Earlier today Brian linked to Meg Whitman’s new attack ad targeting Jerry Brown. The ad calls Brown a failure, blaming him for the budget and economic crisis of the early 1980s, mocking him for losing the 1982 US Senate election (which they incorrectly give as being in 1989 in a fake headline) and losing the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, and blaming him for Oakland’s ongoing problems.

Much of these attacks are flawed history. Joe Mathews examines these misleading claims and concludes Whitman should pull the ad:

I want to focus on one particular crime against history that Whitman commits here.

In this ad and in campaign material, Whitman says that Brown’s big spending during his previous two terms as governor (1975 – 1983) was a failure because “his big spending turns a surplus into a billion dollar deficit.”

That’s true — but only in the same way that whoever happened to be mayor of Hiroshima in 1945 might be attacked in future campaigns for “turning a nice Japanese city into a radioactive graveyard.”

The nuclear bomb responsible for turning the Brown surplus into a deficit during his time as governor was called Prop 13. Yes, that’s right–the same Prop 13, the 1978 initiative, that Whitman says she will protect 100 percent. So, by the standards of evidence and argument employed by the Whitman campaign, one would have every right to argue that Whitman, in this ad, is saying that Prop 13 was a mistake.

When Prop 13 passed, local governments no longer had the ability to fund themselves and programs. So the state, which was running a big surplus under Brown, stepped in to bail them out.

If you had read my new article on Jerry Brown’s terms as governor you’d know the truth about these issues. Basically, Jerry Brown took office in January 1975 amid a severe recession caused by the oil crisis. He immediately imposed budget austerity and hoarded a billion-dollar surplus, especially as the late 1970s economic recovery went underway.

But he was unable to deflect the right-wing attack on state government, largely because he refused to ally with liberals to fix property taxes. And so Prop 13 was put on the ballot by Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann as a massive right-wing attack on public services and economic prosperity, using the cover of property taxes and convincing people that a state with a billion dollar surplus could afford a big property tax cut.

Brown’s response to Prop 13’s passage was to spend down the surplus to prevent a collapse of local government and public schools. 30 years later, that collapse is now here, but Brown did succeed in staving it off for a few decades. As a result, California did not become Michigan or Mississippi. Many of us, myself included, owe our education and what economic security we now possess to Jerry Brown’s response to Prop 13, namely his decision to use state funds to save local government and schools.

That’s not to say that Brown handled the whole late 1970s moment well. He didn’t, as my article made clear. But he deserves credit for ensuring California didn’t collapse.

That credit is especially important given the economic situation. Whitman blames Brown for the ugly recession of the early 1980s, but in fact the recession was caused by three people in Washington DC – Jimmy Carter, Paul Volcker, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom embraced neoliberal economic policies that produced a massive and deep recession by 1981 in order to deal with inflation.

California, like the rest of the United States, has never really recovered from that recession. We’ve used successive waves of debt-fueled asset bubbles to generate new jobs, but every time it winds up collapsing. Jerry Brown didn’t help the state avoid that boom-and-bust cycle. But neither did he create it. And his work in preserving public services in the wake of Prop 13 did provide at least another generation of some semblance of economic prosperity.

Whitman doesn’t want people to know these facts – hence her misleading ad. I’ll strongly second Joe Mathews’s call for Whitman to pull the ad. She may be spending $91 million so far on her campaign, but we can at least demand she spend it on honest ads, and not on rewriting history.