Demon Sheep - Feb. 4, 2010

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Purity. Piety. Our fiscal conservative leaders, men we admire. Aspire to be.

Wholesome. Honorable. True believers. Men like Tom Campbell, who would never lead us astray, his pedestal so high.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Leaving but one way to fall. Tom Campbell, fiscal genius. Who would remember that as the governor's chief budget officer, Campbell was the architect of our disastrous 2005 budget? A budget so bloated with increased ongoing spending commitments and borrowing that it literally set the stage for the recent decline of California. That’s fiscally conservative Tom? Who would remember that was the Tom Campbell budget? We would. A budget about which the respected nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst Office wrote “multi-billion-dollar operating deficits… will persist…” even in the best of times. And Tom, while proclaiming your newfound fiscal conservatism, you seem to have forgotten that you supported last year's budget, saying its tax increases were the right thing to do.

Your current brilliant solution to California's budget mess is to raise our gas tax, already the highest in the country by 32 cents a gallon. Could there be a worse solution? Is that fiscally conservative Tom?

And sadly we're just getting started. You also campaigned for a ballot measure last spring that would have extended a supposedly temporary hike in the sales tax, the income tax, and the vehicle license fees for another two years. At the end of the day that another $16 billion in new taxes you supported Tom. When in Congress, you supported a tax on the Internet, and you were publicly critical of the Bush tax cuts. I suppose we should not be surprised then, Tom, that you are the only Republican candidate to refuse to sign the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, no matter what office you were running for that particular week.

Tom Campbell - is he what he tells us or see what he's become over the years - a FCINO, a fiscal conservative in name only? A wolf in sheep's clothing. A man who literally helped put the state of California on the path to bankruptcy and higher taxes. Fiscal conservative or just another same old tale of tax-and-spend, authored by a career politician who helped guide us into this fiscal mess in the first place.

Might there be a better choice? Someone who has not made a career of politics? A political outsider, perhaps a proven fiscal conservative who has accomplished enormous things in life.

Now that sounds like the right choice for California.