The Last Guffaw?

Jerry Brown was to announce his candidacy for mayor of Oakland, and the large metal building that for two years has served as the former governor’s communal home and political headquarters was filled with reporters and cameras. “Good little crowd here,” Brown said almost to himself as he moved toward the microphones.

He punctuated this observation with a thin smile that suggested a sense of relief. Sixteen years removed from public office, Brown had passed his first test with this Tuesday evening press conference: He still can draw a crowd. Of course, so can freeway car wrecks and freak shows at the fair.

The next and larger question is whether Brown will be taken seriously . . . or laughed out of the house. He talks grandly of wanting to empower Oakland, to bring a bit of luster, and some lucre, to a lunch-bucket city that has long been overshadowed by San Francisco.

Nonetheless, even for this longtime fan of the man, there is an inclination to cringe at the idea of Jerry Brown--one of California’s brightest leaders, and a politician who once made viable runs on the White House--donning his rusty armor to do battle for Oakland City Hall. While Brown no doubt will cast the coming campaign as a serious attempt to reinvent politics from the bottom up, the risk is that it will be perceived as a pathetic exercise in hanging on, the political equivalent of a lounge act: Gov. Moonbeam’s last guffaw.

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Certainly the smirks worn by so many of the reporters present Tuesday suggested Brown’s vulnerability to people who have seen his performance too many times before. They gleefully tossed out moonbeam questions, about windmills and satellites and less is more.

“As soon as I heard about this,” one television reporter from Sacramento told a colleague just prior to the press conference, “I got out the file shots of the old Plymouth and the Linda Ronstadt trip and Mother Teresa.”

“Well,” the other reporter assessed, “I’d say you have it covered.”

Giggle, giggle.

Snickering aside, a case can be made that Brown once again has placed himself ahead of the political curve. However loony it seemed to critics then, Brown was not wrong, in the long view, when he preached as governor that California should have its own satellite or create energy through conservation. And he might not be wrong now, suggesting that the last, best hope for government and politics in the Land of the Lincoln Bedroom can be found at the humble local level.

Certainly not many people bother to pretend any more that national, or even state, politics matter much. Whether the red team beats the blue team in any given election makes for good sport, for entertainment. It does not, however, clean water systems, or fill potholes, or pry handguns from the grasp of criminals, or plan against the proliferation of quick-buck developments that look like tomorrow’s ghettos. All these sorts of tasks are best tackled at City Hall. All politics is local, the old politician once said. He might have added: And so are the solutions.

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There is a dawning awareness of this tilt toward ground-level government among people interested in what was nobly called, in a happier time long ago, public service. The glory grabbed of late by Mayors Rudolph Giuliani of New York and Willie Brown of San Francisco has been noted. In the present climate, any clear-thinking mayor of a large California city might well consider the governorship as something of a demotion. The mayoral trappings are not as swell, but at least the possibility is there to actually do something.

And Brown is full of ideas about what he’d like to do. He talked Tuesday of his vision for Oakland as a sparkling “city on the hill” that would attract artists, entrepreneurs, capital and, who knows, maybe just a little bit of pitching for the hapless Oakland A’s. Oaklanders First, he said, would be his motto, proclaiming: “With the diversity of talent and the best location on the Bay, there is no reason why Oakland shouldn’t be a center of creativity.”

First, however, he must be elected. Among Oakland political types, the initial reaction to his announcement generally was positive. More than once, he was handicapped as the candidate to beat. A newspaper poll that showed him far ahead of the most obvious rivals in the June primary was cited often--even by Brown himself, who described his foes as “not even on the radar.”

And maybe it will be that simple. The call here, however, would be for Brown to follow his own famous advice and lower such expectations. There was something strange and sad about Brown’s return to politics last week, watching all those reporters laugh, not with him, but at him. There also was something strange and sad about the way he seemed not to notice.