Brown’s Campaign Lurching Into a Chaotic Nether World : Politics: Cast back into the shadows, his quixotic march now seems headed for pathos and disarray.

Double espresso in hand, the former California governor strode into a gritty sandwich shop in this city’s crowded Italian market Saturday and spewed greetings like bullets. “Hi. Hi. Hi. How are you? My name’s Jerry Brown and I’m running for President. What are you eating? A hot dog?”

The man chewing a scrambled-egg sandwich--no hot dog here--craned his neck upward. Bewilderment crossed his face. But before he could answer, Brown had wheeled and fled, without bothering to ask for his vote in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary.

Welcome to the Democratic presidential campaign of Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., a candidate who now finds himself living in the shadows while the bright lights shine on the likes of Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and George Bush.

Most political observers give Brown virtually no chance of defeating Clinton in Tuesday’s vote and, by extension, stopping the Arkansas governor from going on to claim the party’s nomination.

In a broader sense, too, Brown has faded from view markedly since the New York primary of three weeks ago. There, after weeks of rising hopes, he finished a disappointing third, behind not only Clinton but former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, an inactive candidate.

While Clinton travels by chartered plane and trains his sights on President Bush, Brown schleps along the campaign trail by commercial craft. While Clinton garners attention--good or bad--for everything he does, Brown operates in something of a political nether world.

Even the mantle of the insurgent, long worn by Brown, has shifted to the shoulders of Perot, the Texas billionaire who is considering running for President as an independent.

Seven months into his campaign, Brown’s effort has come to resemble not so much a march to the White House as a journey to the intersection of chaos and pathos.

“You’re listening to WTAE radio, and I’m Jerry Brown, your candidate for President,” said Brown, upbeat and earnest on a dreary Friday morning in suburban Pittsburgh, Pa.

“By the way, I’m going to have to say something about the weather. . . . It’s variable cloudiness and mild, scattered showers and thundershowers; high today expected at 74. Tonight and tomorrow mostly cloudy, breezy and cooler. . . .”

Through a plate glass window, aide-de-camp Jacques Barzaghi is pleading for Brown to announce his 800-number for contributions, which the former governor has inexplicably ignored. “He could have said it three times already,” Barzaghi said.

This is not how serious candidates are supposed to behave, but Brown has never knelt to convention and does not plan to start now. His callers follow suit.

“Hi, beautiful person, welcome to our beautiful city,” said Al from Millvale, a Republican who wants to talk about Brown’s proposed flat tax.

“I really appreciate your spirituality and your values,” said Rick from Springdale. “You really shine.”

An hour later, Brown had delivered the 800-number twice, discussed the flat tax, declared that Clinton has “no chance” of winning the presidency, defended his own image as a “flake” and answered Tom from Bridgeville, who wanted to know whether Brown “based his philosophy of government on the 11th and 12th precepts of St. Ignatius.”

Well, yes, Brown said, adding that Ignatius’ instructions to “serve God and transcend self” were perhaps better suited to saints than to mortals.

Much of the loopiness surrounding Brown’s campaign is engendered by the campaign itself, which often zooms from disorganized into farce. While the Bush team moves with military precision and Clinton’s campaign is a close cousin, Brown’s effort is cobbled together with abandon--when things are working well.

Take last Thursday, for example, when his entourage bought airline tickets and put their luggage on a commercial flight to Bloomington, Ind., before anyone was told they were getting there by car.

Supporters and reporters trying to search out Brown’s movements in Pennsylvania frequently have had little luck; the candidate’s local campaign offices often can tell where Brown has been--if enough time has elapsed--but rarely where he is going.

But the campaign’s principles have not lost their communal sense of humor.

At the University of Pennsylvania’s campus green, a crew cut, heavyset young man has wedged himself into the front row to hear Brown speak before a crowd of about 1,000 people on Friday evening. Oblivious to a driving rain, he had smeared “Jerry” in red paint across his bare chest. Around him, his friends were hoisting beers.

A Brown aide leaned over. “He’s our statewide coordinator,” he snickered.

Yet for every bit of goofiness, there is a commensurate glimpse of sadness. The hopeless and the grieved seem to revolve around Brown, and they act as if they have been given permission to bare their souls. They reach out for him, touch him, seek him out for conversation.

On Friday, in the vanquished mill town of Aliquippa, Pa., an elderly steelworker and a devout Christian woman drowned out Brown’s remarks with screams of heartfelt anguish.

“You got too much money against you, Jerry. You ain’t got a chance. That’s what’s wrong with this country. We’re finished,” the man shouted, pointing to where seven miles of prosperous steel mills once stood.

“With God, all things are possible,” the woman screamed in counterpoint. “It’s time to rise up. We’re going to rise.”

Brown, a dozen feet away under a drenching rain, stood stunned.

For all the ease with which he embraces the spiritual side of life, for all of his visits with the needy in America, Brown finds it almost impossible to enunciate what his campaign has meant in personal terms. Ask him how it has changed him, or what he has learned about his country and its people, and he speaks in fits and starts, an otherwise articulate man reduced to positing about the waywardness of political parties.

Pressed about his impact on people, he says a little uncomfortably: “They think I am speaking to their values.”

Leave it to Barzaghi, the beret-wearing and thoughtful friend who acts as the repository of Brown’s social emotions, to tell you about the letters Brown receives from the misbegotten; about the time they passed a basket for donations and found, in the bottom of it, someone’s food stamps.

Not long ago, a campaign volunteer drove to an airport to pick up Brown and Barzaghi. He was about 54 years old, Brown’s own age. He had spent a lifetime in one job until he was laid off six months ago. He told Brown that he was at a loss about what to do.

“There was a moment of silence in the van, and then the governor tried to verbalize something, and I could tell his voice was cracking,” Barzaghi said. “It’s hard not to be touched when confronted with rough reality.”

Brown never cites such moments in his speeches, which tend to be as bloodless as they are incendiary. Barzaghi said he has waged a losing battle to persuade Brown to open up and talk about what he has learned.

“He is a very, very private person, whatever part is the Irish, whatever part is the Jesuit (training), mixed with lawyer training,” said Barzaghi. “On the one hand, he is the politician. And on the other hand, a father confessor.”

Still, Barzaghi insists that Brown has gained a certain maturity and new insights during his months of presidential campaigning. He harked back to destitute Aliquippa, bereft and boarded-up since the mills closed down.

“Is that America?” Barzaghi mused. “If it’s America, then it’s not the America he dreamed of.”

Saturday morning, back in South Philadelphia: The address given by Brown aides as the first stop on his tour of the famed outdoor Italian market is Irv’s Maternity Shop, which is closed and not likely to be a campaign stop even if it weren’t.

But three blocks away, where workers are unloading trucks of fresh vegetables, Brown is heading up the street in his signature power-walk, stopping only to stare into a television camera and mouth greetings into a radio microphone: “Good morning, KYW.”

Armed minutes later with his double espresso, he canters down the street, lamenting the “decrepit” state of government and “the moral failure of politics as usual.”

Christene Watkins, a Pentecostal minister from Olney, Pa., reaches out to Brown, catches him in her grasp and wishes him well.

“Oh, listen, it’s the inner man,” she said, explaining her fervor. “He’s genuine inside.”

Brown cannot hear her. He has already blown past, shaking hands but rarely asking people for their vote. He stops to take a few questions and, half-grimacing, tastes a clam, an offering to the television camera positioned nearby.

In the classical literature that Brown studied in college, there was a device called deus ex machina, where, as Brown describes it, “in the end something drops down and solves the problems without any logic in the narrative to justify it.”

Brown could use the political equivalent right now, yet not even he sounds terribly confident.

“What’s my pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, I don’t know. There are always unexpected developments.”