Voting in California

Even the Los Angeles Times admits that the Democratic candidates it is endorsing are not that great. In its endorsement page last week, it had this to say about Jerry Brown Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor who is running against the Republican candidate, Meg Whitman, former CEO of Ebay:

We don’t see him as California’s savior but instead as a kind of experienced mechanic who will know how to get a few more miles out of the state’s falling machinery. . . No longer the fresh young candidate of new ideas whom Californians first elected governor in 1974, Brown is now older and, The Times believes, wiser leader. . . Republican Meg Whitman’s solution for the state too often seem based on popular but wildly inaccurate clichés about how the state got into its current fix and how to get it out.

What these inaccurate clichés are, it does not say. Meg Whitman did not run a successful billion-dollar corporation on clichés, for sure.

And about Barbara Boxer, incumbent Democratic candidate who is running for the US Senate against Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, the Times went on to say:

The Times sometimes is exasperated with Boxer but in the end backs her over Carly Fiorina because issues matter, and we find Boxer on the right side of issues ranging from healthcare reform to the environment to transportation.

As if the current problems of California revolve around healthcare, environment, and transportation! And what is it to be on the right side of these issues, anyway?

With 14.2 % unemployment and a $20 billion deficit, California needs leaders who can run the state on sound principles of fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free enterprise and who can exhibit level-headedness, decisiveness, and innovativeness. As former CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, Whitman and Fiorina are formidable and effective (see today’s Fox News Sunday's interview). They are fresh blood with new ideas on one hand. Boxer and Brown, on the other, come across as tired, old politicians who have made a career out of politics. Perhaps what California needs is a CEO for a governor who can steer the ship of state away from “politics as usual” to something that will work right for the state and for every Californian.

The stakes in these elections are indeed high. The only thing that Californians need to do to make the most out of it is to vote intelligently, make wise choices, despite promptings from their political and media elites to vote along partisan lines.