As California’s gubernatorial election approaches, I thought I’d rather tactlessly relink a post from late August on precisely that question.

Incredibly, Brown is taking credit for the state of California’s public institutions during his tenure as governor. As we know, it takes many, many years to build up high-quality public institutions. While it would be absolutely wonderful if any one woman or man could create high-quality public institutions single-handedly in a compressed period of time, that’s not how the world works. Many players are necessarily involved. So are things that are outside of the control of any policymaker, e.g., ferocious labor market discrimination against women meant that school districts were able to hire and retain high-quality teachers at relatively low cost. The waning of this brand of discrimination has been a boon for our society, yet it has certainly been a challenge for schools.

Brown as governor, as Joe Matthews has argued, was a complex, contradictory figure, who had an unmistakable conservative streak. He attempted to bring “small-is-beautiful” to the mainstream, and that was all to the good. If his tenure as governor tells us anything, however, it’s that he wasn’t much for the details of governance. While he promoted a number of budget-cutting reforms, he also thoughtlessly expanded collective-bargaining rights for public employees, a decision that is arguably at the heart of California’s present crisis.

Depressingly, it takes only a few years to unravel high-quality public institutions that took years to build. Governor Brown’s tenure arguably represented the start of the great unraveling that has continued to this day. Many on the left attribute this unraveling to the poorly-designed Proposition 13. As William Voegeli has explained, there’s something more than a little fishy about this diagnosis.

This, by the way, isn’t to say that Meg Whitman would make a better governor than Jerry Brown. My job isn’t to endorse candidates. But I have to say, I resent watching Jerry Brown take credit for the work of his father and many other devoted public officials. This might be why I don’t like politicians in general.