http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00012/
Which incarnation is eyeing California's top job (again)?
By Jesse Walker
November 01, 2009
Officially, Jerry Brown isn't a candidate in California's budding
gubernatorial campaign. Unofficially, he's widely expected to take
the Democratic nomination and has a good shot at prevailing in the
general election. If he wins, he'll be reclaiming a job he left 28
years before, embarking on yet another chapter in a life that has
changed direction more times than a Sarah Palin sentence.
By turns eccentric and ambitious, spacey and shrewd, Brown has shown
more faces in the last four decades than any ordinary statesman: a
conventional heir to a political dynasty, a hippie-monkish governor
with a taste for visionary ideas, a populist insurgent and talk-show
host who rubbed shoulders with the radical Left, a nuts-and-bolts
mayor of a corroded California city. Whatever his next incarnation
might be, it will be rooted somehow in all the other versions that
came before it.
The First Face of Jerry Brown
When Jerry Brown entered politics, he wasn't called Jerry Brown. He
was Edmund G. Brown Jr., son of a former governor and, as far as the
average voter could tell, not so different from dad. At this point,
the younger Brown had been through several lives already: a seminary
student who stopped short of becoming a priest, a globetrotting
seeker who studied abroad, a lawyer who needed two tries to pass the
California Bar. But his public life began as Pat Brown's kid, getting
elected to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees in
1969 because he shared his father's name and then becoming
California's secretary of state more or less the same way.
The senior Brown was associated with popular programs ranging from
the Interstate to the state university system, and he was skilled at
working both sides of the aisle. He had made his share of political
misstepsRonald Reagan's right-wing rebellion had blindsided him in
1966but now he was a revered elder statesman. Voters remembered him
fondly enough to cast their ballots for an almost identical name.
In 1974, at age 36, Jerry Brown won the race to replace the retiring
Reagan as governor, defeating the Republican nominee Houston Flournoy
with a vague campaign that didn't reveal much about Brown's views. In
an entertaining tell-all, Jerry Brown: The Man on the White Horse,
J.D. Lorenz, a fired Brown aide, quoted his boss bragging about a TV
ad on crime: "I sound tougher than Flournoy, and I haven't proposed
anything the liberals can criticize me for. In fact, I haven't
committed myself to do anything at all." In Mother Jones, Paul Jacobs
reported watching the future governor work some potential voters. The
candidate didn't invoke space exploration or Buddhist economics. He
said, "Hello, I'm Jerry Brown. I'm Pat Brown's son, and I'm running
for governor. I hope you'll vote for me."
His unorthodox side was almost completely concealed. In that first
gubernatorial campaign, a minor candidateElizabeth Keathley of the
radical Peace and Freedom Partypromised that if elected, she'd adopt
Brown and give him his old room in the governor's mansion back. No
one suspected that once in office, Brown would decide to do without a
mansion altogether.
The Second Face of Jerry Brown
Brown served two four-year terms as California's governor, and during
that time he ran twice for the presidency. As his fame grew, he
developed a bizarre public reputation in much of the country, but in
his home state at least he was a successful politician. Widely
remembered as a flamboyant liberal, he in fact mixed ideas from Left
and Right, attracting support from Californians who ordinarily
despised Democrats. When he ran for re-election in 1978, he managed
to carry even the famously Republican Orange County.
In office, the younger Brown was anything but a clone of his father.
Pat Brown had been an establishment Democrat of the mid-20th century,
liberal but not radical, with both feet planted in the Roosevelt
coalition. Jerry was an unconventional governor with a fondness for
unconventional ideas; his style owed more to TV than to traditional
machine politics. If Ronald Reagan was a product of pop culture who
remade himself as a politician, Jerry Brown was a politician who made
himself a part of pop culture.
Like Reagan, Brown had a gift for media-savvy symbolism. "If a
picture was worth a thousand words," Lorenz wrote, "then, in Jerry's
view, the right symbol was worth a thousand pictures." Brown avoided
the expensive new governor's mansion and rented a $275 apartment
instead; he drove a Plymouth rather than being chauffeured in a limo;
he took a salary cut; he slept on a futon; he dated Linda Ronstadt;
he described his job as "a pain in the ass" and told reporters he
liked to govern through "creative inaction"; he put the Beat poet
Gary Snyder on the California Arts Council. If those impulses weren't
entirely consistent, that only enhanced the symbolic effect. Brown
didn't represent a coherent ideology so much as an inchoate gestalt.
In the New Age California of the '70s, that seemed appropriate.
Even Brown's critics sometimes cited the symbols that had gotten
attached to the man more often than his actual policies. For decades,
the phrase most closely associated with Brown has been "Governor
Moonbeam," a jibe from the Chicago columnist Mike Royko, though
hardly anyone remembers the proposal that prompted the label. (Brown
had suggested the state launch its own communications satellite. The
idea doesn't sound so flaky today.) Royko himself disavowed the
nickname after the governor gave a speech that impressed him at the
1980 Democratic Convention. But Brown still had trouble shaking the image.
Royko wasn't the only wit who found it hard to call back his
Brown-bashing jokes. Consider the Dead Kennedys, the San Francisco
punk band behind the most savagely funny pop-culture assault on the
governor, the 1979 single "California Über Alles." Many people saw
something authoritarian lurking behind Brown's easygoing rhetoric: he
told the New York Times that he offered "leadership," not "programs,"
and after his 1980 presidential campaign sputtered to a close, one of
his staffers told Time that Brown "began to believe he was the
founder of a new movement, a messiah of sorts." Impressions like that
prompted the band to record lyrics like these:
I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles and never frowns
Soon I will be president...
Zen fascists will control you
100 percent natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
By the end of the song, the "suede denim secret police" have led an
"uncool" girl to a concentration camp, where she's executed with
"organic poison gas." The author of those lyrics, Jello Biafra, would
speak favorably of Brown's third presidential campaign in 1992. But
like Royko, he couldn't stop a thought he'd already released into the world.
Brown's actual policies were just as mixed as his symbols. He was by
no means unfriendly to the Left. In his first presidential campaign,
in 1976, he picked Black Panther chief Elaine Brown as one of his
convention delegates. But Governor Brown was much more of a fiscal
conservative than Governor Reagan, even if he made arguments for
austerity that the Republican would never use. (At one point, to get
across the idea that a lean organization could outperform a bloated
bureaucracy, he offered the example of the Viet Cong.) Reagan had
raised taxes several times and boosted spending by an average of 12.2
percent a year. In his first year as governor, by contrast, Brown
increased spending by just 4.6 percent, less than the rate of
inflation. He wasn't always so restrained in the rest of his reign,
but he was thriftier than his predecessor, accumulating one of the
biggest budget surpluses in California history. In Brown's first
gubernatorial campaign, he had denounced "recycled Reaganism." In
Brown's first year in office, Reagan's director of programs and
policies joked that his old boss "thinks Jerry Brown has gone too far
to the right."
Brown also favored a balanced budget amendment and, though he opposed
the tax-cutting Proposition 13 while it was on the ballot, he slashed
spending merrily to meet its requirements once the initiative became
law. Sometimes his rhetoric seemed to question the very premises of
the welfare state. "The income supplement is never going to be enough
if people are estranged from society," he told Time in 1975. "But if
you have children to take care of you, friends, a nice community,
it's a winner."
At the same time, he liberalized the state's marijuana law,
decriminalized homosexuality, and strongly opposed the death penalty.
This combination of fiscal austerity and social tolerance might seem
libertarian. Indeed, Eric Garris wrote a generally favorable piece
about Brown for Reason in 1975, and Murray Rothbard praised him that
same year in The Libertarian Forum, though his later remarks about
the governor were more caustic. Brown even hired the old
left-libertarian firebrand Wilson Clark as his energy adviser. But
Brown also called for mandatory national service, endorsed the
Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill, and deployed a series of
subsidies and regulations to enact his environmental agenda. In that
same Time interview, he turned from denouncing government planning to
declaring that public intervention would be necessary to reach full employment.
Many New Agers straddled the boundaries between Left and Right and
between libertarianism and statism. But Brown drew on opposite wings
of the New Age as well. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Brown
hailed two intellectual inspirations: the small-is-beautiful
economist E.F. Schumacher and the inventor/futurist Buckminster
Fuller. It's difficult to imagine two more different thinkers.
Schumacher was the guru of accepting our limits, Fuller the prophet
of limitless possibility. But if you wanted to sum up the cocktail
that was the crunchy California counterculture of the '70s, it would
be hard to find a better pair to invoke. The number of consistent
Fullerites or Schumacherians in the world was dwarfed by the number
of people who were open-minded enough to read both. Fuller and
Schumacher were both staples of the Whole Earth Catalog, a
publication whose sensibility Brown brought to the governorship.
(Indeed, Whole Earth regular J. Baldwin joined the state Office of
Appropriate Technology, a Brown invention, and Whole Earth founder
Stewart Brand was named a special adviser to the governor. Brown even
contributed to the Whole Earth spin-off CoEvolution Quarterly,
sitting in on interviews with libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
and neoconservative futurist Herman Kahn.)
Perhaps this was just a more intense variety of politics as usual.
Nearly every politician dreams of being all things to all people;
Brown had found a way to treat that inconstancy as an Aquarian
virtue. ("Doonesbury" depicted the governor's supporters chanting,
"Hey, ho! Go with the flow!") Yet there was something more here,
something that spoke to why Brown was a man of pop culture as well as
politics. For many Americans he had come to embody postwar
California, a Democratic yin to Reagan's Republican yang.
And something else was at work. With Watergate and the aftereffects
of the '60s, mainstream American liberalism moved simultaneously to
the left and the right; for the first time in decades, there was a
quasi-libertarian current in the Democratic Party. The new liberals
were more skeptical of the national-security state, more supportive
of civil liberties, and more critical of corporate power. Their
skepticism toward centralized authority led them to use the phrase
"big government" disparagingly, just like the Reaganites, and to push
through more economic deregulation than President Reagan ever would.
One effect of freeing the airline and trucking industries, after all,
was to bust up some long-lived corporate cartels.
Obviously this wasn't the dominant faction of the party, but it
wasn't limited to Brown either. It flared when Eugene McCarthy
attacked the Internal Revenue Service, when Fred Harris called for
abolishing the Interstate Commerce Commission, when George
McGovernGeorge McGovern!declared, "Government has become so vast
and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the
interests of ordinary citizens." It had a foothold in the Carter
administration, which flirted with legalizing marijuana and embraced
bills that deregulated planes, trains, and trucks. Even the
thoroughly technocratic Michael Dukakis paid lip service to such
ideas during his first term as governor of Massachusetts.
If the current had a standard-bearer, it was Brown, with his mix of
populist bravado, social tolerance, and fiscal restraint. But when
Brown challenged Carter for the presidency in 1980, he failed. Being
a pop figure, he managed even to flop in a pop-saturated way. The
governor brought in Francis Ford Coppola to produce a live half-hour
TV special in Madison, Wisconsin, shortly before the state's primary.
The results might be the biggest blot on Coppola's filmography:
Brown's microphone died, the program opened with a pair of typos
("Live from Madisno, Wisoc"), and images that were supposed to appear
behind Brown instead materialized on the candidate's face. Coppola
later said the show "looked as if it were a transmission from some
clandestine place on Mars."
Brown returned to Sacramento, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate, and
left office in 1983. Then he dropped out of politics and traveled the
world. At one point he turned up in Japan, studying Zen.
The Third Face of Jerry Brown
In 1989, Brown became the chairman of the California Democratic
Party. He threw himself into the business of raising money and
getting out the vote. After two years, he quit. Denouncing the
"confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in
Washington," he entered the 1992 race for the Democratic presidential
nomination.
He seemed to be the most left-wing and right-wing man in the field.
In an early debate, when moderator Cokie Roberts asked the candidates
if they would have paroled an ex-con who had recently raped a child,
Brown declared the query manipulative and delivered an extemporaneous
speech about the ways fear of crime feeds a loss of civil liberties.
The same candidate called for term limits, a flat tax, and the
abolition of the Department of Education. His willingness to break
with liberal orthodoxy on taxes led to denunciations from the party
regulars, but by the end of the race he had been embraced by much of the Left.
That was partly because he was the only candidate remaining besides
Bill Clinton, the establishment's man; partly because he enjoyed the
early support of heterodox leftists such as novelist Gore Vidal and
columnist Alexander Cockburn; and partly because he moved leftward on
one major issue, denouncing NAFTA as the campaign entered the Rust
Belt. It was also because Brown had made himself a symbol again. His
campaign embraced the emerging alternative media of talk radio and
cable TV, and it financed itself with a 1-800 number. (At the first
Democratic debate, Brown aggravated the moderator by holding up a
sign with his phone number on it every time he answered a question.)
It was a grassroots campaign driven by small donationsno
contributions greater than $100 were acceptedand it was more
successful than any mainstream analyst expected, drawing in around
120,000 donors and carrying three states. In a year when Pat Buchanan
was leading one populist charge on the Right and Ross Perot was
leading another in the radical center, Brown emerged as their
equivalent on the Left. The fact that the trio more or less agreed on
several central issuestrade deals, military intervention, the power
of the American establishmentmade their triple blitz all the more intriguing.
In the wake of the campaign, Brown seemed to grow even more radical.
He got his own talk show on Pacifica, the long-lived leftist radio
network. He interviewed Noam Chomsky for Spin. He declared himself a
"recovering politician" and resigned from the Democratic Party. He
even moved into a commune. When he finally re-entered politics, his
ambitions were local: the man who once had governed the nation's most
populous state, and had aspired to be president of the entire
country, now wanted to tend his own garden as mayor of Oakland, a
mid-sized city and one of the most left-wing municipalities in the
United States.
During the race, Brown veered away from the visionary talk toward
such elemental issues as development and crime. But even his
law-and-order plans had a radical scent. Brown called for
establishing 57 neighborhood crime-prevention councils, not just to
contain misbehavior but to establish "a form of democratic powerthe
power from below." The man somehow managed to sound like an anarchist
even when he was mulling ways to crack down on lawbreakers.
He was easily elected. And then he changed again.
The Fourth Face of Jerry Brown
As mayor, Brown allied himself with cops and developers. He shooed
away citizens who fretted that a new condo would disturb some ducks,
aggravated labor activists by courting investment from The Gap,
allowed the Marines to conduct urban-warfare training maneuvers in
the city, and pushed through public funding for the Oakland Military
Institute, a prep school for members of the California Cadet Corps.
Now he was being denounced by his former allies on the Left and
praised in places like the neoconservative City Journal. During the
California recall election of 2003, he became a regular on right-wing
radio stations, bashing Democratic Gov. Gray Davis with glee.
Some of this shift wasn't as severe as it seemed. The military school
was a charter school, and the charter-school movement was an easy fit
with Brown's old decentralist rhetoric. (Brown told City Journal that
he would also love to see a charter academy inspired by the legendary
free school Summerhill.) And there were plenty of people on the Left
who loathed Davis and supported his recall. But Brown governed as a
pragmatic centrist, not a New Age guru or a populist radical. In
2000, he rejoined the Democratic Party and endorsed Al Gore in the
primariesthe better to maintain federal funding for his city, he
said. (The old Brown wasn't entirely dead, though. In the general
election he voted for Ralph Nader.)
The strongest sign that Brown had changed his stripes yet again
didn't involve a shift from the Left to the Right. It was a shift
from the local to the large. After eight years atop Oakland, Brown
the relapsed politician ran to be the state attorney general. He took
office in January 2007, setting the stage for the latest phase of his career.
The Fifth Face of Jerry Brown
Three and a half decades ago, Jerry Brown replaced a retired movie
star as the chief executive of California. Now he's interested in
doing the same thing again. A lot can change in the next year, but at
the moment he's generally favored to win the Democratic nomination:
halfway through 2009, Brown's campaign war chest already held $7.3
millionand he isn't even a declared candidate yet.
Many of Brown's earlier enthusiasts have given up on him. Cockburn
recently upbraided the likely candidate for the "cynicism" of "a
platform that denounces medical care for prisoners as a frivolous
expense." Still, Brown's earlier personae aren't absent from his
budding campaign. The young governor who told Time it was "a very
salutary exercise to learn to live with" the "limit to the good
things we have in this country" is now telling the same magazine that
we're in, yes, "an era of limits." At a time when Washington
Democrats think the way out of the recession is to encourage
unsustainable consumer spending, Brown is denouncing the dangers of
debt. "We're borrowing what we don't have to buy things we don't
need," he said earlier this year, in a remark aimed not just at
ordinary citizens but at the government itself. Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, like Governor Reagan before him, has spent heavily
after being elected on a platform of fiscal restraint. The young
Jerry Brown brought some discipline to the state's books. Perhaps the
septuagenarian Brown can do the same.
Or perhaps he'll just pander. The man has reversed course so many
times before that there's no reason to assume he'll stand by anything
he says. When Jerry Brown wants power, he has a good sense of what he
has to do to win and maintain it.
The fifth face of Jerry Brown might bear a family resemblance to the
first face of Jerry Brown. The attorney general of the state of
California isn't an inexperienced kid running on his father's name,
but he looks more than a little like his father, a long-lived
statesman who had his share of principles but tried not to let them
get in the way of political survival. Jerry Brown is an intelligent
man with a genuine love of ideas and an intuitive grasp of left-coast
culture. If he's more likely than most politicians to say something
deeply silly, he's also more likely to say something deeply right.
But at his core, he's Edmund G. Brown.
--
Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason and author of Rebels on the
Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America.
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