CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : Jerry Brown of Old Ardently Seeks New Audience

Before an audience of students who were in diapers when he first ran for governor, Jerry Brown was conjuring up the old vision of himself. He lurched over the lectern, his face florid with the heat of the autumn day and the emotion of the moment.

“We didn’t have a lot of money around,” he shouted, his voice hitting the higher registers with a familiar Brown squawk. “So I drove a Plymouth. And had a little apartment. Tried to be a kind of cheapskate.

“And then I made all my friends mad at me because I didn’t give enough money to the university and to doctors and roads and teachers and all the rest.”

Around the concrete quad at the University of California here, there was barely a ripple of remembrance. Undaunted, Brown turned to his punch line.

“And then I started watching Reagan. And for eight years this man proved that you didn’t have to have the money to spend it! All you have to do is want to spend it and get everyone else to go along!”

The students erupted in applause, Brown having landed an elbow to the ribs of their first political image, the larger-than-life President against whom these college Democrats still rebel.

It is an election year, and Jerry Brown is running. Not for office, not just yet. In theory and practice, he is running for Dianne Feinstein and all other Democrats, as chairman of the state party heading up a massive voter registration and get-out-the-vote effort.

At another level, it is a dry run for his next race, perhaps for U.S. Senate in 1992, and that glint in his eye is lit by hope that the latest chaos in Washington might dislodge Republicans from the electoral pedestal. With that fond hope, he is swinging populism like a club, trying to batter the images of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and the man he calls their “co-conspirator,” Pete Wilson.

There is plenty of irony in his target--it was Wilson who tumbled Brown into the political abyss in 1982, when the Republican won their duel for the Senate. Today, Wilson still campaigns against Brown, holding his image up to campaign crowds as the unseemly personification of a Democrat and a likely role model for Feinstein.

In that, Brown takes some glee.

“That is the most damning commentary on George Deukmejian--that Wilson can actually run a campaign apparently on the assumption that I am still governor,” he said in an interview the other day, lounging against the back wall of a Mexican restaurant in Santa Cruz.

Brown the politician still evokes strong reactions. He is either a breath of fresh air or a slap in the face. Time may have filled out his girth and thinned his hair--Brown is 52--but it has done little to tame his ideology. He is a politically angry middle-aged man, a sometimes raging, always unrepentant liberal.

“It’s insane that in a rich society that everyone doesn’t have a roof over their heads,” he said to a question about poverty. “I think we can afford that and I think we can afford to make sure that everyone has a job. That’s something that an intelligent, affluent society should do.”

Wilson and Feinstein would barely utter that sentence before the second-guessing would begin--sure, but how do you pay for it? Brown can flex ideology a little more freely as a party chairman than he could as a candidate, but even accounting for that he seems intent on stretching the boundaries.

The issue of crime, for example, is usually dispensed with by strongly worded pronouncements of faith in the death penalty and promises to build more jails. Brown, predictably, goes the other way.

“Hundreds of crime laws have been enacted and it isn’t doing anything about crime,” he told the students. “Because as long as you have one in four kids born in poverty, as long as you have this growing underclass, as long as you really don’t inspire and train and help people, you’re going to have more crime.”

Brown flails at Wilson for ignoring the roots of crime, but he will acknowledge when pressed that even Democrats are afraid to discuss long-term solutions beyond prisons and the death penalty.

“If you don’t utter the password, you can’t even get into the arena--and the password is, ‘I’m going to be for the death penalty,’ ” said Brown.

At times, he gives the appearance of fighting on all fronts simultaneously. In speeches he segues from crime--and the Republicans’ adept campaign handling of it--into Reaganomics, which segues into harangues on Manuel Noriega and El Salvador.

“What about the war in Iraq?” one student shouted at him the other day, as if to bring Brown up to date on the world’s skirmishes.

Most of the students, at least here, are vaguely familiar with Brown’s eight-year tenure as governor from 1974-82. But few know him the way they know contemporary politicians.

“Their political memory doesn’t span that far back,” said Charles Harder, chairman of the university’s Democratic group.

Notwithstanding that, the former governor all but encourages talk of his running for office. “No specific plans but a general intent,” he said, when asked if he plans to seek elective office again.

But first, Brown has a more immediate problem. There is broad grumbling among party regulars about the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort. Republicans plan to spend $7 million on their plan, dwarfing the “couple million” Brown says the Democrats will spend.

Since the beginning of the year, Republicans have registered about 425,000 voters, according to party officials--twice the number signed up by Democrats. As of Sept. 7, 49.7% of the state’s voters were registered Democrats while 39.1% were Republicans, a continuation of a 14-year trend that sees Democrats slipping and Republicans gaining.

“There has been a slow drop-off in Democratic registration--that’s true--and there’s a very slow increase in Republican registration,” Brown said. “Most of the trend is toward noninvolvement and that means that the candidates are going to have to speak more dramatically or decisively about what’s bothering people.”

Already he has hit 10 campuses this year and may visit more, squeezing them between fund-raising lunches and get-out-the-vote dinners. On his campus visits alone, he probably has talked to more unaligned voters than have Feinstein and Wilson together, bouncing as they do between press events and fund-raising affairs.

Brown is harnessing populist rhetoric more effectively than either Wilson or Feinstein, in part perhaps because he revels more in the role of the outsider. In Santa Cruz and elsewhere, he rails at the Washington institutions he once sought--the Senate and the presidency.

“The fact of the matter is the underclass is growing, the rich are getting richer and those in the middle are getting squeezed,” he said, voice rising with each sentence. “Today you have to become almost a permanent debtor to get a college education.”

“It’s dishonest! It’s time to throw those bums out!”

By that, he means Republicans--not, certainly, Democrats. He talked optimistically about a coming political movement in America, fed by discontent about budget woes in Washington and the country’s rickety economic standing. A time, he said, when “those that have the most contribute the most, and government is there to reduce inequities.”

That idea, he said, is “as traditional as apple pie” and so is what Jerry Brown is doing, here posing for pictures with the cooks outside a restaurant, there signing an autograph, and softening a bit at accolades from longtime allies.

In Santa Cruz, a friend issued a laudatory introduction. Brown, his eyes riveted on the future, offered a teasing rejoinder.

“It’s a bad sign here,” he said, “when we’re talking about things that happened in the past.”