‘I Was in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time With the Wrong Message’

For two years, Kathleen Brown lived a candidate’s life. She went without sleep. She gave up her family’s privacy. She asked complete strangers for money.

She did all these things, made all these sacrifices, in the hopes of becoming governor. Instead, the state treasurer said with a sad smile, “I got hammered.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong message,” Brown said the other day as she reflected on her failed bid to unseat Gov. Pete Wilson.

Sitting in her Hollywood Hills home, her feet tucked under her on a couch near a warm fire, Brown talked at length about what she described as a frustrating but exhilarating campaign--one that taught her hard lessons, but also inspired her to believe more than ever in the future of California.

Disappointment often filled her voice, and at times Brown fought to control her emotions as she tried to explain how campaign advertisements, public appearances and her detailed, 62-page economic plan all failed to give the electorate a clear understanding of her or her program. In that regard, she said, “I don’t think I was as effective as I might have been.”

Although she at times spoke critically--of Wilson, of the news media and of herself--she said she was determined to be “a builder, not a blamer, to the end.” Brown showered her campaign staff with praise. Her defeat, she said, was a product of the times.

“What frustrated me the most was my inability to successfully break through on the issues that I really cared about and thought were important--like education and the economy and the (budget),” she said. “The people were too hot and bothered about these other emotional issues . . . illegal immigration and crime, where I embraced a philosophical position that went against the public emotion of the day.

“I kept thinking, ‘Well, the people want a better California and they want their schools to be better and they want their colleges to be affordable and accessible and they want someone who’s going to clean up government and make it work. And that’s something that we can rally around,’ ” she said. “But what I saw was how much easier and more facile a task it was to divide people, to find an enemy, to find a bogyman.”

Brown talked with pride about her opposition to Proposition 187, the ballot measure to deny services to illegal immigrants that was approved by 59% of the electorate. Toward the end of her campaign, Brown mentioned the initiative in every speech, warning voters that it would only fuel racial tensions.

“It hammered one more nail in my coffin, every single day that I spoke about it,” Brown said with a wry laugh. But “it was a moral voice. It was a fight for California, for the new California that we’re going to be living with no matter who’s governor.”

During the campaign’s last weeks, as the debate raged over Proposition 187, Brown said, she was struck by memories of 1964, when her father, then-Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., campaigned against Proposition 14, a constitutional amendment that voided state fair housing laws.

“It gave people the right to basically discriminate on who they sold their property to based upon race. It was clearly unconstitutional. . . . But it touched all of the hearthstone issues. It was about your home and your neighborhood and it went to some of these fundamental issues that swirl around the issue of race,” said Brown. Californians overwhelmingly approved the measure, which was invalidated by the courts.

Sometimes her father’s speeches on Proposition 14, like a few of her own on Proposition 187, were met with “thunderous boos. I remember the hatred, the anger and the cheers--the depth of raw emotion.”

But then as now, Brown said, she does not fault the people who harbored those emotions.

“They’re voters who are struggling through their day. . . . They’re frustrated and mad as hell and don’t know what to do about it,” she said. “But I do hold to account political leaders whose job it is to be not only an instrument of the public will, but also to be leaders in articulating the right way and the wrong way to solve these fundamental problems--to channel that anger.”

Those who watched Brown during the last days, when her campaign was so low on money that it could not afford to advertise on TV, marveled at her unflagging buoyancy.

“How did I keep doing it?” she asked, repeating a visitor’s question. “I kept getting better, you know? I kept getting better! And the response of the people. . . .”

Her voice cracked and her eyes gleamed with tears. After a pause, Brown said: “I had an assignment, a task, a mission. If you’re a general, you don’t whine and you don’t complain. You point the people in the direction they need to go to get to where you need to be. You take what you’ve got and you make the best you can out of it.

“I think that is what I got from my mother and my father and the life that I’ve had. It was: Remember who you represent. Remember who you represent when you walk out the door. And I think that’s what leaders are supposed to do.”

Brown laments some mistakes, foremost among them a comment she made to a reporter that mischaracterized the death penalty position of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, among others. The comment, she said, came in exasperation when the reporter persisted in talking only about the death penalty and crime.

“I don’t regret anything else so much as I do that, because it hurt people that I respected and I never, ever, ever intended to do that,” she said. “I didn’t even remember saying it, you know? And then when it was published it was like, ‘What?’ And the use of that (in the ads of Feinstein’s opponent, Rep. Mike Huffington) just pained me. I wanted to gobble up those words and put them back in my mouth.”

Brown saved her harshest criticism for the news media, which she said seemed frequently to be more interested in tactics than in issues. She lamented that 30-second advertisements had become the “grammar” of modern politics, and said she believed that too often, journalists allowed themselves to be driven by the advertising, instead of striving to set the agenda themselves.

“The free press I think has abrogated their responsibility to be independent, to bring insight and to bring some courage to the pursuit of the issues that affect the common good,” she said, noting that she wished reporters had pressed Wilson on how he would implement Proposition 187 and on what, specifically, he would do during his second term.

Much of the coverage, she said, “was about how clever he was, how he defined the issues. Whether they were the issues that were going to make California a better place or not--that was not something worthy of the press inquiry.”

Brown also blasted the editorial positions of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, San Diego Union and Los Angeles Times for what she called the “ethical dishonesty” that led them to endorse Wilson while at the same time denouncing Proposition 187.

“To endorse, if not the author, the political godfather and major champion of an initiative that each denounced in the strongest terms stunned me,” she said. “They didn’t have to endorse me--I certainly respect if people thought I was qualified or thought I wasn’t. But there was a level of ethical dishonesty . . . that I found quite troubling.”

Brown’s newest granddaughter, Vanessa, began crying in the next room. Her husband, Van Gordon Sauter, strolled out of his study and started mumbling about the importance of lunch. Brown glanced around her living room, where she has spent so little time lately, and for a moment looked completely content.

Her immediate plans include a two-week vacation in a “faraway land where no one knows me.” Upon her return, she will finish out her term as treasurer--”I’ve still got some more bonds to sell before I get into my wagon and head into the sunset,” she said. After that, “I get to figure it out.

“I am a believer in getting into the arena. Get into the arena and fight. Don’t just sit on the sidelines,” she said, confirming that she plans to continue to work to serve the public interest, though she is not sure that means a job in conventional politics.

Asked if she has any wisdom to impart, she said: “My advice, and it’s the advice I gave myself, is if you ever run for public office, regard it as . . . an adventure and have the best time you can. Conduct yourself in a way that you won’t have any regrets when you look back.”