Brown Takes Gang Members on Raft Trip, Boosts Environment

Democrat Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. pushed the need for stronger environmental protection Monday in a white-water rafting trip with outdoors enthusiasts, reporters and two Los Angeles gang members.

The presidential candidate took a 1 1/4 hour trip down an 8-mile stretch of the New River where a Virginia woman drowned in a rafting accident just two days earlier.

Brown, wearing a protective helmet and life vest, said he wasn’t concerned about his safety. Instead, he spoke about the rugged beauty of the New River Gorge and the need for protecting the environment.

“It’s beautiful and we should keep it that way,” said the former California governor. “In California we found that the better you protect the environment, the more jobs you create.”

Brown was campaigning in West Virginia one day ahead of presidential primaries there and in Nebraska. His Democratic rival, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, has more than 80% of the delegates needed to lock up the party’s nomination.

Brown rode in a 10-person raft along with reporters and two gang members who have been traveling the campaign trail with him. Four other rafts carried mostly environmentalists.

Brown said gang members Titi Gomez, 20, and Robert Leon, 22, represent part of the broad-based coalition for change that he is putting together across the country. He met the two men at the Dolores Mission in riot-scarred Los Angeles on Sunday and invited them to join him for a few days.

Gomez was asked if he planned to vote for Brown.

“I can’t. I’m a convicted felon,” Gomez said.

The rafting trip was scheduled to mark the end of National River Cleanup Week, in which 20,000 volunteers cleaned up 250 river side areas in 41 states, according to the National River Cleanup Committee of Knoxville, Tenn.

Brown later spoke at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, where he drew cheers when he spoke in favor of abortion rights and said students shouldn’t be forced into debt by college loans.

“I shook Jerry’s hand, man,” said Lance Taylor, a 19-year-old freshman from Severn, Md. “He impressed me.”

During the rafting trip, Brown aimed shots at both Clinton and likely independent candidate Ross Perot.

“I consider the Democratic Party on a disaster course. I’m here to give people a choice and to change the course of our nation,” Brown said.

He said Clinton “has a record, and the record is unsafe, low-paying and polluting jobs.”

Brown said of Perot: “I don’t like the specter of an American buying the presidency.”