Jerry Brown: California's Once and Future Governor?
Source: Karl Taro Greenfield/Time Magazine
How do you want us to tell the Jerry Brown story? As a comeback tale? A mystery? A quest? A love story? A little-guy-makes-good story? He is all of them, the comeback kid at 72, the former two-term Democratic governor and three-time presidential candidate who fell from grace, searched for spirituality, found love and worked his way up from two-term mayor of Oakland (1998 to 2006) to current state attorney general to, possibly governor again.
He is a one-man political dynasty (scion of an actual dynasty, since his father Edmund "Pat" Brown was also governor), begetting yet another reborn version of himself, wiser, more empathetic, more effective, though he will argue that is a conundrum. "If I say I've learned anything, then it means I didn't know anything before. If I say I didn't learn anything, then I'm not learning anything." In this dark season of deficits and crises and panic and electorate revulsion at Sacramento gridlock —a version that makes Washington look positively efficient — he claims to be, all conundrums aside, — exactly who California needs.
Much has been made of California's crisis, of schools underfunded, prisons overcrowded, highways rutted, water polluted, businesses fleeing, house prices still collapsing, and the sense of crisis is omnipresent, from the potholes that jar you as you drive down I-880 to get to Brown's garage to the foreclosed properties that surround the charter schools he founded. Yet the ideas floated to fix the state by Republican candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman are blandishments that sound good — yes, we should focus on jobs, schools and making government more efficient — but that Brown will tell you are consultant — conceived generalities. (See pictures of Jerry Brown's career.)
He is quick to contrast himself with Whitman, pointing out every instance where her theories crumble against the realities of actually governing. "I've done this," he explains. "I've been in government and overseen thousands of businesses. I've run charter schools. Those are businesses. She ran her ... her website. She can say whatever she wants. But if you have never worked in government...It's a different world. That's like someone who's never dove in a river and says, I know what swimming in a river is like." (Read about Whitman's views on public-employee unions.)
The contrast in styles between the two campaigns is striking. Whitman has employed, at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars a week, dozens of the top political consultants in California and has already gone through an estimated $91 million of her billion-dollar fortune; her TV ads are inescapable. Brown had spent approximately $400,000 by the time he won his largely uncontested June 8 Democratic primary, and his war chest for the entire campaign looks to be about $20 million. Whitman is rarely unaccompanied by one of her consultants, who also sit in on interviews. She is relentlessly on message, her campaign's hard sell that she is a red-tape — cutting pragmatist who knows "how to balance a budget." In conversations, she casts Brown as the ultimate apparatchik, "100% beholden to the special interests," she told me a few weeks before winning the Republican primary. The latest Rasmussen poll has Whitman leading among likely voters, 47% to 46%.
The Whitman campaign has been critical of Brown's vagueness on many of the issues, saying his policies are "the failed policies of the past." Rather than lay out some sweeping vision, he studies specific issues — like tomatoes — and can come up with surprisingly nondoctrinaire positions. He supports the death penalty, for example, and as attorney general sided against gun-control advocates and often against consumer advocates. His terms as mayor have made him more vocally pro-business, and as attorney general, he says he cut $228 million from the state budget and eliminated 750 jobs. (Comment on this story.)
This has resulted in a candidate who sounds far less tolerant of regulation and red tape than the Whitman campaign will likely portray him. When I ask him if this sort of impatience with the self-perpetuating nature of bureaucracy is something that he has developed since serving as mayor of Oakland and attorney general, he responds; "You're trying to fit me into this procrustean notion that you have of me. You're trying to say that I've changed. Well, yes, people change. I've changed, but the ideas have been consistent. But I've learned, O.K.? Does that make you happy? I've learned."
One other thing Brown has learned apparently is that, in the end, the real issues at stake will probably not determine the outcome of the race. "But you know what decides it? Who f_____ up. Who says the wrong thing. Who insults someone. That will be the deciding factor ... I'm not one to stay on message. Maybe not. But if I say something, you know I mean it. You know who it's coming from. That much hasn't changed."