It's Brown vs. Whitman for California Governor

"She talks about waste and abuse," Brown told reporters at a morning news conference in downtown Los Angeles. "She paid herself $120 million, and then EBay had to lay off 10% of its workforce. Now, is that waste and abuse? Is that what you want?"..."Whitman only has a history of spending money wildly to get whatever she wants," Brown said. "I have a history of reining in my desire to get this or get that, or spend this, in the campaign or the government." Brown cast his tenure as governor from 1975 to 1983 as proof he could impose the kind of austerity that California needs to recover from its fiscal crisis.... "When I was governor of California, we built up the largest surplus in history -- $4.5 billion. We created 1.9 million jobs. We reduced taxes by billions, OK?"

Whitman, 53, proposes scaling back state pensions, making employees work longer before they can collect retirement pay and cutting 40,000 state jobs. She says she would also cut costs by improving computer technology, capping state spending and curbing debt....Her fiscal agenda is familiar. Like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, she proposes to save money by finding fraud in social programs serving the old, disabled, unemployed and poor; paring redundant agencies; and reducing lifetime limits for welfare. But in such efforts she would face a hostile, Democrat-controlled Legislature that is not required to take orders from a chief executive. Brown, 72, was known as a tight-fisted governor from 1975 to 1983. He believed in "limits," which translated to a lack of investment in the roads, universities and other infrastructure that his father, Pat Brown, had built as governor before him. He has been vague about how he would tame the budget, but as governor and in this race, his biggest allies have been the public employee unions whose agendas include preserving big, expensive healthcare and social service programs. Yet he says he would slow the growth of social programs.