BROWN on BROWN : A Give-and-Take With the Former Governor on His Life, Politics, America and the State of Humanity

EDMUND G. BROWN JR. ENTERED elective politics as a candidate for the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, a low rung on the political ladder. That was 20 years ago. He went on to become secretary of state and a two-term governor. His political career also included runs for President in 1976 and 1980. He was considered one of the most exciting and controversial leaders of his generation. He retreated from political life after a 1982 defeat in a run for the U.S. Senate. During the next six years, he traveled, studied and waited. Now he’s back, starting his second political career as a candidate for chairman of the California Democratic Party.

These days, he steps before his audiences awkwardly, just as he always did. His carriage is wooden, and his hands have no place to go. A slight grimace signals his discomfort. He carries no 3x5 note cards, no leather binders with TelePrompTer scripts.

Then, he begins to speak. It’s hard to tell at that instant whether the awkwardness actually disappears or not, but no one notices any longer. People stop watching and start listening. Jerry Brown is telling them what is on his mind now. And almost without exception, whether they hate him or love him--or both--Brown-watchers are engrossed by the rapid firing of his intellect.

As he is fond of observing, Brown was the last major contender for the presidency who had no speech writer. Like no one else in politics, his thoughts are his own--his property, his proud currency. In an era when even lowly press secretaries are constrained to utter only “prepared statements” and when almost everyone accepts “no comment” as a legitimate response, Brown is a renegade.

For better or for worse, or maybe a little of both, Brown, born into politics the son of a politician, insists on playing outside the rules--he always has. And the passage of time has done nothing but hone a provocative edge on the question: What’s on Jerry Brown’s mind now?

Times political writer John Balzar, who has covered Brown for 15 years, prepared these observations about today’s Democrats, the play of California politics and this man once known as “Gov. Moonbeam.” Brown, now 50, offers his own perspectives in reply. The former governor wrote his portion of this dialogue at a portable word processor in his office and in his new apartment in San Francisco.

THE SEEKER AND THE LESSONS LEARNED

By now, almost everyone has heard that Jerry Brown has traveled the world the past six years searching for answers, staring into the face of impoverishment and rolling up his sleeves alongside Mother Teresa.

His critics dismiss Brown’s wanderings as self-indulgence, a retreat from the political battlefield at a time when many of his ideals and associates were under fire. “If he had really wanted to empathize with the poor he could have gone to Oakland, where an ex-governor could have an impact,” says Richard Katz, a Democratic assemblyman from the San Fernando Valley. “I don’t understand why he has to go to India for a three-week window of empathy. That’s the part of Jerry Brown that misses it for me.”

Demands another Democratic politician: “Where was he when Rose Bird was at the stake?” Bird, of course, was the woman Brown appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court who later was defeated in a savage campaign with few important defenders willing to come to her aid. Brown wrote a single newspaper piece in her defense and refused all other comment.

Brown’s admirers see just the opposite in his journeys. They describe a contemporary Diogenes willing to venture far and risk ridicule to gain new insight and renew his intellectual strength. They ask: In an America of timid politicians bent to the winds of public-opinion polls, why attack Brown for daring to stand up and be different? And some of his closest friends say there’s no difference between Brown the private traveler and Brown the public politician. He is a man said to be seeking a moral order to all areas of life. By his own admission, Brown knows only two vocations: politics and religion.

One of Brown’s longtime associates, Los Angeles pollster Richard Maullin, puts it best: “Jerry speaks most articulately and comfortably in normative terms--about the moral order of things. What’s right? What’s wrong? What is the purpose for which we engage in government?”

After leaving office in January, 1983, I knew that I would spend time apart from the political pursuits of the previous decade. For a while, I worked establishing a political journal called New Perspectives and raising money for Democrats. I also spent several months in Mexico and visited China and the Soviet Union. But after two years of what was still essentially politics, I decided to explore something different. First, I traveled to Japan, where I lived in a prewar Japanese house and studied Zen meditation with an 80-year-old Buddhist teacher. His students included people of many nationalities and religions. Then I went to visit Mother Teresa in India. And still later, at the request of CARE, I briefly visited Bangladesh as one of its special envoys.

What I learned fundamentally is just how prosperous and powerful America really is. But I also learned how strong the people are who survive even in the most adverse conditions. The indomitable will to overcome obstacles, which I found in the Third World, is profoundly inspiring and reflective of human courage at its best. So also is the intensity of life. Children of all ages, one often holding onto another, mothers, always with one or two little children at their sides, old people, incredible physical labor, crowded streets, people jammed together. Less separation and distance. The whole range of human life is not hidden. It is right out there in the street.

I went to India not to see misery but to learn firsthand how one woman could make a difference. Juxtaposing the poverty of Calcutta with the joy and service of Mother Teresa and her followers is the miracle. Instead of being overcome by an impossible task, she has set the example of how to combat misery. Instead of hatred, she has demonstrated the power of wholehearted service. It has not ended poverty, but it has transformed the lives of millions.

That is the lesson: not to be overcome by the enormity of injustice or the intractability of problems, but to know that each person can change something and make it better. In an age of increasing cynicism, no lesson is more important or more powerful.

I cannot pass over the religious aspect of Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. For them, there is no watering down of the message. The orthodoxy is pure, the morality without equivocation, and the ritual devotional and utterly simple. She puts forth a call that is at once parochial and completely universal. It is one I find difficult to follow but impossible to ignore.

THE CHALLENGE OF BEING A DEMOCRAT

Democrats have become very accomplished at self-analysis and self-flagellation.

They run. They lose. They turn on themselves and ask, “Why?”

The election of 1988 stung. On porches of housing projects and in parlors of lavish estates, party faithful still have little else to talk about except the presidency that got away. Again. As they have after so many elections this generation, they wonder: What is wrong with us?

Their self-examination has taken on a familiar pattern. Members of a political party that once embodied the values of the working class, Democrats gnash their teeth over the image that the party has become a crazy quilt of the poor, minorities, gays, the carefree rich, featherbedders and freebooters.

Democrats complain that their last presidential candidate was too cold. Their strategists lacked experience, their theorists came up empty, their rationale for governing in 1988 was unclear, their enemies were unprincipled. Entire sections of the country have been ceded to the GOP. And so forth.

There is little cause for partying in the Democratic Party. So its members talk about winning through change. They talk about finding a new kind of Democrat--one with a new ethic, new talents and new spirit--to build a new, successful consensus.

Jerry Brown has always fancied himself out there on the exhilarating edge of “new.” Fifteen years ago, he had bright new ideas about rejuvenating the party. In the ‘70s, when computerized games were coming into vogue, he was called a disciple of the “Atari” school of Democratic politics. Today his style has come to be generically known as the politics of “new ideas.”

But is “new” really the answer? If so, why doesn’t it work better?

Sen. Alan Cranston is a master at making the old Democratic ideals work. He won reelection to a fourth term in 1986 against Ed Zschau, a young, energetic, moderate Republican. Cranston embraced an old-fashioned Democratic coalition of feminists, gays, labor, environmentalists, the elderly. While Zschau tried to claim the futurist mantle for the GOP, Cranston exploited the well-tested themes of Senate seniority, experience and trust. Zschau pictured himself as a modern pragmatist. Cranston offered a compelling contrast as a traditional idealist.

The inventory of triumphant traditionalists goes on. Both Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown Jr. (D-San Francisco) and Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) are durable Democrats who probably haven’t spent a sleepless night for lack of a “new ideas” agenda. Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced) is a youngish man with a traditional Democratic bread-and-butter approach to politics. He has risen to the innermost circle of the party’sleadership in the House, third behind the Speaker. Consider, too, California’s big-city mayors: veteran Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and newcomer Art Agnos of San Francisco. Hardly nouveau.

What is incredible is how long it takes the obvious to become apparent. For at least a decade now, our nation’s conventional politics have veered off into a never-never land of negative rhetoric and divisive scapegoating. Government, minorities and judicial leniency have been made the whipping boys, with private business offered as the answer. Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian and George Bush are the heroes. All three conducted the same campaign--often with overlapping personnel: crack down on crime, trim down government and free up those with money to invest and spend as they see fit.

Nothing new in any of this, except for the conditions under which it all takes place. American society has changed so much that the conservative bromides have become hollow.

Crime, gangs and drugs are as bad as ever. Homelessness has spread, and home ownership has become more difficult. Real income for the average worker is down 11% over the past decade. Big pieces of American business are less competitive each year. The pool of skilled workers has shrunk. Investment in education, the environment and civilian research and development has declined. Dependence on foreign energy has shot up. Nearly one of every four American children is born into a family below the official poverty line. Investment bankers make billions.

Given this absurd picture, should a Democrat be old or new? Should he favor the poor or the middle class? Well, what about turning to the people themselves? In 1988, Californians believed Ralph Nader, business’s Enemy No. 1, and voted against the insurance companies. They also disagreed with Gov. Deukmejian and appropriated more money for schools and more spending for worker health and safety. But at the same time, voters also chose George Bush. (Although not by much: a shift of less than 2% would have altered the outcome in California.)

Reading such tea leaves is never easy. But to me the lesson is inescapable. The successful Democrat must stand up for our party’s finest traditions: lifting the downhearted, regulating greed, respecting nature, welcoming change. The object is not to divide but to unite in the belief that we all share a common future. A rising tide lifts all boats, and Democrats know that forgetting about the rights of workers or the needs of the non-affluent drags us all down. If wages sink, millions drop out of school and families lack decent medical care; whatever is left of the middle class also suffers. Decent schools and healthy neighborhoods improve all of us, wherever we live and whatever we earn. Reducing the taxes of those with the most income and demeaning the public sector has not enriched society, it has made it poorer.

In 1974, I said California needed a new spirit. When I said that I sensed--however dimly--that the conditions that had shaped the mind and policies of Ronald Reagan, my predecessor as governor, had fundamentally changed, and we would have to change with them. The Cold War was dying, cheap energy was gone, the white majority was aging and diminishing and women were taking an increasing role in the work force. For many, these new facts made little impact, especially those whose positions were secure. They could continue to look out at the world through their old lenses without discomfort, expecting things to go on as they had. But for me--perhaps because of my own discontent--what had worked before seemed obsolete. In my mind, Watergate, Vietnam and the widespread antipathy to traditional politics signaled a crossing over to a very different world from the one in which I had grown up. Mastering it, or at least understanding it, became my driving goal.

This was a time when Eugene McCarthy was attacking Lyndon Johnson and the arrogance of his best and brightest. George Wallace was also attacking, but from the point of view of the threatened blue-collar worker and his vulnerable family. Reagan’s assault in California went beyond the others by simply indicting all Democrats as the big-spending culprits. Yet through all of these departures from the happier times of Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, the political situation continued to deteriorate. The gap between what we wanted in our society and what government was able to do widened.

But what is becoming apparent now is that billion-dollar prison expansions and deficit-creating tax cuts have not altered our dissatisfactory conditions. These will change only when a Democrat demonstrates that we can protect the middle class as we lift the poor and give them hope. Not one or the other, but both, done with a deep recognition of the solidarity of our society and how each of its members depends on the others. It is not a new message, just our historic promise to link people together in a common endeavor and prove that our strength comes from the well-being and commitment of each citizen. That is the idea behind our democracy, and it is as revolutionary today as it was 200 years ago.

THE DREAMS OF THE PAST

Jerry Brown was the dream merchant.

Many still hold grudges against him, to be sure. He has been accused of arrogance, self-absorption, intolerance, impatience. But even his critics agree that Brown had a gift for thinking big, for giving hope. He has always insisted that it is more interesting and worthwhile to ponder a perplexing question than to throw out a glib answer.

This tactic once held such breathtaking promise. For a brief moment during his governorship, he brought warring farmers and labor unions to the peace table. He sparked hopes of alleviating traffic congestion through alternative transportation, clean energy and measured growth. Business and environmentalists were excited by his ideas for a cleaner and more profitable state. He popularized the unconventional notion that California society could flourish with less drain on the resources of the planet and still provide more fulfillment for its citizens. In Brown, the have-nots, the immigrants and minorities and women, found someone who believed in their dreams for sharing the pie with the haves.

“I think Jerry Brown always was and still is way ahead of the rest of us,” says Assembly Speaker Brown. “One of his problems early on was that he was talking about the 21st Century when everyone else was interested in the present.” One way to measure his allure is that 12 books, pro and con, have been published about his career so far. By comparison, not one has yet emerged about his successor, Deukmejian.

Now, Brown again confronts political office. But the office of state party chairman has hardly been a platform from which to compete with the policy-makers elected by the people. “I’m not sure that job will provide him intellectual stimulation,” says his old aide-de-camp, state Controller Gray Davis.

Typically, though, Brown has his own dreams. As he tells the 2,800 or so Democratic Party activists who will elect a chairman, the choice is nothing less than Brown has ever presented--a choice of futures.

For most of this century, the Democratic Party has been the entry point for new people and new ideas. That has created problems, particularly when the ideas or the people seem strange or threatening. But without change, we stagnate and die. So even when our task is unregarded or unappreciated, we have to push on, extending the frontiers of possibility.

Appointing a bright, strong-minded woman as chief justice of our Supreme Court was not intended to soothe those whose image of tomorrow is a duplicate of the past. Placing women in charge of building the highways of California, managing its prisons and youth authority, overseeing its departments of health, finance, business, environment, veterans’ affairs, and agriculture and services was not designed for business as usual. All this was done because our prosperity and even our survival depends on recognizing that the role of women has dramatically changed. Unless we alter our institutions to accommodate this new reality, we will perpetuate injustice and impoverish our families, not to mention our economy. Upward mobility, flex time, child care, family assistance, comparable worth--all are part of the Democratic agenda to ensure that women, as well as men, fulfill their potential and contribute to themselves and society.

Giving farm workers, teachers and public employees the right to bargain collectively did not sit well with management. How could it? Power was shifted, and this always causes anxiety. Yet, in a nation dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, sharing responsibility for economic decisions that affect one’s life has to be counted as an advance. Even the latest theories of management now envision an increased role for ordinary workers. Dictation from the top is not only unfair, it is also non-competitive.

Holding back the aerial spraying of pesticides in an area populated by 500,000 people (during the 1980 Santa Clara County fruit fly infestation) until the federal government left no other choice was not popular. It was as close as one gets in civilian politics to “Apocalypse Now.” Yet, holding out for the least drastic approach--ground application of pesticide--strikes me as sound. The medical studies of malathion make it seem OK, but when it takes the paint off your car you have to pause and think: Do we know enough? Is there a safer way to eliminate the fly?

Nothing is more important than your health, and that’s why the Democratic Party has pressed for stronger laws to protect us from toxic chemicals and the pollution of our air and water. Yes, this raises the immediate cost of things and means more rules for business. But better to put our health and the health of our environment ahead of profit. In the long run, we are all better off.

Then there is the business of space, computers and new technologies. In business and in the military, nothing is too advanced or too expensive if it does the job. But in government and in schools, more primitive technology is the order of the day. One computer for every 30 students is thought to be impressive. Yet the time is almost here when, with technology, we could individualize learning and enable fast and slow learners alike to move at their own pace. The effectiveness of teachers can be significantly enhanced and the very best in education made available to every single student. More public-sector investments? Yes, and the sooner the better.

WHEN REALITY INTRUDES

Today is victory over yourself of yesterday.

-- Japanese guide to martial arts

No doubt Brown, the keen student of philosophy, has come across this familiar Zen directive many times. But what has he learned from it?

To tread on the subject of Brown’s first political career--its ideas and dreams--is to disturb dark and bitter ghosts of his legacy. His landmark law providing collective-bargaining rights for farm workers is barely used these days; his old ally Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers remain sworn enemies of farmers. UFW membership and contracts are dramatically on the decline. Brown’s go-slow policy on freeway building has become a punch line to Republican jokes. Electricity-generating windmills have become symbols of flakiness. His determination to open up government to women and minorities often comes down to two words of stinging rebuke: Rose Bird. “Small is beautiful” is a slogan long ago flung onto the political slag heap.

The problem was not the ideas, but Brown’s righteous unwillingness to pursue them. He acted in a belief that a leader’s job was not to defend an idea or nurture it to fruition. All he had to do was hatch it. Follow-up was for others.

Confronting Brown in 1989 are profound doubts about his willingness to work differently this time. The job of party chairman, after all, is one of organizing and building and details and paper work and listening and, most of all, teamwork. It is a job with the kind of bureaucratic demands and nuts-and-bolts discipline that Brown always mocked in his deeds.

Typical was the remark of Allan Panitch of Palos Verdes Estates, a Democrat who showed up one Sunday at a hotel-room gathering of activists to hear Brown campaign. “I don’t know what shape he is going to take--I’m here because I’m curious to see if there is anything different today than there was a few years ago,” he said. Panitch listened and walked away: “Still not sure.”

Some, like Cranston, say the chairmanship of the party is a perfect place for a theoretician, an idea man. Farm out the paper work, he says. “We need some inspiration along with the hard work.”

But others are struck by how much Brown seems determined to live up to his old stereotype--late, disorganized, easily distracted. One Republican strategist chortled from the sidelines: “The Democratic Party is a disorganized group. He’s a disorganized man. It’s a perfect match.”

The challenge for the Democratic Party in California is to bring the grass roots and the elected officials together in a powerful partnership. The party must be able to use direct mail, telemarketing and door-to-door contact with voters to build its political and financial strength. In June, the voters showed through the passage of two separate initiatives that they wish to curtail large campaign donations and create a better system of campaign finance. Nothing would meet this goal so well as a vast base of small contributors.

A political party is not something to be ashamed of. It should have the most modern management and technology available. This includes, in a state as large as California, offices in as many communities as possible and volunteer leaders in every precinct.

The goal must be to enable ordinary Democrats to improve their lives through political action. Health insurance, lower auto insurance rates, child care, education, transportation--these are among the most obvious initiatives the party must push. The party chairman has to reach out and build a dues-paying membership in the hundreds of thousands based on these issues. This is where the teamwork, the organization, the details come into play. This is what I expect to be judged on.

For Republicans, the political task has been simple: Fight crime and taxes, and blame Democrats for both. They have tried it every time for the past 20 years, and in more cases than not, it has worked. As a result, Democrats have been forced to look for more and more ingenious ways to insulate themselves.

Unfortunately, this has led us astray by diverting our attention from the core constituency needed to win. No matter how many police officers are hired, criminals sent to prison, or penalties enhanced, Republican strategists will always find some “permissiveness,” such as parolees committing crimes, to blame on Democrats. Once put on the defensive, Democratic candidates find it impossible to set the agenda. The result is that the issues of concern to core Democrats get lost and the turnout on Election Day reflects not the total electorate, but an unrepresentative sample skewed to the upper middle class. With such a stacked deck, it is no mystery why Democrats lose.

The answer, however controversial, is straightforward: Turn the party’s attention to those who form our natural clientele, but who have abandoned us because they see no difference between the two parties. But this must be done in a way that doesn’t divide the middle class from those of low income. Because, in fact, their interests are intertwined and our fundamental task is to prove this is so.

Building an effective constituency is what this strategy is called, and no Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt has done it in a way that endured. I certainly didn’t. My focus was on opening up the process and introducing new initiatives into what struck me as a pretty stale environment.

THE FUTURE, WHERE DREAMS AND REALITY MARRY

People are of different minds about Jerry Brown and the passage of time. Has tomorrow finally caught up with the futurist? Or did it pass him by?

Certainly, some of Brown’s ideas from the 1970s have gained renewed currency in the politics of the ‘80s. Temper your material yearnings and enjoy the “psychic rewards,” he told workers. Today, this is such a mainstream idea that even Republican President George Bush has criticized material gain as a shallow goal. Brown argued that a clean environment would attract business development, not discourage it. Today, many businessmen and growth advocates, once stern opponents, have stopped debating the point.

In a larger context, Brown was an early champion of quality-of-life issues in politics, a cause now in vogue from the cities to remote mountain communities. Even some of Brown’s most celebrated controversies have become embedded in the routines of life today. He was savaged by critics for promoting diamond lanes on freeways. But these car-pool lanes live on as an everyday part of commuting.

“Time has made it clear that a number of his ideas were just ahead of themselves. He has become part of today’s conventional wisdom,” says Richard Silberman, a San Diego businessman who served as state finance director under Brown.

But there is discordance, too, between Brown and the politics of the here and now.

A globe-trotting bachelor seems slightly out of place in a culture now brimming with talk of family values and an exploding new baby boom. Brown recently described his travels of self-awareness to India and Japan and elsewhere in a story in The Times. “I recommend it to anyone who has the chance,” Brown said. This remark drew angry outbursts from readers. “That shows how out of touch he is! Who has a chance to go gallivanting around the world?” one caller demanded.

Brown remains intrigued by the grand scale of things. He asks Californians to lift their eyes and regard themselves as members of the global village. The current trend, though, seems to find many Californians lowering their sights to just their homes and neighborhoods. The idea of one large homogeneous culture has fallen below the horizon in today’s pop sociology. Cocooning is the ‘80s version of “small is beautiful.”

The era has proved successful not for high-voltage dreamers like Brown, but for workaday administrators like Deukmejian and Bush and Sen. Pete Wilson and Cranston.

By 1982, my personal cycle of reform and innovation had been spent. The freshness with which I had stormed into California politics at the opening of the 1970s had aged through 12 exacting years in government. Endless speeches and sound-bites. Hours on the telephone, arguing this point or that. Making and defending appointments, fighting and compromising. Thousands of fund-raising meals. It all had worn down the edge. I knew in my bones that my beginner’s mind had become worn into tired grooves. It was time to leave, and the voters sent me packing.

Now after some years searching, exploring, waiting, taking the measure of my own consequences, I am back. This time, as I start again, I want to tackle what is perhaps the most difficult job in politics: building an effective party organization and making it work for its ordinary members.

The problem today is that even if Democrats get elected, the whole environment is so tilted to the right that it’s difficult to carry out what the rank-and-file members want. That is the rub. Unless we change the electoral marketplace, even electing Democrats to the highest offices will not fulfill our strongest aspirations. The precondition for that is a nuts-and-bolts organization that combines people, media and technology to deliver without apology the basic economic message that brought Democrats success in the past.

In some ways, political parties in America have become “anti-parties,” because they frustrate the ability of rank-and-file members to really have a voice. Like so much in modern life, political undertakings are often driven by expert control rather than broad-based participation and by donations from only a fraction of those registered with the party.

But there is another way. Its first stirrings were seen in the California Dukakis campaign when tens of thousands of people volunteered to urge their fellow citizens to vote. Ironically, with the privacy and autonomy of our separate lives, this was the first time many had the chance to knock on their neighbor’s door and meet the people who live near them. Wearing out some shoe leather in politics may be the best way to break down the barriers and come to know one’s neighbors. After all, this is what political life is really about: building community through action on the things we share in common.

I am convinced that we can build on this outpouring of activism a structure of participation that will enable Democrats in every community to have an impact on the political decisions that affect them. Technology may have weakened parties but it also now gives them the opportunity to involve millions of people in a systematic way: precinct work, registering voters, raising small donations and, most important, identifying and supporting state and local candidates as well as shaping the policies that they adopt.

The technology of involving people is available. The historic political cycle is ready to turn, away from the manipulation of fear and insecurity, toward empowering the citizens at large to take control of their lives.

Based on my own experience, I know that political action is fundamentally the common endeavor by which people come to trust themselves and thereby create a community that works. It is done not by repressing differences but by honoring our diversity. There is unimaginable potential in each one of us, which cries out for recognition and support. This is the core of what the Democratic Party in its best moments has always stood for.