Not long ago, Jerry Brown said lack of experience did not matter in a governor

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As he launched a campaign against one Republican who has never held office (Meg Whitman) and another (Steve Poizner) with a four-year term as insurance commissioner under his belt, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown on Tuesday said Californians need a governor with his long political resume and his ‘knowledge’ of the job.

But, Whitman promptly noted, Brown has had a different take on the subject in the past. In an e-mail blast to reporters, her campaign highlighted Brown’s stated opinion after the 2003 recall election, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was swept into the office without having been elected to anything before. Back then, Brown, who served eight years as governor starting in 1975, told Mitchell Landsberg of The Times that Schwarzenegger’s lack of experience would not be a big problem.

‘Most governors don’t know that much about the workings of state government,’ said Brown, a Democrat who was then mayor of Oakland. ‘They figure it out. They have bevies of aides that are running around doing talking points and issues memos.’ More important, Brown said, was ‘to stand for something. ... You need to be able to exercise moral stature at critical moments.’

In his announcement Tuesday, however, Brown suggested that the Schwarzenegger era might have changed his mind about having a newbie governor: ‘We tried that, and it doesn’t work. We found out that not knowing is not good.’

The article Whitman cited contains some contradictions for her own bid for governor. For instance, former Gov. Pete Wilson, her campaign chairman and a strong backer of Schwarzenegger’s candidacy, told The Times that Schwarzenegger as governor would most enjoy ‘having restored the state to good health, and seeing it prosper again.’

But seven years down the road, Whitman, Wilson’s preferred candidate of the moment, has derided the state of government under Schwarzenegger, calling it a ‘broken system’ in ads and saying California suffers a ‘crisis of confidence’ and is ‘in the worst shape that I have seen ...’

Both the former governors’ past statements raise questions about the meaning of one of Whitman’s campaign slogans: ‘Let’s say what we mean, mean what we say, and let’s get it done.’

-- Michael Rothfeld in Sacramento