Last in Polls, Brown First in Invective : Campaign: In millennial tones, he lambastes his Democratic rivals as fervently as he attacks Republicans.

In the last days before the New Hampshire primary, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. couldn’t be taking much harder shots at his competitors if he were using a shotgun instead of a microphone.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, the new front-runner in today’s vote? “If Tsongas got the nomination, there would be massive defections from the Democratic Party. We have a pro-business Republican; why do we need a pro-business Democrat?”

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the erstwhile front-runner now struggling to overcome incessant accusations about his personal life? “No one--well, maybe Bill Clinton and his wife and a couple of friends--believes he is going to be the nominee.”

Brown is running well behind each of his four rivals in the polls here, but he is vying for the lead in at least one category: invective. Campaigning in heavy black boots, jeans and a flannel shirt, he looks more like a lumberjack than a lawyer, and at times it sounds as though he has committed himself to chopping down his rivals.

The Democratic field, he told a college audience here last week, was nothing more than a “chubby, clubby, patty-cake five-man irrelevance.” After the speech, he corrected himself slightly: He didn’t mean to call his rivals chubby, and he didn’t mean to include himself as irrelevant.

But for Brown to talk about the Democratic field as though it didn’t include him is understandable; at times he seems barely tethered to the campaign. His rallies have the insular feel of a protest movement that finds in its own failure to gain power the proof that the system is rigged.

Brown himself has moved beyond the incremental language of most politicians; he has adopted a millennial tone in which visions of apocalypse and utopia clash like storm clouds.

If voters rose up against the entrenched political Establishment, he told his audience at New Hampshire College last week, “everyone in New Hampshire could be working tomorrow. The only reason they’re not is people in Washington don’t want them to.”

Without a new citizens’ movement to challenge “the corrupt status quo,” he says, “This democracy will not continue the way it has. It will deteriorate, more people will get poor, more people will die of AIDS, more alienation, more incarceration, more removal of civil liberties and more political turmoil.”

These grim prophetic visions alternate with lacerating political analysis. Don’t bet on any of the other Democrats’ fulfilling their promises even if they beat President Bush, Brown says.

After all, the Democrats elected Jimmy Carter and he failed to pass labor-law reform, tax reform or welfare reform; the current crop won’t have any more success diminishing the power of special interests over Congress.

In New Hampshire, at least, that message has found only a niche, not a mass following. But Brown insists he will soldier on all the way to the Democratic convention in July--no matter how many Democratic leaders complain.

“Show me the proof,” Brown says. “I’m telling you George Bush is going to be a very powerful candidate, and we have to provide a difference, something real, something meaningful, and I don’t see any of the other candidates doing it.”