70 Year Magazine Archive

Gunning for Brown

by Charles Wallen Jr.

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A lot of people are against Governor Brown but are afraid to take him on, California politicos are saying.

Well, who in particular is afraid of the mantra-chanting eminentissimo? I offer the following list: labor, agriculture, utilities, industry large and small, his own executive bureaucracy, and Californians who care about the economy of the state. For two years now the handsome governor has pursued them with horse, foot, and dragoon. His mocking, lowered-expectation rhetoric—a whimsicality he has marketed as his very own—has succeeded in ranking California as the 47th state in the Union in terms of friendliness toward business. This means that jobs are hard to get, utilities cannot sell their stock to raise capital to expand, industry goes elsewhere to prosper. After spending $60 million on an absurd transportation plan, he dropped it, with high-toned disavowals, as soon as its folly was exposed, letting his subordinates walk the plank. Mind, I am not suggesting they shouldn’t walk the plank. We have, after all, ’ the Nuremburg precedent.

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