Different Shade of Brown : State Treasurer Is Carving Her Political Niche Out of a Famous Family Tree

First and foremost there is the cliche, which is getting a bit tired but still bears truth: She has her brother’s brains, her father’s warmth and her mother’s looks.

Or is it her brother’s talents, father’s charm and mother’s focus?

Choose your noun. The fact is, state Treasurer Kathleen Brown is “a different shade of brown,” as she frequently says. And the distinctive hue is attracting new political admirers, especially women. “She’s an amalgam of all the assets of the Brown family without any of the liabilities,” said veteran political consultant Joseph R. Cerrell of Los Angeles.

She’s “Jerry’s little sister.” But she is not “Sister Moonbeam,” as a magazine once introduced her in a banner splashed across two pages. She’s “Pat’s baby daughter.” But she also is a grandmother and nearly in position, many political experts believe, to carry on with what her top aide calls “the family business”--governing the state of California.

It will be at least two years before Kathleen Brown, 46, can run for the governor’s office once held by her brother, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., from 1975 to 1982, and her father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, 1959-66. Meanwhile, she is fast establishing her own statewide identity--helped immensely by Sacramento’s budget gridlock--and as she prepares to make her debut on the national political stage at the Democratic Convention in New York.

Brown is scheduled to emcee a prime-time convention segment featuring women candidates for the U.S. Senate and governor. Barbra Streisand will sing. Unfortunately, the program is booked for Tuesday night and will compete for TV viewers with the major league All-Star game. “That means I won’t be watching it,” quipped Brown’s press secretary, Michael Reese, referring to his boss’s performance.

But Brown said she is not worried about the TV audience size, and sees this as an important opportunity to begin establishing a national identity. “I think it’s going to be fun,” she said. “ . . . It’s the Year of the Woman.”

Neither Brown nor her top aides--nor apparently anyone around Bill Clinton--took seriously early speculation by some news media that the California treasurer was one of those being considered by Clinton as his vice presidential running mate. The rumor, fanned for a while by the Clinton camp, was widely seen in political circles as merely a goodwill gesture to women and to California, which will offer the biggest prize of electoral votes.

There also was suspicion that Warren Christopher of Los Angeles, who led Clinton’s search for a running mate, may have encouraged the rumor to enhance Brown’s political stock. Christopher is a big fan of Brown’s and the law firm he chairs, O’Melveny & Myers, gave her $9,000 last year through its political action committee. She also was a corporate attorney for the firm in the mid-1980s.

But having never held an office above state treasurer, Brown did not pass Clinton’s first test of being “a plausible President.”

“In Washington, the prospect of her going on the ticket was not taken very seriously,” said William Schneider, political analyst for the American Enterprise Institute. “People say: ‘You mean Jerry’s kid sister?’ That’s the problem. If she gets elected governor in ’94 or ‘98, then fine. . . . Now, nobody knows that much about her, but she is on the list of people up and coming.”

For a while, Brown and her aides thought she might be given a bigger convention role than emcee for “ladies’ night.” There was speculation about convention chairwoman--that went to Texas Gov. Ann Richards--or co-chairwoman, or perhaps a keynote speaker. Their hunch is that Brown was passed over for these prestigious slots because she had not endorsed Clinton--and still has not--despite proddings from the presumptive nominee’s emissaries.

From the beginning, Brown has supported her brother’s quixotic quest for the presidential nomination--though not very actively--and she refuses to abandon him now.

“I’m going to support our Democratic nominee and (Clinton) is going to be the nominee, for sure. I’ll feel very comfortable supporting him. But my brother’s running for President,” she said in an interview. “He’s got 600 delegates. He’s really impacted and changed the whole dynamic of the presidential debate. They all have 800-numbers now. Ross Perot is talking about ‘taking back America.’

“He’s run the marathon. I don’t see that he’s endorsed Clinton. He wants to proceed and I respect that and I’m not into repudiating family. I’m a Brown and I’m proud of it and I’m not going to do anything that would not make me feel good to be a Brown at the end of the day. Family transcends politics. It absolutely goes well beyond any kind of political campaign or election.”

Another consideration in the assignment of convention roles may have been state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, her possible primary gubernatorial opponent in two years. Garamendi was an early backer of Clinton and is his California campaign chairman. He also will chair the state’s delegation to the convention. If Clinton had given Brown a huge convention role it might have seemed, in some quarters, as a sign of ingratitude toward Garamendi.

Garamendi, who will be one of the presenters of the party platform Tuesday, is tight-lipped about Brown. “She’s done a good job as treasurer,” he said, refusing to elaborate. Regarding a potential gubernatorial contest, Garamendi said: “Those interested in a 1994 race should keep their powder dry until later.”

That is precisely what Brown is doing. “My basic gut instinct and also my emotional desire is to just focus in on what I’m doing,” she said. “Maybe it’s my method of self-protection.” But in the recesses of her mind, doesn’t she assume that someday she will try to extend the family legacy in the governor’s office? “I don’t assume anything in politics and I don’t assume much in life,” she said.

She offered some personal history: As a very young woman, she said, “I swore I would never go into politics. But apparently I had a sleeping giant in me, a little latent genetic defect that percolated up and I got comfortable with. . . . I got older and became a more mature person and realized I didn’t have to not go into politics to prove something.

“I am incredibly proud of my brother’s and my father’s legacy in this state. They touched something, each in their own distinctive way, very powerful, that is part of what I think the California dream is about, the California psyche is about, and to be part of that legacy is pretty daunting.”

At 29, after helping her brother win his first gubernatorial race, Kathleen Brown was elected to the Los Angeles Board of Education and reelected four years later. She resigned in 1980 to move to New York with her three children and new husband, TV executive Van Gordon Sauter. She got a law degree in New York and returned to California in 1987 after Sauter was fired as CBS news president during a network power struggle.

Assistant Treasurer Beverly Thomas, who was Brown’s 1990 campaign manager, is pragmatic about her boss’s political future. Asked under what circumstances Brown would run for governor, Thomas answered without hesitation: “Under circumstances she could win.

“There is a feeling among insiders and loyalists, an expectation, that she should run (in 1994),” Thomas said. “Kathleen is in great position to run for governor. It’s the family business. And she’s doing an excellent job as treasurer.”

Whether Brown runs in 1994 or waits until 1998, key advisers say, will hinge on the popularity of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson at the end of next year.

In the meantime, Brown says she loves her job and loves her life. A third of her time is spent in Los Angeles, where she and her husband own a home in the Hollywood Hills; a third is spent in the state capital, where they own a townhouse on the Sacramento River, and a third is spent traveling as treasurer.

Basically, she is the state’s banker. She manages an investment portfolio that totals $22 billion, consisting of state money not immediately in use. Since taking office in January, 1991, spokesman Michael Reese said, Brown has invested $124 billion and earned $2.1 billion through the most liquid paper notes available.

She also sells voter-approved bonds to finance construction of highways, schools, prisons and the like. During her 1990 election campaign, Brown accused Republican incumbent Thomas W. Hayes of being a laggard on bond sales, arguing that a faster pace would help stimulate the state’s economy. Hayes said he was timing the sales for the best interest rates. Since taking office, Reese said, Brown has cut the bond backlog in half, from $10.7 billion to $5.3 billion.

Sitting on the boards of the public employees and teachers retirement systems, Brown was instrumental in banning junk-bond investments.

As Sacramento has sunk deeper into its budget bog, Brown has been trying to assure financial institutions about the reliability of the state’s IOUs and credit worthiness.

And with the state’s cash crisis, the relatively obscure office of treasurer has been drawn into the glow of the media spotlight. Brown is not a principal player, a negotiator--”choosing what gets cut is not my responsibility; they (the governor and legislators) would jump all over me,” she said. But her peripheral role has attracted attention.

In interviews and speeches, Brown has criticized the “partisan bickering” in Sacramento and Washington. “People in America are sick of it,” she said. “They want government to work. They want those who are elected to make the tough decisions and in a timely manner.

“It was a disgrace,” she said, for the governor and Legislature to allow the new fiscal year to begin July 1 without enacting a budget, forcing the state to issue scrip for the first time since the Great Depression.

“I suddenly realize why I’m so disappointed,” she said, walking up to a reporter on the first day the state began dropping IOUs into the mail instead of checks. “This crisis is man-made. California’s other crises have been natural. We can’t help it if there’s an earthquake in Cucamonga, or wherever. But we can fix this.”

Referring to the Republican who spoiled her father’s bid for a third term: “I don’t think Ronald Reagan would have allowed this to happen. He cared more about the state than this. He would have negotiated.”

Brown has cautiously avoided targeting individuals for blame. “There’s no shortage of villains,” she says. But she has outlined a possible solution that the governor has flatly rejected: rolling into the next fiscal year $2 billion of the debt attributable to school financing.

Beyond the budget crisis, Brown has been telling audiences, there is a “more serious crisis of confidence” in California and across America, a pessimism that “problems seemingly have become so big and so intractable that there isn’t any answer for getting out of this fix.” And she concludes: “The crisis of confidence can really only be solved through political leadership.”

It all sounds like fodder for a gubernatorial campaign.

And as one listens to Brown speak, the tendency is to identify her less as “a Brown” and more as a rising woman political star in “the era of women.”

She is building a solid base among women. She also is creating political IOUs by personally contributing money to other women candidates--$26,000 to 31 of them during the last primary season, according to her political director, Catherine L. Unger.

Brown raised $221,000 for herself during the first half of this year and has roughly $740,000 stashed in her campaign kitty.

It is hard to find an enemy, or anybody with a bad word for her.

One example: Assemblyman B.T. Collins (R-Sacramento)--who served as chief of staff for Gov. Jerry Brown and later GOP Treasurer Hayes--said: “I’m not speaking to her (because) she lied about me” during the 1990 treasurer’s campaign. But asked to assess her performance in office, Collins instantly replied: “Excellent.”

“She has the human qualities of the average voter,” Collins said. “She understands the inner-workings of Sacramento. She doesn’t grandstand. Her speaking style is not demagogic. She gives women the subliminal message: ‘Don’t be so uptight; we can get a lot done.’ . . . And people still like to hear from a very photogenic, attractive grandmother.”

Pollster Mervin Field, whose California surveys consistently have recorded high marks for Brown, theorized that she benefits from being “the fair-haired daughter of the revered Pat” and “different than the unconventional--some say weird--Jerry . . . They made a big splash and she is benefiting from all the ripples.”