Brown and Kashkari down to final hours of debate preparations

As Gov. Jerry Brown and his Republican challenger Neel Kashkari were making final preparations for their sole debate Thursday night, advisors for both were trying to keep expectations low.

“The fact of the matter is the governor’s been debating since before Neel was born, and this is Neel’s first debate,” Kashkari campaign manager Pat Melton said.

Kashkari, he said, is likely to argue that rampant poverty and unemployment, along with substandard public schools, belie Brown’s narrative of a California comeback.

“California is not back, and it’s time for real leadership,” Melton said.

Brown spokesman Dan Newman, echoing former Vice President Spiro Agnew, called Kashkari “a nattering nabob of negativism” who favors stunts over substance. The Democratic incumbent, a onetime Jesuit seminarian prone to occasional bursts of Latin, might debate in iambic pentameter, he joked.

The one-hour debate, which starts at 7 p.m., will take place in a TV studio near the state Capitol. The sponsors are The Times, KQED public radio and television, Telemundo and The California Channel.

The event will be carried live on C-SPAN, 30 NPR radio affiliates across the state, major PBS television stations, The California Channel and in Spanish on Telemundo stations.

The moderator will be John Myers, KQED’s state politics and government editor. The other journalists on the panel are Jim Newton, editor-at-large of The Times and Dunia Elvir, morning news anchor of Telemundo’s KVEA-52 in Los Angeles.

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