The Democrats haven't chosen a lieutenant governor nominee just yet, but their incomplete ticket already seems stronger than the GOP's slate.

First, there's Republican lieutenant governor nominee Jason Plummer, who has virtually no political experience. It showed last night during his first major television interview.

In an appearance on WTTW's Chicago Tonight, host Phil Ponce asked Plummer a simple question about where in the budget he would cut programming to save money. After listing a few GOP standbys -- Medicaid waste, the consolidation of some state agencies -- Plummer gets stuck. And when we say stuck, we mean stuck, literally stammering for 18 full seconds before Ponce jumps in to save him. He follows it up by criticizing GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Bill Brady's proposal to cut 10 percent from every department in state government. Watch it:

Brady's got some problems of his own. Despite protestations from leading Democrats, he's under no obligation to present his own FY 2011 state spending plan. The Republicans should be counting their blessings about that because recent interviews with Brady suggest that he hasn't thought about these budgetary issues very carefully.

Check out this clip from Brady's discussion with Illinois Statehouse News yesterday afternoon. The senator admitted that the state can't cut its way out of a $13 billion hole but fails to offer a coherent or comprehensive answer for how to balance the budget:

BRADY: You can't cut yourself out of the $10 to $13 billion [deficit] that they've accumulated in the Blagojevich/Quinn administration over the last eight years. So what we have to do is we have to reconcile ourselves into a budget that's not just balanced but has a surplus so that we can begin paying down the backlog of unpaid bills that are referred to as the $13 billion deficit.

If Brady's 10 percent across-the-board cut won't eliminate the budget hole, what options does he have left? He's made crystal clear that he won't consider a tax hike of any kind. In fact, he's proposed $1 billion in tax cuts. Even if we're generous and assume lowering taxes will generate $3 billion in new revenue (as Brady projects), that new money certainly won't funnel into the system in time to balance the 2011 fiscal budget. The stimulus program is expiring, so he can't rely on Uncle Sam to bail Illinois out. He consistently rails against borrowing, so that's ostensibly off the table too.

In short, Brady says we can "reconcile ourselves into a budget" with a surplus, but offers no realistic option to do so. Maybe there's a magic money tree somewhere in Bloomington.

Speaking of cuts, we wondered yesterday whether Brady -- who has paid lip service in the past to reforming the state's inequitable education funding formula -- would exempt education from his 10 percent "across-the-board" cuts. It seems almost certain he won't.  When ISN questioned him on this issue, Brady said any budget solution will require "shared sacrifice" from schools and social service providers. Watch it:

Gov. Pat Quinn's preliminary budget called for about $1.3 billion in education cuts, as well. But the numbers intended to show lawmakers and voters what the state's balance sheet would look like without an income tax hike, a reform Quinn himself supports. Brady can't say the same.

Update (12:22 pm): Capitol Fax and Archpundit have more.