Brown's budget veto won't break political deadlock

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You can tell they just hate it that he vetoed that mess.

Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Jerry Brown was elected on a pledge to break legislative gridlock by changing Capitol culture, and he showered state lawmakers with attention as he tried to forge a bipartisan compromise to fix the state's chronic financial mess.

But the budget that Democratic legislators sent to him Wednesday — and his swift veto of it — threaten a rerun of the same dysfunction that has paralyzed Sacramento for years. Democrats and Republicans are as divided as ever, a viable budget seems elusive and the governor is feuding with his own party.

"That's not what people expected when they elected him as governor," said John J. Pitney Jr., a government professor at Claremont McKenna College and a former national GOP official.

Throughout his campaign last year, Brown portrayed himself as a political sage, a former two-term governor with the experience to usher in a new era of bipartisanship and honest budgeting. In an oft-repeated line, he said his governorship would be an opportunity to "turn this breakdown into a breakthrough."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jerry-brown-20110618,0,242554.story