Brown the old pol as the ‘fresh new face’

In a year dominated by brash political novices, 72-year-old veteran Jerry Brown propelled himself back into the governor’s office Tuesday with a mix of guile, good luck and timing.

Brown’s ascension to the job he held half a lifetime ago came in dramatic fashion, as he vanquished both a national Republican tide and the expansive wallet of Republican Meg Whitman, who broke a spending record by putting more than $141 million of her own money into the race.

It represented a remarkable transformation, both political and personal. The Brown who first ascended to the governorship in 1975, with a full head of jet black hair, ascended a second time balding and slightly stooped. The governor who gained followers and ridicule talking about satellites and the avant-garde found his footing the second time around talking about the brick-and-mortar accomplishments of his father, Pat Brown, governor from 1959 to 1967.

His victory defied critics -- including those in his own party -- who complained openly as Brown sat out most of the spring and summer to husband his resources for the fall when, he insisted, voters would turn his way. He relied on a rarity in this year’s politics, a lean and cheap campaign that spent what money it had when it counted most.

Most central to victory was Brown himself. His background as a former governor and Oakland mayor, among other roles, played to California’s historic tendency to elect veteran officeholders and send first-timers to the sidelines.

The downside of his experience, Republicans believed, was the anti-incumbent mood afoot this year. But Brown’s legendary quirkiness set him apart from that disdained class. He was further inoculated when he was compared with Whitman, who often relied on well-lighted sets and memorized lines, as if campaigning on a sound stage.

In the end, a candidate who had been around the block for 40 years came off as a more authentic alternative than a newcomer with all the resources Whitman could command.

“Who would have thought that ... Jerry Brown would be the fresh new face in the race for governor?” asked Jim Brulte, a former GOP legislative leader. “Who would have believed that?”

In a year like this one, particularly, elections can turn on any number of pivot points. In California this year, almost everything broke Brown’s way.

Two opponents bailed from the Democratic primary before that contest had even started, sparing him the money a contested June election might have cost. Allies in organized labor kept Brown’s campaign afloat during the summer by airing ads critical of Whitman. Voters shrugged off Brown’s occasional verbal miscues as if they only proved his honesty. In the last several weeks, when voter attention turned to the race, Brown’s advertisements were lancingly effective, skewering Whitman’s background and her character. And, of course, the electoral turf was mostly Democratic.

Not unimportant were Whitman’s missteps.

Her campaign was premised on the notion that as a business titan -- she led EBay for 10 years -- she could bring a financial rigor to Sacramento. But she made the argument by spending astonishing sums of money, most of it from her own pocket. Some of it was necessary to introduce a political unknown to a California electorate notorious for its nonchalance.

But even early on, Whitman supporters were concerned that the spending would backfire among voters worried about their own finances. As one Republican said in January, when Whitman had spent only $39 million, there would be a point where “people all of a sudden say, ‘Gee, that money could be better used to save people in Haiti.’”

Coupled with the lavish spending was its tone. Whitman made her initial introductions when few people were paying attention, and by the time they were focused on the race, her message was blisteringly negative, reinforcing a ruthless corporate persona. Her advertisements stretched the truth repeatedly, most notably when she aired an ad based on an erroneous CNN report -- and refused to rescind the ad when the error became widely known.

Whitman also spent much campaign time impugning welfare recipients and illegal immigrants. Both are traditional targets in difficult economic times, but ones that require a deft touch when the candidate is a billionaire. The whiff of coldness was reinforced when Whitman’s former housekeeper announced in a tear-strewn news conference in late September that the candidate had thrown her out “like a piece of garbage” after she admitted that she was in the country illegally.

All together, the campaign was left with an unsympathetic face at a time when voters were, more than ever, concerned about their futures and the elected officials who can affect them. Polls taken as the election neared showed that although voters gave Whitman points for her proposals, they simply disliked her. And, campaign observers believed, they stopped listening to her.

Dan Schnur, chairman of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and a former Republican consultant, said most wealthy candidates lose not because of their money but because they leap into politics at the top, where scrutiny is acute. He equated them with rookie phenoms who flame out in the major leagues because they had no chance to sharpen their skills in the minors.

“Everybody makes mistakes, but conventional politicians make those rookie mistakes in races for City Council and state Assembly,” he said. “There’s a reason most plays open off-Broadway.”

Brown’s strengths, it turned out, lay in the many times he had opened plays everywhere, on stages local, statewide and national. As a two-term governor and a three-time presidential candidate, he is notoriously confident in his own political instincts, and hewed closely to them this year. Luckily for him, the political environment aligned with those instincts.

He stayed out of the race until the last minute, in part out of financial necessity and in part because he feared giving voters time to turn on him. Campaigns, he told a San Francisco radio station in early spring, when he was still an unofficial candidate, “are long, arduous and mistake-prone.... They go on 10 months. I can tell you that after a few months, people already start getting tired of you.”

When he finally jumped into the race in March, he co-opted the “tea party” sentiments then filtering through the country with his announcement that he would return power to local governments and would approve no taxes without a vote by Californians. And he noted that the state had already placed bets on an outsider, in the 2003 recall that brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governor’s office.

“We found out that not knowing is not good,” he said. “We need someone with insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s mind.”

Brown’s arguments benefited from three things.

Among voters who remembered Brown’s tenure more or less fondly, the current strategy echoed his first “era of limits” tenure, making him seem in tune with today’s sentiments. Among younger voters, particularly those who registered in recent years, it was enough that he was a Democrat, as most of them are. And even those with only a glancing understanding of Brown’s history knew he had presided over a California that, for all its faults, worked better than the California of today. Even Whitman, in a commercial immediately skewered by Brown’s campaign, spoke of coming to the state when the California dream was alive and well -- a time when Brown was governor.

The first time around, Brown seemed to spurn his father’s old-school approach, but he won a return to the governor’s office by asserting the bountiful optimism that was the older man’s hallmark.

“Old people have a lot of good ideas,” he told a crowd of senior citizens -- his peers -- in Fresno last weekend. “You build on the past. You build on what your family taught you.... And I want to build on what my father did. He’s the one who built the universities, the freeways and the water project. I want to follow in that spirit.”

cathleen.decker@latimes.com