Brown III : Kathleen Brown Has the War Chest, the Poll Results and the Family Ties to Make It to the Governor’s Office. The Question Is, What Will She Do Once She Gets There?

In an hour, Kathleen Brown will make her splashy entrance into the California Democratic Party convention. For now, her supporters are hunched in folding chairs in an anteroom at the gray concrete Sacramento Convention Center, plotting. Some of them had stood in line for hours the day before at Brown’s photo booth, where she grasped hands and smiled into the camera for intimate pictures. Others are long-time Brown aides, here to witness yet another steppingstone in her career.

Brown is the California state treasurer, but what brings her here this weekend, two bright and sun-splashed days that will be spent almost completely inside the gloomy convention center, is her quest for the governorship. A formal announcement of her intentions will have to wait until December or January, but with plenty of money in the bank and a constant flow of appearances scheduled throughout the state, it seems nearly a foregone conclusion that Brown will become a candidate. She is seeking to follow her father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, and her brother, Jerry, in an office that could start to look like a family legacy.

Her convention appearance will be one of her first formal test runs, speaking before the party faithful in what amounts to practice for the 1994 elections.

In the anteroom, the small details that make up a political performance are calculated. When Brown comes in, the volunteers are told, they will wave their signs, facing the television cameras. In the midst of planning what will appear to be a spontaneous rush of affection, however, comes a woman’s small, questioning voice. What about the issues? she asks. Are there any position papers?

“Assuming we’re talking about a governor’s race, that’s a long way off,” says Duane Peterson, a respected political veteran who today is guiding the Brown volunteers. “Right now, it’s about enthusiasm!”

And so it is. When Brown arrives in the convention center arena on this spring morning, her supporters follow Peterson’s commands to the letter, going wild in full view of TV cameras. She enters down a center aisle, almost dancing as the crowd sways around her for several minutes, shaking their regal purple-and-gold “Brown” signs as she mounts the stage.

Surveying the crowd, a gleeful smile etches across Brown’s face. “I know I’m not supposed to say this, but if my dad were here, he’d say, ‘Kathleen, just get up there and say you’ll accept and sit down,’ ” she says to loud applause. And then she launches into her speech, equal parts apple pie and tough, motherly appeals to a California that needs to believe in itself again, a crisp delineation of the state’s problems--its sagging economy, troubled schools and increasing crime--that carefully avoids the messiness of solutions.

This is typical Kathleen Brown, say her friends and her foes--a well-organized burst of affection, a bow to the patriarch who looms over her political career, a blithe remark that bespeaks either a breezy confidence or a premature expectation of victory. And on the issues? So far, a lot of unanswered questions.

Yet it seems not to matter. Even if few people have a grasp of who she is, even if her buoyant, native optimism is her best-known political trait, Kathleen Brown is the acknowledged front-runner for governor in 1994. Current polls show her running ahead of her probable Democratic opponent, Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, and, like Garamendi, swamping the Republican incumbent, Pete Wilson. Her campaign chest exceeds $3.5 million.

If political races were won on sheer likability, Brown, who is 47, would be a slam dunk; she exudes born-to-the-mission competence mixed with outright joy. Her ascension into the political stratosphere, after only a few years in public office, has drawn attention around the nation. “She’s perceived as the star for the next election cycle,” says Harriett Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Yet if supporters see her as a charismatic, pragmatic Democrat, opponents see instead an apparition constructed by good public relations; a sort of one-woman Potemkin village, impressive on the outside but bare on the inside, bereft of the internal compass that guides effective politicians to their destiny. In short, they are asking--more insistently--the same question posed by the woman with the small, questioning voice in the convention anteroom.

Where does she stand? What would she do about the state’s budget mess? Where would she lead a California that seems to be yearning for leadership? With less than three years in the treasurer’s office and two years before that on the Los Angeles public works board--two decades after her 1970s service on the city school board--does she have what it takes to be governor?

“It’s one thing to talk about the problems and another thing to put a solution on the table,” says Republican political consultant Donna Lucas, echoing familiar criticisms.

But even if Brown has shied away from delivering specifics, she is not incapable of discerning them. Her approach is a meld of two things: She appears to have made a common political calculation--by avoiding positions, she avoids offending. And that tactic dovetails nicely with her innate caution, a character trait that even friends suggest she will have to overcome if her quest for the governorship is to prove successful.

“Her Achilles’ heel is her caution,” says Democratic Assemblyman Steve Peace of San Diego, head of the Finance Committee that oversees some of Brown’s domain. “At some point and juncture she is going to have to do something to distinguish herself,” he warns. “If all she is is Pete Wilson with a ‘D’ behind her name, she isn’t going to cut it.”

THE DESKS, THE TABLES, THE ARTWORK THAT DECORATE THE TREASURER’S suite in the venerable Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles are variants of beige. The overarching sense, though, is not of blandness but of elegant earthiness--the same aura exuded by Kathleen Brown herself, clad in a pumpkin-colored suit and, as usual, smiling brightly.

The family resemblances are unmistakable. Her father Pat is there, in her quick, ebullient laugh; her mother Bernice is evident in her direct, unflappable appeal; her brother Jerry is visible in the occasional dark intensity in her eyes. But it is easy to overstate the benefit of genetics. For while Kathleen Brown is a confident and comfortable politician, she has been formed less by the Brown gene pool than by her own experiences: a youthful marriage, a traumatic divorce, a new life formed of rebuilt confidence, all intertwined with a career that to this point has gone exactly as she wished.

As she says, distinguishing herself with no small amount of earned pride, “I only take out incumbents. The men in my family run for open seats. But the girls run for the tough ones.”

She has absorbed many lessons in politics. Chief among them is the capacity to be unrevealing about her feelings in the midst of criticism. So she can shrug off, with little concern, the caustic calls for specificity. She would rather carve out her own niche, she says, than fall into one constructed by an outsider. “I don’t fit into little boxes that people want to build for me,” she says. “I think of myself as an independent thinker, and I think of myself as an idealist on the one hand. But very practical on the other.”

Her older sister Cynthia once devised a game in which she asked family and acquaintances what traits they would use to describe themselves. “(Kathleen) said she always felt that she was a ‘balancing person,’ ” says Cynthia. “She liked to balance situations.”

Kathleen Brown says that she does, indeed, have stands on specific issues. She opposes the death penalty, but she is quick to say that her opposition is personal, and that she would defer to the courts and to California voters, who both support capital punishment. She wants to make Californians feel safe but does not say exactly how. She supports abortion rights but often does not address the subject as she campaigns around the state.

Ask her about race relations and one can see Brown’s approach in its purest form: She believes in the efficacy of leadership in general over hard-and-fast positions. “The bigger challenge, I think, is to embrace and herald the diversity that is California as a positive value rather than as a negative value,” she says. “And that just comes through in leadership. It comes out when you talk about immigrants as being a drain on the economy and as tax receivers rather than tax payers . That sets a negative tone and gives permission for people to act out, I think, based upon stereotypes that are inappropriate.”

In recent months, she has begun to talk about economic recovery: California should invest in highways, communication systems, schools; the state should develop a new master plan for education, promote business research and development, allow long-term capital-gains breaks and give tax exemptions for new plants and equipment. All this, she says, would require “not much” from government. But “there is no dollar figure that I’ve assigned to any of those items,” she says.

She is in no hurry to get more specific, because for now Brown is selling a broader message: Optimism. And she is an optimist to the core.

That becomes obvious on a late spring day when the fourth-generation Californian rides down a two-lane road north of Sacramento toward her family’s first homestead here. A springtime of rain has turned the countryside emerald green.

“There are enormous problems. I mean, the schools, the universities, the transportation, the housing,” she says, ticking off some of the problems. “The coastal regions of the state are quite unaffordable for many. For a full kind of California dream life, it’s out of reach. So I see California as a state that used to be land rich and people poor and now we are people rich and land poor . . . and now the budget deficit and the recession have taken much of the wind out of our sails.

“It’s different, it’s a very, very different place than when my father was governor and when I grew up. But because it’s different doesn’t mean that it isn’t still good and great. You can find a promised land.”

She reaches the old homestead, the bucolic legacy of her paternal great-grandfather: a creaking barn, a few outhouses, the crumbled foundation of what used to be a stagecoach inn. Across the road, a creek that is almost always dry is bubbling with water, as if to approve her upbeat assessment of this battered state.

But even here are grim reminders that all, in fact, is not well in California. Freshly painted in red, white and blue, on the side of the barn once used by her German immigrant forebears, is a Confederate flag. On another side of the barn are the letters “KKK.” And next to that signature of the Ku Klux Klan is a horrible reminder of the divisions that haunt California, divisions that Brown will have to face in her expected campaign. There, on the barn, are painted the words: “Hate thy nigger.”

It is startling, this metaphor for a troubled California. But Brown’s reaction is cautious. No outburst of disgust, no lamentations that hatefulness has come to this immigrant’s homestead. “It’s always there, just below the surface,” she says. “But when you’re in desperate economic times . . . .”

Later, she returns to the subject. “KKK. It’s pretty astonishing to me that there’s that level of activity--and I mean, blatant--in this tranquil setting.”

IN THE COMFORTABLE BANQUET ROOM OF A DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO high-rise, Ellen Malcolm, founder of Emily’s List, the nation’s largest women’s political fund-raising group, extracts from Brown a joking promise. If you’re elected, Malcolm asks, will you have a slumber party in the governor’s mansion?

“This is one person who knows how to throw a slumber party in the governor’s mansion,” Brown cracks, for she has done just that.

She moved there when she was 13, the last of the four Brown children still at home with Gov. Pat and Bernice. She had lived since birth in San Francisco’s thicketed Forest Hills section, a neighborhood of dozens of children who passed their post-World War II days in pursuit of hide-and-seek and kick-the-can.

San Francisco is in her family’s bones. Her father’s father ran a photography studio and a gambling den, which he promised to close--but didn’t--when Pat Brown became the city’s district attorney. Her mother presided over a brood that dealt with Pat’s political life by waiting dinner for him--the better to coerce an early return home. All doted upon the family caboose, Kathleen, born more than seven years after her closest sibling, Jerry. But none of the kids was pampered: Pat Brown’s wealth came after his governorship, and his daughter remembers a frugal childhood, Catholic, middle-class and traditional.

Brown, clad these days in tailored suits, laughs fondly at that lifetime ago, when she got two new dresses a year--plaid and permanent pressed--for Easter and Christmas. And her shoes? “I had brown oxfords longer than any human being that I knew in San Francisco!” she hoots, delighting in her former lack of cool.

If the lifestyle was middle-class, there were twists imposed by her father’s profession. She grew up traipsing to campaign barbecues in Petaluma and party dinners in Ukiah, and it was at such events that she apprenticed to the trade that would later be hers. “She was sitting there,” says her father, “and my life was continual politics.”

In 1959, however, the stakes radically changed. Her father won the governorship and the family was off to Sacramento, where it became immediately apparent to young Kathleen that the political and the personal had become inextricably linked. Protesters on all sorts of issues set up obstacle courses that she had to maneuver just to enter and exit the mansion. Then there was the mortifying matter of history class.

“I had not wanted to take history as a 10th-grader at Sac High because no one else did, and it was not required,” she says. “So guess what? It was required for me, and it was also the subject of the next day’s press conference. My name and picture were splattered over the front pages of the Sacramento Bee: ‘Governor’s Daughter Refuses to Take History. Governor to Change Master Plan for Secondary Schools.’ ”

According to some who know her well, that period was instrumental in forming Brown’s dominant political attribute--the unbridled, often reality-stretching optimism about a California that still, recession or riots notwithstanding, offers its dreamy possibilities. Jim Margolis, a political consultant who has worked for Brown since her 1990 treasurer’s race, believes her personality was indelibly marked by experiencing California during her father’s administration, “when it really was this golden moment for California: economic growth, schools that seemed to work, the best education system in the country.” To Kathleen Brown, he says, “that’s not something that has to be just a historical view.”

While her family history gave her reason for optimism, it also set her up for a lifetime of comparisons. During most of her adulthood, Brown has been publicly defined more by her kinships to well-known men than by what she has done. In style and personality, however, she is far more her father’s daughter than her brother’s sister. And it is to the nostalgia over Pat Brown’s reign as governor, filled as it was with expansion and growth, that she plays in almost every speech.

There are few obvious similarities between her and Jerry. He is the never-married loner; she is the mother and stepmother to five children, doting grandmother to two. His passion is vented loudly, hers is indecipherable under a cool demeanor. He defines political risk; she has “probably taken just a few major risks in her life,” says her daughter Hilary, 27. His is the tension of a son competing against his namesake father, hers is the ease of a daughter who has never found the mantle of heredity a burden. “I’m convinced that an awful lot of (Jerry) is still an act of rebellion against his father and how he was raised,” says one who has known and admired the family for a quarter-century. “His ideas are communicated in confrontational fashion. She is at peace with the world. I don’t think she came into her adult years expecting to be the governor of California.”

Jerry suggests that his sister’s caution aligns her with the “mainstream politics” to which he once aspired and now disdains. But, asked if she would make a good governor, he readily replies, “Sure! She’s certainly got the experience or will have by the time she gets there.” Will he be involved? “I don’t know. I didn’t get active in her treasurer’s campaign.”

Their relationship is complex and has tested her political savvy in public ways. Last summer’s Democratic Convention in New York City was to be Kathleen Brown’s national coming-out party; she was chosen to deliver a high-profile speech on the one night the party pooh-bahs had dedicated to women. But it was not to be so simple. The problem was Jerry, who despite the odds against success, continued to wage his presidential campaign until the moment of his concession speech.

Kathleen, not wishing to publicly repudiate her brother, held off endorsing Bill Clinton. Time after time, reporters clamored to know: What about Jerry? Her only response was a sly insert into her address: “For generations, women have put others first--our parents and kids, our husbands and our brothers , our friends and our bosses,” she told the delegates. But those watching on CNN did not hear her words. As she uttered them, the network switched to an interview with Jerry. “Preempting her moment,” a senior aide to Kathleen would later say.

Jerry Brown denies he meant to knock his sister off the air. “Candidates don’t set the time of interviews,” he says heatedly. “Also, I didn’t know she was speaking. Nobody told me.”

TOUGHNESS OF THE KIND NECESSARY TO BE GOVERNOR IS ONE OF THE unknowns about Brown. But certainly campaigning tests a politician’s mettle, and in 1990, Brown demonstrated that she could more than hold her own. She took on appointed Treasurer Thomas Hayes and beat him with an aggressive, hammering attack. Always on the offensive, she derided Hayes as a mere green-eyeshade bureaucrat and said that California needed more--it needed political vision. Hayes, without the necessary money and the political gut instinct for self-preservation, wilted under the barrage.

But governing exacts its own demands, and perhaps the best example of how Brown might react as California’s chief executive can be found by looking back to the late 1970s, to a time when she found herself confronted with her most difficult--and formative--personal and professional challenges.

She had long kept her political leanings quiet. At Stanford University, her most public political action was door-to-door campaigning on behalf of Lyndon Johnson, during which she became reacquainted with the brother of a boy she had dated in eighth grade. George Arthur Rice and Kathleen Brown quickly became an item, so much so that the governor’s daughter up and eloped one spring day. She was 19.

At the close of her junior year at Stanford, she and her husband left for Boston, where he entered Harvard Law School. By the time he graduated and they had moved to Los Angeles, she was pregnant with a second daughter. Any career plans took a back seat to motherhood, a time in her life that Brown looks back on as a “luxury.”

Her political instincts were, in part, awakened by Jerry. In 1974, he made his first bid for governor, and she made her first serious foray into campaigning--for him. “It was quickly evident that she had her father’s warmth with people and her brother’s quickness of mind,” says George Rice. “She was a big hit.” She found, he says, that “she was a natural.”

The next year, she toppled a 16-year veteran conservative to get elected to the Los Angeles school board. And then all hell broke loose.

In August of 1963, the American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit against the school district, alleging that it had segregated the city school system. By the time Brown reached the board, the complaint was festering in the court system and the board was seeking to keep control of the district’s destiny and yet placate a restive, racially polarized community. She found herself thrust into a situation that would give opponents ammunition, almost two decades later, to accuse her of waffling when things get tough--of striking a balance instead of exerting leadership.

In March, 1976, Brown signed a board resolution opposing compulsory busing. A week later, the resolution was rescinded--with Brown’s approval--in favor of one sanctioning “voluntary methods” of integration. Later, after the state Supreme Court ordered the district to desegregate, Brown backed a limited approach to expand voluntary busing to grades four through eight. And six months after that, when the board’s approach was rejected by the courts, Brown switched sides and voted for mandatory busing.

It was not her last change of heart. In September of 1978, the board asked the state Supreme Court to kill its own desegregation plan, fearful that it would be too difficult to execute before school began. One day later, with the plan before the U.S. Supreme Court, the board flipped and asked the court to support its plan. Brown rejected the plan when it was before the California court and supported it when it went before the federal Court.

“I felt no ideological pro-busing or anti-busing, liberal or conservative tug,” she said at the time. “I was genuinely concerned about the sacrifices I was asking the people of the district to make.” The explanation did little to smooth over suggestions that her votes were driven by concern over her upcoming reelection. Her campaign literature for that 1979 race proclaimed her opposition to “forced busing” even as she voted for it.

Roberta Weintraub, a conservative who left the board this summer, admires Brown, but even she finds truth in contentions that Brown has avoided taking hard stands on important issues. “They’ll pin her to the wall on that one,” says Weintraub. “They’re correct.” In the political maelstrom that was the ‘70s school board, it was hard to get a bearing on Brown, Weintraub says. “I was never quite sure where she was on the issue of busing. That was an issue hard to be on both sides of, and I’m still not certain where she was.”

Yet all the while, Brown remained on good terms with board members of all political stripes. “Certainly there were times when I wished the entire board had cast different votes,” says Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters, who was on the board with Brown. “But I never felt that Kathleen had the kind of viciousness--she just didn’t even come close--like some folks did. There was never any question in my mind about her intent or her relationship or feelings toward the African-American or Latino communities.” To state Sen. Diane Watson, who, like Walters, was a consistent board vote for mandatory busing, the problem was Brown’s desire not to rock the boat. “I think she was looking at what would be less disruptive for the district. I had to convince her that sometimes you have to do things that are painful,” Watson says.

Today, Brown contends that her actions were entirely consistent. She blames suggestions otherwise on simplistic newspaper accounts. She rejects the assessment by fellow board members that she rarely took a strong leadership role.

“It was straight ahead,” she says. “It was really easy and really very consistent for me. . . . I didn’t support mandatory busing. But I did support upholding the law.” Brown says she still favors voluntary busing but opted for a mandatory plan as a way to satisfy the courts. “It’s like everything else in life,” she says a bit testily, “if it’s not black or it’s not white, it isn’t a 30-second spot or it isn’t a headline, it makes it harder for people both in the media and, I think, in the public to understand what one’s position is.”

If Brown appeared ambivalent about school busing, her friends and her family say she dealt resolutely with a coincident personal crisis. In a lifetime largely sunny, her divorce from George Rice is universally cited as her most devastating experience. Fifteen years afterward, it is still that rare subject that can crack Brown’s composure. Even now, she grows pensive and hesitant when the subject is broached.

Rice’s announcement that he wanted out of the marriage, after 13 years and three children, came as a “terrible shock” to Kathleen, says her sister Cynthia. For several weeks, her mother and sister say, she sat in the library at her Hancock Park home, not sleeping, not eating, ultimately losing 20 pounds.

To Brown, the elegant surroundings in which she lived and the resources of her wealthy families did little to shield her from an overwhelming sense of vulnerability. Like the frugal circumstances of her youth, the divorce seems to have promoted in her a middle-class anxiety that was far removed from the comfort of her life.

“I remember the feeling of ‘I am now a single mother.’ And the school board paid $100 a week if I showed up for meetings.” She decided then that she would have to pursue a professional career. “That experience has given me a very strong sense of personal desire to have independence and to be smart about areas of financial management and personal management that I might have been fairly cavalier about.

“And when I go talk to women’s groups, I talk about that. We have, I think, too often turned over control of whole segments of our lives to the men in our lives, and we just have to accept the personal responsibility for those matters,” she says.

Brown began her recovery in a most unlikely place--the eighth-grade graduation of Leslie Kantor, daughter of Mickey Kantor, now the U.S. trade representative and a former Los Angeles lawyer. Leslie’s mother, Valerie, a friend of Brown, had died several months earlier in the San Diego crash of a PSA jetliner. “I mean,” says Brown, “my life had not had anything to compare with what Mickey and those three kids had to deal with. And she died on my birthday.”

With that, Brown’s voice breaks. She tilts her head toward the ceiling of her office, fighting for control. When she glances back, tears fill her eyes. “I remember that day going out there (to the graduation), and she’s just up there, and she’s president of the class.” Watching that, she told herself: “ ‘God, this kid is just moving on.’ And it got me very focused on, ‘Yeah, I’m moving on, too.’ And that there were much bigger issues, that life was full, it was different and complex and never easy.”

Little more than a year later, her self-confidence restored, a new marriage begun and a new career on the horizon, Brown quit the school board and moved to New York.

THEY ARE A BANTERING pair, Brown and her second husband, Van Gordon Sauter, careening through the northlands of California in the search for her family’s homestead. They are also a somewhat unlikely pair, a funny and literate Hepburn and Tracy--she the daughter of a family that defines Democratic politics, he an unrepentant Republican; she a perennial partaker of the Jenny Craig diet, power-walking and frozen yogurt, he a plump and rumpled presence with a bushy white beard and flowing hair.

In the parlance of their Hollywood friends, they met cute. He was running television station KNXT, now KCBS-TV, and she was--well, let him explain it, in typically abrupt Sauterese.

“I used to see Kathleen on television and always thought she was strikingly attractive. But she was on this wretched school board, which was a collection of ill-advised social engineers, and I used to do editorials denouncing (them). I just went totally over the top when they passed a resolution calling for the removal of junk food machines from the schools. Never mind that people were continually carrying weapons to school, but we were going to purge the schools of Mars bars. And I just did this devastating editorial about these people, and it certainly angered a fair number of them.” It was then that a friend challenged him to ask her out. Enlisting the aid of mutual friends, he did.

“They called and they said, ‘Would you ever go out with Van Gordon Sauter?’ ” Kathleen recalls. “And I said, ‘The bearded, bow-tied, opinionated editorial person at KNXT?’ They said, that’s it. And I said yes. If I couldn’t get my two cents in on air time, I was determined to get it in.”

Over dessert on their first date, he told her he was going to marry her. “And she, of course, thought that I was the living personification of all the villainy that her father had told her rested in Republicans everywhere,” he says. They married a year later, almost to the day.

Just before the 1980 wedding, however, Sauter was promoted to run CBS Sports--and later CBS News--and afterward the couple moved to New York, where they were joined by her children and, occasionally, by his two. They would not come back to Los Angeles for seven years. It was, she says, a placid sabbatical after all the personal and political tumult. “It was a very private life,” she says, “and I had time to nest and rebuild some of the ground that might not have been as well laid with my kids.”

She also sought out a career. Brown, who had completed her undergraduate studies in history at Stanford in 1967, earned a law degree from Fordham University and began working in New York for the Los Angeles-based firm O’Melveny and Myers. Two years after her husband left his job and they returned to California, she built the fund-raising base for her race for treasurer on something she had kept all those years--a box of index cards listing donors to her school board races.

Sauter is rare among political spouses, a self-confident man who speaks his mind and has little inclination to hogtie himself to political correctness. He spends most of his time in Los Angeles, where he now heads Fox Television’s news division, or traveling. (She splits her time between Los Angeles, Sacramento and the political road.)

Like others, Sauter sees as one of his wife’s strongest characteristics her ability to generate an uncanny sympathy for people who have lived quite different lives than she has. Her personable style has won praise even from those diametrically opposed to Brown’s political leanings. Angela (Bay) Buchanan is about as different from Kathleen Brown as are their presidential candidate brothers Pat and Jerry. Bay Buchanan ran for California treasurer in the 1990 Republican primary against Thomas Hayes, whom Brown defeated in the general election. Though she believes that Brown is overly cautious and still untested, Buchanan gives Brown high marks.

“There are certain people when you meet them in politics who are looking over their shoulder every moment. She doesn’t give that impression. She’s very relaxed and very deliberate.

“She’s the princess of the political world out here,” she says, adding, “she had a base sitting there any time she wanted it, sitting there for her. And she picked it up with grace and built on it and works her head off.”

It is not that Brown’s political instincts are ever very far below the surface; it is just that she gives the impression that they do not control her every move.

“She doesn’t have that hard edge that you see on many women politicians, myself included,” says Roberta Weintraub. “It’s very unusual to see a woman eligible for being governor and still maintaining that personal part of her. Most of the time that part gets buried in the raw clawing of politics.”

“She’s got a certain wholeness of character; you’ve got a sense that if she chose not to run for governor, Kathleen would live a fulfilled and engaging life,” says Phil Angelides, the former chairman of the state Democratic Party and an unabashed Brown supporter. Still, as even Angelides acknowledges, Brown must translate that appeal into support from the masses.

“She still has to meet the big tests of inspiring the majority of people to vote for her,” he says. “The ultimate test of a leader is inspiring people.”

AT THE APPROACH OF SUMMER, the political season in which the state budget flowers into a troublesome mess, California’s treasurer began hawking her new budget plan. Part of it was novel--extend the temporary half-cent sales tax for three years and dedicate it to paying off $4 billion of recurring debt that she says has burdened state government for years. But part of it was vague. About the rest of the budget deficit, an estimated $6 billion, Brown offered no concrete suggestions for cuts, or taxes, or any combination of both.

“There is waste in government,” she said at a breakfast with political reporters in Los Angeles, where she sounded more like Pete Wilson than her Democratic counterparts. “There are levels of bureaucracy, there are redundancies that we just can’t afford anymore.”

Pressed later about the dearth of specifics, she declared, “When I announce greater aspirations, you bet you’ll get more detail. Until that time, I am trying to do my job as treasurer as best I can.”

It is this side of Kathleen Brown--this sort of caution--that exasperates Republicans and some of her fellow Democrats, and has defined Brown’s handling of the treasurer’s office. She has neither the anonymity of her predecessor, Hayes, nor the swashbuckling verve of his predecessor, Jesse Unruh. To be sure, there is no chorus of criticism about her handling of the job. One of the few to find fault is Steve Peace, head of the Assembly committee overseeing Brown’s department.

“She’s not inclined to grab the reins outside of the defined parameters of the job,” Peace says. Overall, Brown’s reputation as treasurer is neither great nor bad, he says. “It becomes part of the inherent consequence of being temperate--people don’t develop strong feelings about you.” Brown’s partisans say it has been her intention all along to keep a relatively low profile and build a reputation as a credible, not overly political treasurer.

Played by the book, the treasurer’s main occupation is investing California’s money, selling its bonds and, in these troubled fiscal times, persuading investment bankers to maintain their confidence in a state that at times seems not to deserve it. According to an accounting by the treasurer’s office, Brown has earned the state $3.2 billion on investments of $263 billion since taking office in January of 1991. In addition, she has sold more than $9.6 billion in bonds. The large numbers, she says, should in themselves deflect charges that she has behaved too cautiously.

“I think of myself as very--I won’t say impetuous,” she laughs. “I think that I move forcefully and I think I’m very decisive once I’ve made the decision. And I am very cautious when I’m dealing with $400 million a day. . . . I just don’t take those responsibilities lightly. I might be more impetuous in my own life, when I’m diving into rapids, and riding a river or into the ocean . . . when it’s just me, my skin that’s on the line. But when you have a public trust, I don’t think that the flip, glib or giving the easy sound-bite answer is necessarily the best service that I can give.”

But how long can an ambitious politician succeed without a good measure of specificity?

Speaking at a Democratic fund-raiser last spring at a posh Newport Beach hotel, close enough to the Pacific that the scent of the sea wafts over its parking lot, Brown lays into the pitch she has been touting from north to south, west to east, across the state as she does the piecework of campaigning.

“It’s what I say to my kids all the time. Let’s stop whining and let’s start hustling and that is what California has got to do as well,” she says, her voice rising. “Let’s get with the program and turn it around. We can do it. We’ve done it before.”

Optimism can be uplifting, particularly in a state where it has become increasingly rare. But when nerves have been rubbed raw by years of recession and fear, it does not always strike the right chord of sensitivity. So it is that while most of the Democrats in her audience applaud politely, a loud voice, urgent in its sarcasm, cuts through the warm night air: “See, Mike, there’s no real-estate crisis; you’re just whining about it.”

The voice, addressing a friend, belongs to aircraft industry executive Mark Lee. The next day, he lends it to the debate over Brown. Her pitch was nicely presented, he says, but “I definitely think she needs to start saying what she would do about some of the issues raised.”