Three Strikes and She’s Out : Kathleen Brown: Being a woman, a Democrat and a Brown proved too much of a roadblock to the governorship.

Kathleen Brown was drowned in the Republican tsunami at the polls this year, along with virtually every other Democrat seeking office. Yet, I predict that her agenda as a New Democrat will continue to provide the yardstick by which the next four years of California’s political history will be measured.

Admittedly, voters rejected the old Democrats, and they aren’t sure yet what a New Democrat is.

Democrats are now challenged to demonstrate that their contemporary version of John F. Kennedy’s legacy still works. Kennedy’s vision was of a strong but limited government that protected the people through sustainable private economic growth, social justice and international human-rights leadership. Democrats must demonstrate the utility today of this political value system.

Kathleen Brown understood that Democrats must rekindle the public’s optimism that we can now define market-driven solutions in an international economy marked by technological change coming at warp speed.

Brown argued that we must recalibrate to accept the success of Kennedy’s vision. She pointed to the extraordinary development of strong Latino, African American, white and Asian middle-class families in America who were nurtured by Democratic ideals and programs.

She wanted to rebuild California for them through a smaller government that is tough enough to protect, yet nimble enough to promote growth in the private sector, primarily by advancing educational excellence. Her vision was simple, perhaps too simple for those yearning for a return to a political Camelot that never was. Yet her vision remains California’s challenge today.

The actual story of Kathleen Brown in this election was her three fundamental challenges--as a woman, a Democrat and a Brown.

Initially, her public identity was just a creation of polls and profiles of her celebrity family status. As the real Kathleen Brown emerged, we met a woman of deep conviction confronting a cynical, political landscape.

Her voice of moral courage was lonely in the beginning. She was among the first to denounce the popular but deadly virus of Proposition 187. She then honestly stated her views on the death penalty, going against the majority view. She nonetheless persuaded many of us who support the death penalty that she would carry out the people’s will. A corny, honest, but electorally damning position.

Yet Brown was then vilified by her Republican opponent as either weak or unschooled. Brown met this “re-machoization” of American politics head-on. She called for cutting government waste and lowering taxes. She demanded that government protect the environment while fostering economic growth. She argued that kindergartners and teachers, who we pay less than prison guards, should not be used to balance our chronic state budget deficit.

But no one appeared to believe her on these issues. Why?

Because Kathleen Brown was also a Democrat, in a year when Democrats were nationally in retreat and near-disrepute. The accepted wisdom was that Democrats can’t cut government, can’t cut taxes and can’t reorient their allies in the environmental and labor movements to accept new ideas of growth and workplace changes.

Curiously, President Clinton has accomplished just these missions. Nonetheless, Brown’s straightforward proposals to advance these goals in California were swept away in the vast skepticism of anything Democratic.

If that wasn’t enough, she was also a Brown. The health of her father, the legendary Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, California’s governor from 1958-66, unfortunately precluded his participation in her campaign. Her brother, Jerry Brown, California’s last Democratic governor, has been marginalized in the 1990s. As political assets, they were wanting. Yet she melded the economic growth strategy of her father and the environmental stewardship of her brother. Kathleen Brown, like her brother and father before her, believes ideas matter.

The force of Brown’s ideas was demonstrated when a majority of the Los Angeles Times’ own focus group moved from supporting Pete Wilson to backing her upon receiving a copy of her plan for rebuilding California.

All we ultimately learned is that you can still scare most of the people some of the time, especially if you spike their fears with near naked appeals to racial animosity and xenophobia. I grew up in North Carolina and have listened to Jesse Helms all my adult life. I know well how fear and hate works in politics.

Wilson has unleashed a whirlwind in California with Proposition 187. Coupled with the ascension of Jesse Helms to the role of foreign-policy leadership in the Senate, Wilson’s tactical goal of dividing our state by who carries an identification card may now drive the national debate into a stark politics of division. This hardly represents a formula for building in our multicultural land the successful new economy and civil society needed in the international 21st Century.

Kathleen Brown , as her father and brother before her, stood for a vision of building a state for all the people, of investing in people to enable them to improve their own lives, of believing that while each of us is sacred, we can accomplish more together than we can apart.