COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Brown’s Moral Anchor Is His Political Edge : The Establishment cranks up its rage for Clinton, a man devoid of political principle.

The full fury of the Democratic Party Establishment is now aimed at Jerry Brown. They call him a spoiler and they’re right. With his upset victory in Connecticut, Brown wrecked the script of an orderly coronation for Bill Clinton. Now, on the eve of crucial primaries in New York, Wisconsin and other Eastern states, comes the counterattack.

Brown, bellows one liberal columnist, is interested only in personal power. Brown, roars another, is the consummate opportunist. Brown, warns Citizens for Tax Justice, a supposedly nonpartisan body with ties to the Clinton campaign, will increase the federal deficit by $200 billion with his flat-tax proposal.

This fury is being mustered in the cause of a man so devoid of moral consistency or political principal that the citizens of Arkansas know him simply as Slick Willie. Clinton is the candidate who sought to get the spotlight off his sex life by rushing home to Arkansas Jan. 24 to preside over the execution of a black man, Rickey Ray Rector, who had killed a police officer and then shot himself, destroying part of his brain. Rector had no idea what death was. A couple of hours before his execution--it took 50 minutes to locate a vein into which to pump the lethal injection--he said he might vote for Clinton in the fall. In his cell, after he was dead, they found a slice of pecan pie he’d been saving.

When it comes to basic outlook and instinct, Jerry Brown has one of the most consistently decent, innovative records in U.S. politics. These days all candidates--even Clinton, who has done nothing to curb polluters in Arkansas--swear they are for a clean environment. Brown invented California’s pioneering policies on toxics. He started the crucial Cancer Registry (whose demise Gov. Pete Wilson now seeks) whereby pollution can be linked to its consequences. He inaugurated the occupational health and safety centers on University of California campuses. No politician did more to set the agenda on energy conservation, or was more steadfast against the nuclear power industry and the death penalty.

Today Brown, shunned by some big-time labor chieftans, is winning a constituency among many workers and labor organizers who are aghast at Clinton’s espousal of right-to-work laws and free-trade negotiations with Mexico. In this area Brown can point to a long, consistent record, from writing laws on collective bargaining for public sector employees to support for farm-workers. When Clinton was picking up his first campaign contributions from Arkansas’ big food processors and retailers, Brown was setting up a strike force seeking to set wage standards for immigrant workers in sweatshops.

Brown isn’t perfect, of course. He’s done his share of buckling under pressure from agribusiness and other citadels of money power. He can be arrogant. But he has a moral anchor. Clinton’s foreign experience consists of sales trips for low-wage Arkansas. Brown has seen what the bottom of the barrel looks like in Calcutta. When he invokes the ideas of the philosopher Ivan Illich on the fallacies of “development” and on self-sustainability, he isn’t just reeling off a precis from a quick read on the campaign plane. And no governor did better on enlightened appointments, particularly of women.

The ultimate joke is the attack on Brown’s flat-tax plan. The Democratic Establishment is savaging it as a giveaway to the rich. Pundits now praise the “progressivity” of the present system. They should remember the words of one expert, Leona Helmsley, who once exclaimed, “Only little people pay taxes.”

Brown has produced a draft proposal to simplify the system, an idea that has outraged the influential Citizens for Tax Justice, which rushed out a widely quoted appraisal, building its own exemptions into Brown’s plan and then calculating the alleged deficit on that basis. Meanwhile, Clinton’s grotesque, useless handout to the rich, a proposed capital gains tax cut, is passed over in silence.

Clinton’s central instinct is to link arms with power on its own terms. At one of his rallies in Pennsylvania, the platform was so loaded with party power brokers that it literally collapsed.

Brown understands the importance of constituencies--environmentalists, labor at the grass roots, the young--that Clinton can’t touch. It’s a fateful difference in outlook. As Brown said last week, “Unless you have some power to move the political center of gravity, you’re always stymied in very marginal changes, and that’s really what my candidacy is saying, that Clinton, in the politics of business as usual, would only provide a cosmetic alteration, while what is required is a fundamental shift.”