Moonbeam and His Family

Two weeks ago, in the dim cell where I work, a beep emitted from my computer. A piece of E-mail had arrived through the ether. I looked up and there it was, glimmering on the screen.

“Jones, Jones..” it said. “Do Moonbeam.”

That was all. Do Moonbeam. It was enough. From another dim cell in the building, I was being urged to do the obvious, the inescapable. That morning, Jerry Brown had announced his decision to “explore” the idea of running for President. The Moonbeam, our Moonbeam, was on the loose again.

And so fat a target. I pictured him on the campaign trail across America, dragging his baggage after him. Linda Ronstadt and the love-nest in Africa. Rose Bird. The mattress-on-the-floor stuff. Etcetera.

The whole thing was a laugher. He couldn’t win. He couldn’t even come close. The world had passed by Jerry Brown, and he was the last to know.

But I didn’t do Moonbeam that day. Or the next. And finally I had to face it: The Moonbeam thing was not satisfactory. I had never really believed it in the first place. And after all these years, secretly I guess, I was glad that Jerry Brown was back.

California had been boring without him. The Van de Kamps, the Leo McCarthys and, God knows, the Dukes were all grim substitutes. When Jerry came rolling back from Calcutta or wherever, you just had to feel relief.

Now, understand, that’s different from wishing Jerry Brown were President. My affection for Brown is otherwise. It flows from the confidence that any political contest will be more interesting because he is in it.

Remember his first, coy answer to a reporter who asked him about rumors that he was thinking of running for President?

“I am not un-thinking about it,” he said.

Wonderful! Pure Jerry Brown, arrogant and funny all at once. Such a good line that L.A. police chief Daryl Gates tried to steal it a few days later and, of course, got it hopelessly garbled.

Then Brown, who has made a career of coining phrases for the press, announced that henceforth he will refuse to engage in “sound bite politics.” When the television cameras appear, he will insist on the opportunity to speak a complete thought or he will not speak at all.

Splendido! Who else would have the chutzpah to try this? I suspect it will not last, but in the meantime we will find out what happens if a presidential candidate refuses to dispense his thoughts in 20-second packages. Will the television boys ignore him? Or will they chase him down the sidewalks, demanding their bites?

Which brings me to a central point about Jerry Brown: at any given moment, we do not know what he will do, or what he will say. We are not watching a creature fashioned from focus groups but a man driven by his own, dark interior. And that is why we keep watching.

Which is not to say that Brown cannot be cynical or opportunistic. He has always been capable of both, and still is.

Take this new business about not accepting donations greater than $100. Jerry is always convinced that he just discovered the primary ailment of the western world and, very shortly, will also have the answers. This year it’s the fat cats and their big money.

This comes, of course, from a man who just spent two years shaking down every fat cat in California as chairman of the Democratic Party.

Part of the fun of watching Jerry, in fact, comes from the contradictions. But here’s the point: he contradicts according to his own instincts, his own changing sense of what issues churn in the voter’s breast. He stands there, all alone, trying to figure us out.

His last try, for example, was a ten-page letter, single-spaced, sent to several thousand supporters in California. It was about anger, how we are all angry in America, angry about money and privilege, and how his campaign was going to address that anger. His recent speeches have contained the same theme.

No one made the decision about that theme except Jerry Brown. There is no campaign consultant in the country who would have signed off on anger. The current vogue is the sunny stuff, the thousand points of light stuff, that calms and soothes.

Jerry is betting differently. He studies us in a way that is nearly familial. And he believes he knows what others do not.

For Brown, a man without a family of his own, maybe we are substitutes. I don’t know. I do know that these interchanges with Brown have a pull and power of their own and the presidential campaign will be better because he is in it.

After that, we shall see. As Jerry says, the situation will “evolve.”