‘I Will Win’ Democratic Party Job, Brown Says

As state Democratic activists gathered here Friday to elect a new party chairman, former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. predicted confidently that he has enough votes to nail down the job.

“I’ve been on the phone and I’ve talked to enough delegates to know I will win,” Brown said at a packed press luncheon.

Earlier in the day, Brown’s competitor for the job, Menlo Park investment banker Steve Westly, insisted that his survey of convention delegates has convinced him that “it’s absolutely wide open.”

The party’s 2,800 convention delegates will decide today which man leads the state Democrats into the 1990s.

Recent court rulings have given the state political parties more independence and potentially more power than they have enjoyed for more than half a century after the early California reform movement severely limited them in order to keep them from being used by special interests.

Sudden Potential

Suddenly, what was for years a largely ceremonial job for party activists has the potential for becoming something much bigger, and that is what has attracted Brown, who has been largely uninvolved in politics since he lost a race for the U.S. Senate in 1982.

His campaign for state Democratic chairman has drawn the support of most top California Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who apparently want to make sure the job is in the hands of an experienced politician if it is going to wield power.

This has angered Westly’s supporters, who have labored for years in the vineyards, going to meetings and doing election tasks the politicians often ignore.

For months Westly and his admirers have been criticizing Brown from afar, arguing that the former governor, never known for his attention to detail, would be a disaster in a job that requires a lot of nuts-and-bolts work.

But on Friday Westly got a dose of reality as he and Brown squared off on opposite ends of town for their press conferences.

Westly drew a small contingent of reporters, who asked him fewer than a dozen questions and then drifted away.

170 at Lunch

Brown, by contrast, drew 170 people to a lunch, including various government press spokesmen, most of the state political press corps, correspondents for national magazines and reporters for Los Angeles television stations who have not come up here to do a story for months.

Leaving the lunch, Brown was trailed onto the sidewalk by a paparazzi -like group of photographers.

One of Brown’s selling points is his ability to raise money for the party because of his celebrity status and his powerful connections.

But Westly, in his press conference, noted that Brown was so unpopular near the end of his second term as governor that the Republicans invoked his name in fund-raising letters.

“Who will he raise more money for, the Democrats or the Republicans?” asked Westly.

Later, Brown insisted that he would not hurt his party’s prospects in the 1990 elections, saying, “People will distinguish me from the Democratic candidates for statewide office.”

Brown acknowledged, however, that paying attention to nuts-and-bolts matters--one of the duties of a party chairman--was never his strong point, but he said this is not the side of his personality that has infuriated the more traditional politicians.

“It’s not my attention span,” he said. “It’s that I’ve gotten myself into a business where a lot of people are interested in things I’m not interested in.”

As for whether he sees the state chairman’s job as a steppingstone to elective office, Brown was pretty direct.

“Obviously, I don’t intend for this to be my terminal position,” he said in response to a question. “Being a political person, you have to assume that somewhere down the line I might be available.”

Times political writer John Balzar contributed to this report.