Brown Kickoff Speech Echoed Caddell’s Fictional ‘Sen. Smith’

From major themes to minor phrases, substantial pieces of former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.’s presidential campaign have lived a previous life, in the fictional candidacy of a “Sen. Smith” created in 1988 by Brown’s occasional consultant Patrick Caddell.

Last October, Brown stood in the shadow of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and announced his candidacy, saying: “Our cause is clear. We must restore commitment to our nation; vitality to the values of our society; vigor to our economy; real democracy to our government, and purpose to our national life.”

Three-and-a-half years earlier, Caddell’s “Sen. Smith” summed up his message by saying, in part: “Our purpose is clear: we must restore community to our nation; vitality to the ethics and values of our citizenry; vigor to our economy and society; real democracy to our government, and purpose to our national life.”

Created as part of a proposal for a nonfiction book that was never published, “Sen. Smith” was a fictional device Caddell employed to illustrate a strategy to energize disaffected voters by appealing to idealism while stoking anti-Establishment anger. In Caddell’s scenario, “Smith” won the 1988 Iowa caucuses by “positioning himself against the Democratic field en masse,” claiming “they were all . . . ‘political insiders’ ” and “eschew(ing) the approach of slick, high-production 30-second television spots”--all techniques central to Brown’s real-life success as an insurgent this year.

From his home in Los Angeles, Caddell said Sunday that he “helped Jerry write” the Philadelphia speech. He angrily insisted there was nothing newsworthy about his apparent adaptation of the Smith scenario to the Brown reality.

“It’s all my work product, so there’s no question of plagiarism,” Caddell said.