Jerry Brown Stamps His Imprint on Party : Politics: The former governor has raised some eyebrows during his stint as the Democrats’ state chairman. What he has accomplished will be evident this weekend at convention in Los Angeles.

Former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.’s Democrats convene in Los Angeles this weekend, and one year after he took over the state party, Brown has definitely put his stamp on it.

No party chairman has ever raised as much money in one year as Brown--more than $2 million.

But then, no chairman has ever spent it so fast. The money’s pretty much all gone, according to party sources. The expenditures, some critics say, reveal Brown’s short attention span and also raise questions about his judgment.

On the plus side, the spending illustrates Brown’s instinctive grasp of cutting-edge technology, and even his critics concede that he has made the state Democratic Party more exciting.

As for the convention, Brown’s putting his stamp on that too.

If you are a candidate and need some work space at the Convention Center, Brown is asking $2,500 up front for the party coffers, according the the managers of various statewide contenders.

Want to post a campaign sign? That’ll be 25 bucks, please. And you can only post two--Brown doesn’t like clutter.

Like to bring your college-age daughter to view democracy in action? That’ll be $40 for an observer’s pass.

“Whatever happened to the Democratic Party for the little guy?” fumed Sam Singer, campaign manager for attorney general candidate Ira Reiner.

But Brown’s top aide, Cathy Calfo, retorted: “Wait a minute--all of these are examples of entrepreneurship. Democrats need more of that.”

One thing California Democrats definitely need, as Brown himself acknowledges, is some evidence that they are not rapidly losing all hope of carrying the state in presidential and gubernatorial races.

The most recent bad news on this score was the secretary of state’s report that for the first time in 56 years, the party’s share of registered voters slipped below 50%. The Republicans continue to gain registered voters, now claiming nearly 40%.

So, one thing Brown may be asked to explain to the delegates this weekend is why he has not delivered on his promise a year ago to greatly expand the party’s base in California.

In a recent interview at his home in San Francisco, he looked at the battle for voters from another angle--referring to the Jan. 30 special election in the San Joaquin Valley’s 27th Assembly District in which Democrat Sal Cannella defeated Republican Richard Lang.

“We won Cannella. We did it, the state party, the new California Democratic Party,” boasted the former governor, who, at 52, has turned almost portly. With his thinning black hair and silver sideburns, he looked like a badger as he pondered each question about his stewardship of the state party.

Sitting nearby with all the party’s facts and figures, Calfo, the Democrats’ executive director, said that Brown authorized the party to spend $280,000 to help elect Cannella, an unheard-of sum by a state party in a special Assembly election.

Most of the money went to a widely praised absentee-voter drive that gave Cannella a big advantage over Lang. The news there is that for years the Republicans dominated the use of absentee ballots.

Under Brown, the state Democratic Party’s field operation also played major roles in two other special elections: last September’s election of Gary Condit in the 15th Congressional District, also in the San Joaquin Valley, and last December’s victory by Lucy Killea in the 38th Senate District in San Diego County.

“What we have learned is that the state party can step in and help in targeted elections,” Brown said.

However, the reviews of Brown’s party chairmanship continue to be mixed.

He infuriated some activists recently when he refused to renew the contract of the party’s legendary voter-registration expert, former farm labor organizer Marshall Ganz.

To some, that signaled Brown’s short attention span, since he had once talked obsessively about Ganz and his many successes in the past.

Brown said his decision showed good judgment: Ganz was making $7,500 a month and wanted $20,000 a month in his new contract.

“I think I should get credit,” Brown replied, “for seeing that there is another way to do voter registration than the way we were doing it. It was very expensive, for one thing.”

Brown also laid off more than a dozen party staff members as he scaled down the voter registration effort.

Said Calfo: “We also concluded that voter registration and turnout is best done at the local level by local officials.”

About the time Ganz was departing, Brown raised more eyebrows by hiring his longtime confidant, Jacques Barzaghi, to edit the party’s new magazine, Democracy, for a fee of $3,500 a month.

Barzaghi is an object of much curiosity at Democratic get-togethers, as delegates roll in from the hinterlands.

He has a shaved head, the messianic look of an intellectual revolutionary and a reputation for insulating Brown from party regulars.

He’s also eccentric. When Brown was elected state chairman at a tumultuous convention inSacramento last year, Barzaghi changed suits three times before dinner.

“Jacques doesn’t look like your average Democrat from Fresno or Richmond,” said Occidental College professor Derek Shearer, who was an adviser to Brown in his first gubernatorial Administration in the mid-1970s.

“Putting Jacques on the payroll makes me think Jerry is about to do to the Democratic Party what he did to the state,” continued Shearer, one of those most critical of Brown. “He has incredibly bad judgment. He brought us Prop. 13 because he refused to use the surplus in 1978 to give property tax relief. And he made it impossible for progressives to hang onto the state Supreme Court when he appointed Rose Bird.”

That was a reference to former state Supreme Court Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, who became so controversial that she was rejected along with two other liberal justices by voters in 1986.

In an interview one recent night in the renovated San Francisco firehouse where he makes his home, Brown turned aside the controversies over Barzaghi and Ganz as the kind of subjects that fascinate a handful of party gossips.

“What matters is this,” he said, poking a finger at a fat packet of information with a grizzly bear (the state symbol) lumbering across the cover.

It is the official packet for convention delegates, and it is a piece of work.

Like graphs? Brown’s got some humdingers. How about “Chart IV: Margin of Democratic Over Republican Registration Needed in 1990 to Reverse the Gap Trend.”

There’s an asterisk on that one, by the way, to make sure you know that the “1990 projections are based on multivariate regressions.”

Want to crunch some numbers? Brown has put rows and rows of them in the delegate packet as he goes all-out to explain to Democratic activists where they should target their efforts to register new voters.

Here’s a tip, Democrats: Knock on every door in rapidly growing Stanislaus County.

There is also Brown’s own essay in the packet, titled “The New Party of the ‘90s.”

“The only instrument for more democracy now is the reinvigorated political party,” Brown writes. “When parties decay as they have over the last 30 years in America, voter participation goes down.

“Technology (television) destroyed the older parties,” Brown continues, “but now it will help create new ones. The campaigning of the future will depend on long-term investments in a small donor base, a sophisticated voter file and voter targeting capacity.”

Those are the kinds of things that animate Brown these days as he enters his second year of a job that no one could believe he wanted.

But as the party activists convene Friday, they should not conclude that he does not have higher ambitions.

When Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) requested the chance to address the convention this weekend, Brown turned her down. He said the schedule was already too crowded.

But Boxer could be a potential Brown opponent in the future. She is seriously exploring a run against Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston in 1992. Brown, who lost a bid for the Senate in 1982, has told friends he would not rule out a run against Cranston.