After endorsing Prop 1A Jerry Brown appears to not have taken Calitics’ constructive criticism to heart. Instead he has doubled down on his support of Prop 1A, appearing at a press conference in Alameda with Arnold Schwarzenegger and explaining why he thinks Prop 1A might actually help the next governor:

“If these don’t pass, it’s going to make the next governor’s job and the people’s job that much tougher,” Brown said in an Alameda press conference with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Partisanship in Sacramento has become poisonous. We’re in a crisis in the country, and that crisis reaches to California. This is a response that is helpful.”

Umm…OK. How exactly is Prop 1A helpful? How is it at all related to partisanship? And how is partisanship the problem? Last time I checked we had a severe economic crisis, and a severe financial crisis, both produced by conservative policies that Democrats did not sufficiently oppose. If anything we have too much bipartisanship.

Even putting that aside, he needs to demonstrate how Prop 1A would do a damn thing to make the next governor’s job easier. As we explained in our endorsements this morning Prop 1A will actually make the next governor’s job harder by forcing them to make massive program cuts. Perhaps Brown wants to make those cuts anyway and prefers blaming it on Prop 1A. But he needs to explain this thinking to the public.

In an AP interview today Brown also addressed the emerging campaign dynamic between himself and Gavin Newsom:

“Newsom is trying to make everyone think I’m Hillary, and he’s Obama, but those analogies just don’t work,” Brown said of his Democratic rival.

Unfortunately Brown is actually doing his best to give fuel to that kind of analogy. Newsom endorsed Prop 1A as well, but to my knowledge he hasn’t stood next to Arnold Schwarzenegger and taken that kind of personal ownership of not just the May 19 initiatives, but of the way things have been done in this state for the last 30 years.

I may sound like a Jerry Brown critic here, but I would actually like him to start espousing some more forward-thinking ideas for our state. He’s going to have to show Californians his vision for the next 30 years of the state – but so far all I seem to be hearing is a defense of the ideas and the frames of the last 30 years. That’s what would give Newsom an opening to run an Obama-style strategy of change, should he choose to do so.

If Brown doesn’t want to play the Hillary role in that drama, then he has to be the one to stop speaking about the horrors of partisanship, stop defending bad budget solutions like Prop 1A, and instead actually speak to the problems Californians are facing. He may not realize it, but if we saw the Jerry Brown of 1992, he might not feel the constant need to look over his shoulder at Gavin.