Brown Says Too Many Ignored by Party : Democrats: He claims hierarchy is becoming elitist, and vows to continue his ‘campaign of ideas’ beyond this year.

Democratic presidential candidate Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. attacked his party Saturday for what he said was its failure to listen to a broad segment of its constituency, and he pledged to advance his anti-Establishment political movement beyond the 1992 political season.

Addressing a vocal group of supporters at a rally on the Santa Clara University campus, Brown said his “We The People” movement would not be silent after Tuesday’s primaries in California and five other states, in which Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is expected to clinch his party’s nomination, nor after the Democratic National Convention in July or the fall election.

“This is a campaign of ideas, a campaign of openness and it’s a campaign of ordinary people challenging a corrupt leadership elite who’ve lost contact with the people of this party and of this country,” the former California governor said. “I don’t care if it takes a day, a week, a month, a year or four years, we continue because we know the stakes are too high.”

Citing exit polls in previous Democratic primaries that showed him running strongest against Clinton among voters under 40 years of age and acknowledging that he is unlikely to win the nomination this year, Brown labeled his current efforts as laying the groundwork for “the campaign of the future.”

Sporting a steel-gray, double-breasted linen suit and dark tie, Brown told the largely youthful audience that his party risks becoming irrelevant to future generations as it seeks more and more financial support from wealthy and older Americans and from large corporations.

“My warning to the Democratic hierarchy, whose small donor list has an average age somewhere in the late 60s . . . how about representing people in their 40s and their 30s and their 20s?” Brown said. “We’ve got to have a party of all the people, a party of the future. We don’t have that right now and that’s why I continue to run.”

To drive home his point, he said the U.S. Senate races in California illustrate what is wrong with “status quo” politicians across the nation. He argued that the candidates in both the Democratic and Republican Senate races have spent more time soliciting money than reaching out to involve people in their campaigns.

“We’ve got a bunch of people running for Senate who don’t run. They stand in place talking on the phone to rich people to get money to buy ridiculous advertisements,” he said.

In an interview following the speech, Brown rejected running for President as a third-party candidate this year or in the future. He also suggested that he might press his reform message at the Democratic convention from outside the convention hall.

When asked by a reporter if he expected to be allowed to speak at the convention, Brown said it didn’t matter. “You can go ‘live’ from inside the convention or outside the convention,” he said. “I plan to be outside as well as in.”

In his speech, Brown stressed that it would be best for his party to embrace his message rather than force him to continue to play an outsider’s role.

“Do we really want to change the country?” he demanded during the rally to a chorus of cheers. “Do we really want to give the people some power, or do we want to go along with this whole corrupt, decrepit political process that is becoming a caricature of democracy?”