Brown’s Renewed Self Makes the Establishment Squirm : Politics: A candidate who escapes the tyrannies of money and conformity stands as a public rebuke to others’ lives.

No presidential candidate in recent history has made media observers so visibly uneasy as Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. this year. Far more than journalistic judgment or even furtive political preference, the reaction to the former California governor betrays something deeper--and rather forlorn--about the current crisis in American life.

This is not to say that questions about Brown’s political past or electability are not fair reporting game. In 1978, I wrote at length about the then-prodigal young California governor in a New Republic article titled “Proteus Californias,” on the expedient if ascetic chic beneath the surface of Jerry Brown’s Sacramento regime. Today, worthy topics would include his time as state Democratic chairman, as well as the actual consequences of his policies as governor.

But for the most part, the anathema so anxiously pronounced on Brown at this point does not come from some serious new reporting of his history in office. On the contrary, there now seems a palpable fear and willful ignorance not so much of what he was, but of what he has become--or perhaps of the becoming itself.

For Brown in 1992--whether by conviction or calculus, conversion or evolution--too clearly represents a politician transformed, too manifestly symbolizes a freedom from the pervasive American tyrannies of money, organization and ideological, even philosophical, conformity.

It is not as if such transformations were rare in American life. Reappraisal, renewal, rediscovery--what Bill Clinton calls scornfully in Brown “redefining himself”--are a socio-psychological if not political emblem of the era. But the Establishment reaction to Jerry Brown is a mean little reminder of how far we have to go.

Brought so visibly to the public domain, Brown’s reformed life, even more than his reform politics, now comes as a rebuke to too many lives and roles, strikes too close to home. That is why so many must swiftly discredit the man and his message in terms of opportunism or cynicism--”cold calculation”--that are, after all, the coinage of the realm.

In a sense, it almost doesn’t matter whether Brown came to his epiphany through carrying a cripple in Mother Teresa’s shelter, or after going to one too many party fund-raisers. What mocks and menaces is the prominence of his break with the status quo, the resonance of his rejection of politics as usual, his reassertion of values to which the nation pretends, though its leadership has long since forfeited them. Such willing self-examination is not an act familiar to most of Brown’s alarmed critics. If it truly were, their lives and talent would not still be spent in conventional, often dysfunctional organizations whose ethos epitomizes the problem.

Brown may eventually be expelled from the classroom for the mirror he holds up. Yet his images are indelible. The love of money is the root of our political evils and misgovernment. Equity and energy are the twin revolutions necessary in the economy. Confronting human misery will be our only lasting national security in the world of the next century. And neither Clinton nor a convention-brokered alternative promises the personal or national transformation implicit in meeting those challenges.

Meanwhile, the political and media Establishments will curse Brown for not having the “attachments” they have. They are right, of course. What unintended and tragic irony for the rest of America.