Governor’s Race

* Everyone in California is a winner before the election if our two very intelligent candidates for governor could stop the political positioning and address the issues you correctly raise in “Let’s Try to Do This One Right” (editorial, July 3).

The effort to reinvent government will fail unless it starts with a more enlightened political system. I wish I could vote for both Democrat Kathleen Brown and Republican Pete Wilson as a team. We could not lose if they worked together and combined their strengths to develop strategies to lead California back to the top in education, business and as a great place to live and visit. The least they can do is share their best thinking with us and then implement it, regardless of who is elected.

JEANNE ARMSTRONG

Glendale

* I heartily applaud your editorial. You ticked off 10 issues about which our gubernatorial candidates need to develop a dialogue to inform voters. The death penalty was not among them, having been rightly dismissed as irrelevant earlier in the editorial. Yet Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, in the same issue of Opinion (“Will the Father’s Political Sins Visit the Daughter?”), devotes five columns to an analysis of Kathleen Brown’s problems in defining her death penalty stance.

How can we get campaign strategists to cut the baloney and get their candidates to discuss matters of importance if supposedly informed commentators such as Jeffe continue to expound on the irrelevant ones? Sadly, I would venture a guess that more has been written and spoken about Brown’s stance on the death penalty than on any other issue she has addressed.

RON BOTTORFF

Newbury Park