The (Latest) Return of Jerry Brown: 'I've Seen a Lot'

California Attorney General Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., the state's once and maybe future governor, has yet again reinvented himself. The onetime apostle of New Age politics, famed and deplored as "Governor Moonbeam," has emerged in the first month of his candidacy for governor as a champion of the traditional bipartisan politics practiced by political leaders of this state since Earl Warren, who served as governor from 1943-1953.

This is a new guise for Brown, a quirky gadfly who last appeared on the national political stage in 1992 as a quixotic candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Brown's candidacy was propelled by his long-held conviction that politics -- and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton -- had been corrupted by excessive contributions, which Brown proposed to limit to $100.


After that unsuccessful presidential run, his third, Brown has remained politically active in California, as mayor of Oakland and since 2006 as state attorney general, a job once held by his father and two-term governor, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown. Now, Jerry Brown seeks to do what only Earl Warren has done before him: win a third term as governor of California. In a 50-minute interview Jerry Brown recalled the problem-solving approach of Warren and his successors and said he would try to emulate it. "I understand politics and government," Brown told me this week. "I've seen a lot, I have a lot of loyalty to California. I have an independent turn of mind."

Brown said he would bring "tradition and innovation" to the solution of California's recurrent fiscal problems. For several years the state has lurched from crisis to crisis, kicking precariously balanced budgets down the road with various gimmicks. Its current deficit, subject to revision, is $18 billion. The budget chaos symbolizes the decline of once-golden California, which has 12.5 percent unemployment, the lowest bond rating of any state, declining enrollments in the state's two money-starved university systems, and a prison system so crowded that thousands of inmates are being released ahead of time.

The approval rating of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dropped to a record low 24 percent; the rating for the Democratic-controlled Legislature is even lower at 14 percent. But Jerry Brown has not given up on the system. He said that if he is elected, he will meet with legislators before he takes office and if necessary negotiate with them face-to-face every day until a gimmick-free budget is adopted. This would be a different tack for Brown, who in his two terms as governor often disdained the Legislature.

A 36-year-old who looked younger, Brown was first elected governor in 1974. He promised radical limitations on campaign spending and said he would limit lobbyist payment for meals to "two hamburgers and a coke." His proposal became law but was struck down by the California Supreme Court.

Given Brown's long preoccupation with campaign finance, there is a touch of irony to his present predicament. Brown has $15 million in his campaign coffers and is unopposed for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. But Brown, who will turn 72 on April 7, is a pauper compared to his likely Republican opponent, Margaret Cushing (Meg) Whitman, the former president of eBay and one of the wealthiest women in America. Since announcing her candidacy last year the personable Whitman has spent $46 million and estimates she will spend $150 million before the campaign is over.

In the first three months of this year, Whitman spent $27 million, compared with $130,000 by Brown. She is a constant presence on television, sometimes with a 60-second spot that emphasizes her business success and personal qualities but more often with a series of 30-second commercials demonizing State Insurance Commissioner Stephen Poizner, a moderate technocrat, as an extreme liberal who would raise taxes.

The barrage of negative ads has accomplished its objective. Poizner was once competitive, but a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed him 50 points behind Whitman in the Republican primary. Matched against Brown in trial heats, Whitman held a 5-point lead in the PPIC survey and a 3-point lead in the venerable Field Poll.

Brown seems shaken by the magnitude of the Whitman commercials. He complained during my interview that Whitman had reduced "the public space of America to a 30-second commercial on sports and entertainment shows." Later, again deploring Whitman's spending, he said. "The future of our very way of government is at stake in this election." But Brown has formidable advantages, too. One of these is a 1.5-million advantage in Democratic voters.

"We've pretty much become a Democratic state," observes Bill Carrick, a respected Democratic political consultant. "Obama's approval rating in California is consistently about 10 points above the national average." Carrick also believes that California voters may be wary about choosing another outsider on the heels of Schwarzenegger. Brown doesn't seem so sure about that. In his low-key announcement speech he said he would be an insider but would have "an outsider's mind."

He has been an insider for a long time. Brown was elected to the Los Angeles Community College board of trustees in 1969. The following year he was elected secretary of state. Four years later he won the governorship, succeeding Ronald Reagan. He ran for president in 1976 and 1980, winning seven primaries. In 1982, he ran for the U.S. Senate but lost to Pete Wilson. Then, at 44 years of age, he dropped out of politics. Brown spent a summer in a Mexican village, learning Spanish. He studied Buddhism in Japan. He went to India to help Mother Teresa bathe and feed the destitute at the House of the Pure Heart. "You see the gratitude or pain on faces," he wrote afterward. "Nothing is filtered by a need to impress you."

Brown, however, remained unfulfilled. After India, he returned to politics and in 1989 took a thankless job as chairman of the California Democratic Party. He quit in 1991 with a denunciation of the influence of money in politics that set the stage for his 1992 presidential campaign. At the time of that campaign I was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post, whose editors assigned me to do a profile of Brown. It was not an assignment I relished. We had known each other since we were both in our 20s and had a mutually adversarial view.

As governor, Brown had starved California's once-vaunted mental health facilities, already reeling from cuts made by Gov. Ronald Reagan. I had written critically about this, and, like many old-school reporters in Sacramento, also disliked Brown's open disrespect for his legendary father, a great builder of universities, dams and freeways during his governorship from 1959 until 1967. But in researching the profile for The Post, I talked to Brown's siblings and high school friends, and another picture emerged. Pat Brown, busy politically, had nonetheless found time to be present at school events involving Jerry Brown's three sisters. He hadn't done as well by Jerry, who was hurt by his father's absences and resented being used as a "prop" at political events.

So perhaps it wasn't so surprising that Brown and his high school debate partner, Peter Finnegan, renounced the world at the age of 18, threw their money in the streets, and entered the Sacred Heart Novitiate in Los Gatos, near San Jose. Two years later Brown took vows of poverty, obedience and chastity as a Jesuit, from which he was later released. He spent three and a half years at the novitiate, but Brown said he eventually found the conformity too stifling. He left the seminary and went to law school, earning high marks and easily passing the bar. Brown had no interest in practicing law, however. Like his father before him, he used the law as a stepping-stone to politics.

In 1992, Finnegan told me that he thought Brown had remained on a spiritual quest throughout his life and was also still trying to prove himself to his father, who died in 1996. "I like Jerry," said Finnegan. "He can be a cynical SOB and a cuckoo, but there is a real sweetness about him." The "sweetness" part of this evaluation was unusual, but it's a fact that many of Jerry Brown's early friends defend him and have loyally supported him through various quests.

As governor of California in the 1970s, Jerry Brown left a conflicted legacy. He improved educational standards but was stingy with higher education. He appointed more minorities and women to government posts than any previous governor, but he also left key vacancies unfilled while he pursued odd interests such as a state space program that literally failed to get off the ground. (It was this venture that earned him the sobriquet "Governor Moonbeam," from Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko.) Brown was ahead of his time in perceiving the dangers of crop pesticides and other toxic chemicals and signed into law various measures to restrict them. But his concern for the environment caused him to underrate the crop-destroying Mediterranean fruit fly, which cut a swath through California's agricultural valleys before Brown belatedly ordered the use of pesticides to stop its spread. Pete Wilson seized on this issue when Brown ran for the Senate in 1982, and it proved a major factor in his defeat.

Brown was not known as a hands-on governor. He had, however, an epiphany of sorts, when he ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998. Oakland, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, was troubled and crime-ridden, with a hollowed-out downtown from which businesses had fled. Brown was convinced he could change this. When I went to Oakland to write a story about his campaign, an African-American community leader told me in wonderment that Brown was the first white candidate he had ever seen who walked into black neighborhoods alone and engaged residents in discussion. It made an impression. Brown was elected easily, and this engagement became a hallmark of his style as mayor.

He personally founded two schools, the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute. Realizing that both education and law enforcement were under-financed, he led a campaign for a tax increase to provide more money for these essential services. It passed with more than the required two-thirds margin. Brown also succeeded in attracting new businesses to Oakland, sometimes getting on the telephone and extolling the virtues of the city to business owners or their chief executive officers. The people of Oakland appreciated what Brown had done and re-elected him mayor in 2002 with 64 percent of the vote. Brown still resides in Oakland, with Anne Gust, whom he married in 2005.

Whether his Oakland experience fundamentally changed Jerry Brown remains an open question. He has so far campaigned cautiously, husbanding his money so he can be competitive with Whitman in the fall. As he travels the state, relying on "free media" for coverage, there are occasional flashes of the old polysyllabic Brown.

"Adaptation is the essence of evolution," he said, in discussing his shifting stances on issues over the years.

But Brown has a sense of the distance he has traveled, an understanding of California political history and a somewhat apocalyptic view of the national economy. "We're not quite the Weimar Republic, but it's close," Brown told me. Even so, he seems different from the man who left the governorship 27 years ago. Jerry Brown has been places, seen poverty and done things. He has been a hands-on mayor. He believes in Earl Warren-style bipartisanship and after all these years seems capable of practicing what he's preaching. Win or lose, he's no longer Governor Moonbeam.