Angelides for Governor

As many of you who read my blog regularly must know, I have been agonizing for months as to which candidate to endorse for Governor (I doubt Arnold was holding his breath). I have made my decision, and although it was a tough one I feel good about it. As the title of this post indicates and as you might have been able to tell from the way I have been blogging about the race recently, I have decided Phil Angelides shoul be the next Governor of California. One of the deciding points in his favor was not the Los Angeles Times endorsement but this endorsement by L.A. Weekly columnist Harold Meyerson:

As treasurer, Angelides has been the most influential public figure in determining the investment policies of the state’s two main public-employee pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTIRS, which are the two largest pension funds in the nation. As such, while exercising his fiduciary responsibility to ensure a good rate of return, Angelides has also steered investments into inner-city and inner-ring-suburban development, into densification along transit corridors, into small businesses and renewable-energy technology. And as the main voice for funds that are often among the largest shareholders in corporations, he’s been an outspoken and influential force for reducing CEO pay. (He was the first official, for instance, to demand that the New York Stock Exchange rescind the ridiculous platinum parachute it bestowed on Richard Grasso, its departing CEO.)

In short, like New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (now running for governor in his state), Angelides has used his power to try to curtail the excesses of winner-take-all capitalism, and to establish a more socially responsible capitalism in its stead. For that matter, Angelides and Spitzer are just about the only elected officials at any level of government to have taken on the culture of boardroom chicanery during the past decade, and Angelides stands alone, alas, for the magnitude of his efforts to put capital to remunerative but also socially necessary purposes.

California’s treasurer ain’t nobody’s shrinking violet. During the energy crisis, he called for the creation of a state energy company to serve as a yardstick for the private companies that were then robbing California blind. He criticized Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budgets when no one else was criticizing Schwarzenegger at all. And he advocates raising taxes on the rich and corporations to improve the state’s schools.

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Angelides is not the sum of human virtue. He’s brilliant and not shy about letting you know it. He’s micromanaged his own sometime-meandering campaign in a way that might portend problems if he’s elected governor. But the conventional media wisdom, that there’s really no difference between the two Democratic candidates for governor, is deeply wrong — wrong as only the conventional media wisdom can be. In a timid time, Phil Angelides has a clear record as a bold liberal.

Now, let's just see whether California will decide they want a bold liberal to be Governor.