Peter Schrag
After a week of media reintroductions, we now know that we have at least one moderate Republican running for governor, and that’s Jerry Brown.
No new taxes, he promises, no driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, downsize government, grow business, promote “cutting-edge environmental protections.”
With the possible exception of Senate candidate Tom Campbell, who’s more of a libertarian than a Republican, Brown may in fact be the only moderate Republican running for any major office anywhere in this half of the country.
To those of us who have watched Brown over the past 30-plus years – as governor in 1975-83, three-time candidate for president, candidate for the Senate, chairman of the California Democratic Party, mayor of Oakland, and attorney general – there have always been two constants about Brown.
One is his uncanny ability to reinvent himself. As governor in 1978, he fought hard to stop the passage of Proposition 13. Then, when it passed, he called himself a born-again tax cutter, embraced it, got the endorsement of Proposition 13 author Howard Jarvis and won re-election by a landslide.
A decade later, when he returned from his sojourn with Mother Teresa washing the feet of lepers in Calcutta, he declared that he’d learned to serve suffering humanity and (in 1989) leaped into the race for Democratic Party chairman, which made him the party’s chief fundraiser. Then, two years later, expressing his disgust with the influence of money on politics, he quit. Still later, he briefly called himself an independent, then returned to the Democratic Party.
The other constant is that he’s always been one of the most interesting politicians around – not just the most erudite, an attribute he makes little effort to conceal, but one of the smartest. That’s been both an asset and, when his preacher-didact got the better of him, a considerable liability. In The Bee, former editorial cartoonist Dennis Renault liked to portray him as a Mouseketeer.
When his sister Kathleen ran for governor in 1994, she portrayed herself as a “different shade of brown.”
Jerry Brown may have been prophetically correct when, as governor 30 years ago, he sermonized about the virtues of smallness, the “era of limits” and the need to lower expectations. Even then, he sometimes sounded half Republican.
But when his administration started to throttle down the big public programs for which his governor-father became famous, highway construction in particular, there was an uproar. The highway lobby excoriated his Department of Transportation Director, Adriana Gianturco, as the “giant turkey.”
It seems fairly certain that most of that stuff is behind Brown: It’s not likely that he will again appoint a Jane Fonda to the California Arts Council or name a person without judicial experience like Rose Bird as chief justice.
But his intuitive aversion to grandiosity, maybe nurtured in his formative years in the Jesuit seminary, maybe learned from models and friends like the priest and cultural critic Ivan Illich and the British economist E.F. Schumacher, author of a volume aptly titled “Small Is Beautiful,” may serve him well in this new age. It sometimes seemed out of tune in the 1970s and 1980s; it seems right on key now.
But if the 2010 model Jerry Brown has learned (as he says) to be more focused and patient, has he also unlearned his irreverent originality and lost the creative impulses that made him so interesting?
Some of the results of the originality, like his unorthodox appointments and his stillborn state space program, earned him the “Governor Moonbeam” title that bedevils him to this day, long after Chicago columnist Mike Royko, who stuck him with the label, apologized for it. But some, like the state’s farm labor law, Political Reform Act of 1974 that created the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission and which Brown wrote as he was running for governor in 1974, and the California Conservation Corps, were major innovations, never perfect, but better than what came before.
In his announcement last week, Brown said “we need someone with an insider’s knowledge, but an outsider’s mind.” Despite his spells of inattention as governor, he probably once had the “insider’s knowledge.” Whether it’s still pertinent given today’s divisive political climate is anyone’s guess.
And although there’s no way to know whether he still has the outsider’s mind, everything we’ve so far heard from the candidates in this campaign indicates that he may still have more of both than anyone else in, or running for, high office. The last real Democrat in the Governor’s Office was Jerry’s father, Pat Brown. During his own eight years, Jerry (then frequently known as “Junior” in the Capitol) worked hard, and with considerable success, not to be like him. It’s good to have someone running as a moderate Republican this year. It’s too bad there isn’t a real Democrat.