Richie Duchon filed this report for Annenberg Radio News.

In a video on his campaign website, the seventy-one-year-old attorney general entered the race with a few veiled punches at the two republicans fighting to run against brown in the general election.

“What we need is not a scripted plan cooked up by consultants or mere ambition to be governor. We need someone with insider’s knowledge, but an outsider’s mind.”

But brown faces a number of obstacles in this race. For one, his opponents will likely try to paint brown as an old, career politician. Brown is seventy-one and served two terms as governor more than 30 years ago. But brown has a defense for that.

“Some people say that if you’ve been around the process you can’t handle the job, that we need to find an outsider who know virtually nothing about state government. We tried that and it doesn’t work,” said Brown.

Bob stern is a political analyst and president of the Center for Governmental Studies who worked for Brown during his time as California Secretary of State. Stern says Brown will raise far less money than his Republican opponent. But Stern says Brown has name recognition and is a very good campaigner.

“The thing to watch with Brown is his nimbleness. He is not an idealogue. He is not somebody who sticks to something and never changes. He is constantly changing and constantly moving. He’s a moving target and a very very good politician,” Stern said.

Stern added that he expects Brown will be hurt by low voter turnout.

“The biggest question in my mind is who will vote. My guess is that they’ll be a tremendous drop off in the number of votes this year as opposed to 2008, when Obama and McCain were running,” said Stern. “There’s going to be much, much less interest. Young people are not going to vote. Probably people of color are going to vote less then they voted in 2008. And that’s really going to hurt Brown.”

Stern says brown likely learned something from the Massachusetts senate race, where another popular attorney general lost to a younger outsider. Stern says Brown knows he will have to campaign hard ahead of the November election, especially in Southern California.