SACRAMENTO — Gavin Newsom taunted rival Jerry Brown on Saturday by framing the Democratic race for governor as a choice between "a stroll down memory lane" with a man who held the job in the 1970s and a "sprint into the future" with San Francisco's mayor.
Newsom avoided mentioning Brown's name in remarks to several thousand Democrats at a party gathering. But it was lost on no one that he was jabbing the 71-year-old attorney general who hopes to reclaim the job of governor that he first won in 1974.
"We're not a state of memories," said the 41-year-old mayor, who on Tuesday formally declared his candidacy in the June 2010 primary race. "We're a state of dreams. We're Californians. We're not content to relive history. We're going to keep making it."
In a speech a short while later, Brown spurned Newsom's bait, apart from saying it was difficult, in the setting of a party convention, to "use words that express not cliches and bombast and empty rhetoric, but really speak the truth."
A former Oakland mayor who ran for president three times, Brown reminded the crowd that he was not yet campaigning openly for the 2010 election, then went on to joke about his decades in California politics.
"I've run for more offices than any other candidate that still is alive, or is around, but there's a time and place for everything," said Brown, who has been waging a full-scale campaign for governor behind the scenes for months while remaining coy in public.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the third likely major contender for the Democratic nomination, skipped the gathering to tend, he said, to the city's budget crisis. But in an opening shot at Newsom, who markets himself as the rage of social networking websites, a Villaraigosa advisor told reporters last week that the Los Angeles mayor would not "Twitter while Rome burns."
Newsom, in turn, called on Villaraigosa to tone down the rhetoric.
"Candidly," Newsom said in an interview, "I wanted to call him, honestly, and say, 'What was that? No need for that.' I'm his friend, not an enemy."
The three-way sparring was the main backdrop of the state party's first convention since Democrats recaptured the White House and expanded their control of Congress in November.
That did not stop California Democrats from reverting to their 8-year-old custom of trashing former President George W. Bush. State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, for one, joked that Bush and his treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., should star in a movie called "Dumb and Dumber."
