Perspectives on Election ’94 : California Might Have Bought a Visionary Brown : Governor’s race: She opted for cautious consensus when the electorate was ready to be launched out of the doldrums.

It’s obvious that the Brown campaign was outthought and outfought. But the fatal flaw of the Brown candidacy was deeper than that. It reflects the crisis of conventional Democratic politics.

Kathleen Brown and her husband, Van Gordon Sauter, are longstanding friends of mine. As journalist and sounding board, then as her senior adviser for strategy and communications during the primary campaign, I had many talks with Brown about California’s politics and its future.

Program flows from perspective. During the 64-day state budget impasse in 1992, her perspective was one of fiscal managerialism.

When I formally joined her campaign last April, she was unclear on the role of ideas in politics. Speaking of her brother, she mused: “He focused on the power of ideas. That isn’t what’s going to do it now.” Echoing new campaign manager Clint Reilly, who in turn echoed Michael Dukakis, she said the election would be about effectiveness, not ideology.

Still, in April and May, she asked me to write her campaign book, laying out her vision for California. I declined, fearing that it would be an artifact to be pointed to rather than a message to be run on. When she finally released her book last month, it was only a collection of policy speeches she had given many months earlier.

Brown opted for a cautious elite consensus, offering little contrast with her opponent. Her candidacy was a major missed opportunity to define a new politics for a challenging time.

Confused by change and disgusted by corruption, the electorate presents as complex and nasty a setting for the doing of politics as has existed since the 1930s and the 1960s.

California is in the midst of a difficult passage to the 21st Century. It’s a center of accelerating global change: in the cross-border flow of capital, goods, ideas and people; in radical new technologies; in complex environmental challenges; in the end of the Cold War; in the rise of the Pacific Rim; in the shape of the work force and of society itself. The anxiety and dislocation caused by this multiplicity of change disrupts communities, drives anti-immigrant hysteria and clouds the economic picture.

At this stage, Job No. 1 in reinventing the faded California Dream for the new century is to drive change to serve broader goals, not just the narrow interests of connected corporate managers, fortunate entrepreneurs and clever speculators.

The technocentralist paradigm of broadcast television (controlled on the other side of the box) is giving way to the techno-populist paradigm of personal computing and communication (increasingly controlled on your side of the box).

Why not pursue a politics of techno-populism that acknowledges the dominant reality of radical technological change and turn it to the common good? This politics would promote technologies that can serve as cornerstones for new industries and expansion of existing industries, affirm the value of individual choice at a time when more and more people feel powerless, and foster a sense of stewardship of community and ecology.

We can’t allow the creation of pariah populations. The Wilson campaign was all about walls, not bridges. In our mosaic society, there can be no one whose work is valued and whose welfare is not. If aggressively countered from the start, Proposition 187 would have been defeated.

Since there is no inherent good in bureaucracy, we should promote not Big Government but Big Bang government. There was a glimpse of this two weeks ago, when Brown finally proposed a radical consolidation of environmental regulatory agencies devised by three ecological strategists. Unfortunately, the unveiling came six months after the San Francisco luncheon at which she privately embraced the idea. The only “reinventing government” portion of her book was a silly claim of a performance review generating $5 billion in savings. Not that the public employee unions that funded her campaign cared.

Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign was prescient in recognizing popular contempt for a fixed system. With Sacramento in the grip of what Tom Hayden calls the “special-interest state,” there can be no substitute for confronting corruption through political reform.

In a time of political heavy weather, Kathleen Brown, the best-funded Democrat ever to seek an American governorship, hunkered down with what she herself described as “laundry lists” of safe policies. And lost badly to the least popular governor in California history.