NEWS ANALYSIS : Brown Campaign Is Ending as It Began--in Obscurity : Politics: The press has virtually ignored the Californian’s drive. But the former governor still refuses to concede defeat.

Peace signs bob up and down like buoys in a sea of tie-dyed shirts and sandals, vying for the eye’s attention with a placard that proclaims “Hemp Heals.”

From the podium, the speaker is denouncing multinational corporations for exploiting the people and the power structure in Washington for wasting billions of dollars on defense.

There is only one thing out of place in this college campus scene from the 1960s--the date.

It is 1992, the place is Ashland, Ore., and the speaker is former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., who is still running for President--even if most of the national media has chosen to forget that.

A long, long time ago in election-year politics--late last March--Jerry Brown’s star was clearly rising. He had just defeated Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic race, in the Connecticut primary, his media entourage had ballooned overnight from less than five to more than 50 people and the pledges were beginning to pour into his by now famous 1-800 campaign number.

Never regarded until then as more than a curious political anachronism, Brown was suddenly a serious contender whose Populist “Take America Back” campaign looked as if it might ignite the same emotion on the left as Republican challenger Patrick J. Buchanan’s “America first” campaign briefly fired on the right.

But as the race to win the Democratic presidential nomination enters the homestretch, Brown’s quixotic campaign is ending much as it began: in obscurity.

After a string of humiliating primary defeats--in New York he even finished behind Paul E. Tsongas, who had long since dropped out of the race--the press has turned its attention elsewhere and Brown is back in what he says is “the black hole of media anonymity” in which a “corrupt” money-driven political system conspires to place candidates who don’t play by its rules.

The press corps traveling with Brown has dropped to two--although local reporters pick him up at campaign stops. Often he has only one aide with him these days. Even longtime friend and adviser Jacques Barzaghi took a few days off.

Brown refuses to concede defeat, but all but acknowledges that he cannot wrest the Democratic nomination from Clinton. “I can count,” he says. “I know how many delegates he’s got. I understand the system.”

What, then, makes Jerry run?

“The cause,” he says simply. “The cause is bigger than any individual candidate. I’m running because I want to carve out an insurgent movement that will keep the tradition and the conscience of the (Democratic) Party before the electorate.”

The Democrats “are in danger of being taken over by the same interests that control the Republican Party,” adds Brown, who says that Clinton is “as close as you can get to being a Republican while still using the name Democrat.”

In much the same way as Buchanan is trying to move the Republican Party to the right, Brown, with strikingly similar rhetoric, is trying to move the Democrats to the left to head off what he sees as the party’s “imminent takeover” by corporate interests.

It’s a tough job, but Brown feels someone has to do it. “Someone has to protest the gong-show mentality of the political campaign process. . . . Someone has to stand for change. . . . Someone has to remind the Democratic Party of its roots.”

And so, fueled by continued pledges to his toll-free number, Brown’s anti-Establishment, ‘60s-something campaign keeps on trucking from college campus to alternative bookstore, directing its message mostly to activist community groups and students. The Oregon rally was repeated at campuses across the West Coast all last week.

“The ruling class has lost touch with the American people,” Brown told students at Stanford University. “They have lost touch because they swim in a world of privilege, power and wealth.”

The rioting in Los Angeles that followed the Rodney G. King verdicts is a “reflection of many years of abandonment and neglect (of inner-city problems) by both parties,” he said before a meeting of community activists in East Palo Alto. “If you vote for Clinton, you are voting for a status quo that will take you nowhere.”

After the Pennsylvania primary April 28, in which Brown received 26% of the vote, most political experts were predicting that nowhere was also about as far as the former California governor’s campaign would get.

In the last Los Angeles Times Poll, Brown was leading Clinton among California Democrats, 51% to 37%. But that survey was taken April 23-26; whether Brown’s support will hold up remains to be seen.

The candidate himself professes to have “no idea” how he will do in Tuesday’s Nebraska and West Virginia primaries, saying only that he has a “feeling” that there is a “hidden constituency” out there waiting to respond to his message.

His loosely run, low-budget organization takes no polls, but Brown says he can “sense a huge vacuum in the country that will be responsive to the things I’m talking about.”

Asked why it hasn’t responded yet, Brown stares off into space for a moment. “Look,” he says finally, “it is out there. It is. It’s just being masked by the way the political system works.”