We’d be remiss if we didn’t spend some time on one of the major stories in California politics this week – Bill Clinton’s tour de California to endorse Newsom for governor. Both Carla Marinucci’s article in the Chronicle and Jack Chang’s in the SacBee focus on the bad blood between Clinton and Jerry Brown, dating to the 1992 Democratic primaries. But the bigger question here is what, if anything, does this actually mean for the governor’s race?

As Marinucci points out, it could help open the fundraising taps for Newsom, who has been badly trailing Brown in fundraising. More fundamentally, it gives a public boost to a campaign that has been flagging of late, and gives Newsom himself valuable legitimation by a former president who is still well-liked by California Democrats, even if the long 2008 presidential primary reduced that lingering support. Bill’s legacy and Hillary’s own outreach helped her do well among Latino voters in the February 2008 primary here in California – but most of those Latino voters became enthusiastic Obama Democrats over the course of the year. The Clinton imprimatur is unlikely to have as much impact on what is in fact a complex, diverse bloc of California voters who are much more interested in bread and butter issues than in personalities.

Ultimately I’m not convinced the Clinton endorsement will be the spark that turns around the Democratic primary campaign for Newsom. He faces three ongoing challenges that Clinton isn’t going to be able to overcome, unless he decides to camp out in California on Newsom’s behalf until June 2010 (which, let’s face it, is quite unlikely):

First, Newsom hasn’t been able to dent the “Governor Moonbeam” image of Brown as a last connection to California’s progressive glory days. Jerry Brown’s poll lead is based on the support of people who, unlike myself, can still remember his first go-round as governor. These Dems, as evidenced by some comments here at Calitics as well as many conversations I’ve had on the topic recently, believe that the Jerry Brown of 2009 is still the generally progressive Jerry Brown of 1975. Not only does that view vastly overstate how progressive Brown was in the 1970s, it completely ignores his right-of-center views on some of the state’s key issues, such as taxes (he is dead-set against new ones and has talked about tax cuts) and prisons/sentencing policies. But because people still see Brown as a ’70s progressive, a lot of Dem voters are willing to overlook those inconvenient truths.

Newsom hasn’t yet created a campaign narrative that can compel significant numbers of Democratic voters to flock to his campaign. Newsom has been unable to show Californians how he will solve the state’s dire economic and political crisis. Obama ran and won an underdog campaign by offering Americans a very clear alternative to Hillary Clinton – a campaign of hope, change, and post-partisan progress. (Never mind the fact that none of it has come to pass now that Obama is in office.) Newsom must do the same for Californians, and offer a coherent vision that Democratic voters can not just support, but get excited and fired up about implementing.

Finally, neither candidate seems to have had much success mobilizing the new and infrequent voters who turned out in 2008 – and whose de facto disenfranchisement from the political process is perhaps the key factor in the perpetuation of right-wing rule in one of the nation’s bluest states. Bill Clinton isn’t going to suffice for outreach to Latinos young and old, to Asian and Pacific Islanders, to the mounting numbers of unemployed across the state.

The risk the Newsom campaign runs is letting Clinton’s endorsement substitute for that deeper and more systematic outreach. Then again, we appear doomed to witness a campaign of images and not ideas. Which, given the scale of our state’s crisis, would be an unforgivable missed opportunity.

The 2010 gubernatorial race ought to be about who has the best vision for California’s future. We know that Meg Whitman’s vision is essentially Governator 2: Judgement Day, where what is left of our tattered safety net and California Dream is burned to the ground.

California needs both Brown and Newsom to move beyond the politics of images and high-profile endorsers and focus on offering clear solutions to the crisis. We’ll see if that actually happens.