years ago, I saw it, but it was hard to prove. Well, now we know. When you put in poison, CO2, methane gas and other chemicals into the environment, you're creating cancer, birth defects and also you disrupt the global plan. ... This is real stuff."

Brown also spoke in sentimental tones about the past, recalling that when he was governor, "back in those 'moonbeam' days," 17 percent of the general fund went to the University of California system and only 3 percent went to corrections. Today, the state spends roughly the same on prisons as on the UC system.

Brown's long history — twice elected governor, three times a presidential candidate, mayor of Oakland, state treasurer and party chairman — gives him a head start in name recognition, political observers say.

"People know him as governor, and if he doesn't connect the past to the future, talk about all the good things that happened in his time, he'll allow his opponents to do it for him — and you can bet the Newsom campaign is poring through history to find all that went wrong," said Corey Cook, a political-science professor at the University of San Francisco. "But Brown needs to make the argument that things were better when he was governor."

In a Tulchin Research poll published at the start of this weekend's convention, Brown had a commanding lead over all others with 31 percent favoring him. Newsom was well behind at 16 percent, but ahead of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, at 12 percent. Lt. Gov. John Garamendi pulled in 11 percent, but has since shifted his sights to a bid to replace U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, who was nominated by President Barack Obama to be undersecretary of arms control and international security.

Villaraigosa was absent from the weekend events, announcing last week that he'd decided to remain behind to work out budget issues with city union leaders in Los Angeles. His spokesman, Sean Clegg, said Villaraigosa wasn't going to "Twitter while Rome burns," a shot at Newsom's high-tech campaign rollout — which he did on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and his Web site.

Newsom said, "I love being the underdog," but his campaign said they saw vulnerabilities in Brown's lead.

In a memo released by Newsom's campaign, strategists Pete Brodnitz and Joel Benenson pointed to a 13-point advantage Newsom has over Brown with voters under 40.

"This also means that with higher turnout, Newsom can expect to expand his support," the memo said. "The fact that Brown lags among voters under 40 and that he has 31 percent ballot support even though he is universally known suggests challenges ahead for Brown."

Newsom's campaign played on the youthful theme by touting his appearance at a California College Democrats block party that featured Grammy Award winner Wyclef Jean. Brown hosted a "recession reception" at the old governor's mansion.

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