The bad news just keeps growing for the Phil Angelides campaign.

According to the Sacramento Bee, on Thursday, several prominent state public employee unions announced shifts in expenditures that will effectively mean that the gubernatorial candidate is losing those unions as a major money source. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association withdrew about $1.3 million of $5 million in ad-buy time that it had committed for the final two weeks of the race. Eight other public employee unions have moved about $1 million to support John Garamendi’s faltering run against Tom McClintock for lieutenant governor. In a telling quote, Lance Corcoran, the spokesman for the prison guards’ union, said, “We never said we were on a suicide mission.”

On another front, former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown savaged Angelides in an interview after Angelides failed to show up at a fundraiser yesterday morning in San Francisco for Brown’s think tank. (Schwarzenegger and a bunch of Democratic luminaries did show up.) Brown told a Sacramento Bee reporter, “I think Arnold Schwarzenegger will be re-elected governor. And that’s no matter what, I think he’ll be re-elected governor.” Brown and Angelides have a history of bad blood; Brown made an even cattier comment about Angelides when he was running against Steve Westly in the June primary, saying, “Angelides doesn’t look good on TV and doesn’t sound good on radio. They need to keep him in places like Dinuba and Chico, where they don’t have modern communications with the rest of the state and no one can see or hear him.”

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