Brown Vows to Press ‘People’s Platform’ Goal

The day after he lost the Democratic presidential primary in his home state, a relaxed, almost jovial Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. pledged to hammer out a “people’s platform” for his party and to keep working to give ordinary folks a stake in the political process.

The former California governor also predicted that the California Senate race between liberal Democrat Barbara Boxer and conservative Republican Bruce Herschensohn will highlight what can be at stake in an election.

“There are going to be some people who are going to feel they’ve got to have Herschensohn, and there are some other people who’ll feel they’ve go to stop him and they’ve got to have Boxer,” he said at a news conference Wednesday in Santa Monica. “That’s called an election, instead of this mushy, ambiguous exercise in avoidance which so often politics degenerates into.”

Brown seemed buoyed by losing California by only 8 percentage points to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. He also was unfazed that Clinton had won all six of Tuesday’s primaries and clinched the Democratic nomination.

As he has for weeks, Brown pledged to keep alive his insurgent movement to give “voice to the voiceless” and to involve those who’ve tuned out politics.

He spoke of an enthusiastic community meeting he attended in Ohio where a group of residents is trying to bar an incinerator. The reason for the citizen interest, he said, “is there was something at stake--namely their houses, their families and their neighborhoods. It’s that level of investment that politics is missing.”

Brown said he plans to organize nationwide platform hearings and will push the ideas that emerge at the Democratic National Convention in July.

“We’re building what you might call a people’s platform. . . . We’re going to listen. There are powerful political forces that are not engaged, that are turned off. And what’s happened in our campaign is we’ve touched a lot of hearts. . . . But it’s just a very small beginning.”

He was noncommittal about endorsing Clinton, saying, “We’ll take that up at the convention.”

He also cited the expected independent presidential candidacy of Ross Perot as proof that the political system is breaking down. Brown termed the Texas tycoon “a major threat and challenge not only to the Democratic Party, but to the whole idea of a two-party system.”