The red-faced California Chamber of Commerce and their right-wing head, Allan Zaremberg, are in full retreat this afternoon after an unprecedented – and richly deserved – backlash against their massively dishonest attack ad. Anthony York reports the Cal Chamber has agreed to pull the ads:

The California Chamber of Commerce has pulled an ad off the airwaves after objections from Jerry Brown and Brown’s allies in the business community.

Brown was instrumental in pulling the ads by exerting pressure through board members on chamber President Allan Zaremberg. Brown and his wife, Anne Gust, who once served as chief operating officer of the Gap, made calls to chamber members Wednesday imploring them to put pressure on the group to take the ad off the air.

“We’re ready to move on to the next phase of our paid media campaign,” Zaremberg said. “We believe we’ve accomplished what we tried to accomplish with the first ad, which is bring attention to these important issues. We probably got a little more attention than we expected.”

When asked about Brown and Gust’s roles in getting the ads off the air, Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford said, “This campaign has worked very hard to mare sure the chamber’s misleading ads be taken off the air.”

Brown’s personal intervention may have helped tip the scales, but the Cal Chamber was already getting huge pushback from its members including UC President Mark Yudof, who was one of the first to denounce the ad and say he didn’t even know the Cal Chamber was producing it.

I’m sure that the Whitman campaign and the Cal Chamber will use this to justify a demand to pull whatever the next independent expenditure ad airs that targets Whitman, but that would be a classic case of false equivalency. It has to be kept in mind that it’s not that the ad attacked Jerry Brown, but that it did so by making a shockingly dishonest misinterpretation of the past, leaving out key details.

This is a big victory for Jerry Brown and a big defeat for the Cal Chamber. They’re not going to stop trying to destroy California for their own profit, but they’ve been dealt a blow in their efforts to smear the Democratic candidate.