‘He’s Made Them Proud of Oakland’

Jerry Brown has never failed to surprise. This is the erstwhile California governor who ran for president, then spent a stint with Mother Teresa, who studied with Japanese monks, then became state Democratic Party chairman.

Now, newly reborn as mayor of this multiethnic city, Brown is at it again: California’s inveterate cosmic thinker has gone mainstream.

He has emerged as a wildly popular mayor whose approval rating tops 80% at the close of his first year in office. Former skeptics, who feared he’d be a flake and a civic embarrassment, call him the best thing to happen to Oakland since the A’s won the World Series.

“I was not a Jerry Brown fan when he was governor,” said Democratic state Sen. Don Perata, a newly minted ally who represents the city. “But I go all over the place in Oakland, and people are always coming up--white, black, young and old, women, men--wanting to shake his hand. He’s made them proud of Oakland.”

After a career spent bashing both the status quo and corporate America, Brown is gleefully wooing the generals of capitalism in an unabashed attempt to pull California’s eighth-largest city out of the doldrums.

He still attracts his share of critics, but supporters say Brown has brought an aura of can-do respectability to a hard-knock city forever in the shadow of its glamorous neighbor across the bay. Oakland suddenly has cachet and is basking in a renaissance of sorts, fueled in no small part by the state’s booming economy and Silicon Valley spillover.

The politician once dubbed Gov. Moonbeam is now focused on fighting street crime, improving battered schools and bringing scores of new jobs to town.

Along the way, Brown has seized unprecedented power. Even before taking office, he pushed through a “strong mayor” ballot measure giving him enormous control over how the city runs.

During his first months, he performed a thorough housecleaning at City Hall, worked to dump several port commissioners and bounced a black police chief popular in a city where African Americans outnumber whites 43% to 28%.

Disgusted with the performance of Oakland schools, which have posted some of the state’s lowest test scores while wrangling over controversial issues such as “Ebonics,” Brown worked to force out the district’s embattled superintendent. Brown is now asking city voters in March to give him an executive privilege enjoyed by only a few American mayors--the power to appoint three additional members to the elected seven-member school board.

“Contrary to everybody’s expectations that he’d be a New Age, leftist, impractical mayor, he’s become the West Coast version of [New York Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani,” said Bruce Cain, director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

But the first-year whirlwind has earned Brown some foes, particularly within the city’s African American political establishment.

Already rattled when Brown became the first white mayor in a generation, some black leaders call him “King Jerry,” suggesting that he is intellectually imperious, a political know-it-all who doesn’t give their ideas an audience. They say the city, pummeled by the 1989 earthquake and catastrophic fire of 1994, was making a comeback even before Brown landed. They also question his sympathy for the large population of impoverished renters and minimum-wage families.

“He’s trying to become God, or the pope,” said Mary King, an Alameda County supervisor who ran against Brown for mayor. “He was looking for a place he could reinvent himself, and he saw Oakland as a relatively easy mark.”

Kathy Neal, a port commissioner, said many African Americans “don’t feel included” in Brown’s Oakland. “All you ever hear him talk about is how bad this city is,” she said. “His pitch is that Oakland’s broken and he’s the only one who can fix it. But there’s a lot of good here.”

The mayor has also been thumped by former friends on the far left. Opponents have set up a Web site called “Jerry Watch,” which contrasts Brown’s current agenda with his anti-capitalist pronouncements during the mid-1990s as a syndicated radio talk show host based in Oakland.

Brown used his radio pulpit to berate corporate America, rail against warmongers and take on America’s “prison industrial complex.” These days he lunches with Bank of America chief Hugh McColl, talks of establishing a military prep school and boasts of putting scores of new cops on the street.

On a recent bright and blustery winter day, Brown held court on a barren construction site where a high-tech start-up will employ 1,500 workers near the Oakland Coliseum. A hundred people gathered under a white tent for the groundbreaking, and Brown wielded a ceremonial silver spade like some giddy municipal cheerleader.

“Things are on the move,” he bellowed.

The hair has thinned decidedly on top, but the megawatt energy hasn’t waned. The hoarse, trademark baritone still stirs it up on the stump.

As the champagne-sipping crowd dispersed, Brown paused to talk about his critics.

He turned away suggestions that his vaulted “10K plan” to lure 10,000 well-heeled new residents downtown is crowding out the poor. “Preposterous,” he said, accusing naysayers of indulging in “anachronistic rhetoric.”

Rents may have increased 13% last year, Brown said, but Oakland remains one of the most affordable spots in the Bay Area. The way he sees it, either you want gentrification or you want “slumification.” If that means a turn toward the capitalist system he once railed against, so be it.

“There’s not a socialist bank I can draw on, so I’ve got to draw on the capitalist bank,” Brown said. “A slum is not the icon of Oakland. . . . It’s very hard to get Nordstrom to service that demographic profile.”

Known for his flickering attention span and slew of half-finished initiatives as governor, Brown has remained stoically on point as mayor. He has become the city’s most potent promoter.

Brown recently held a conference for 300 high-tech executives to extol the city’s virtues. In May he jetted to Las Vegas to make a pitch to a convention of shopping center builders.

In downtown, 3,800 new lofts and condo units are in the works, promising to house 6,500 residents in the next three years. Last year, 22 companies moved to Oakland, bringing 5,000 jobs. Oakland recently closed a deal to bring a Gap store downtown, no small feat for a city largely ignored by many national chains.

“Jerry has that special magnetic ability to inspire, to close the deal and make it happen,” said John Protopappas, a downtown developer who served as Brown’s campaign treasurer.

Brown, whose grandfather was a San Francisco police captain, also finds himself popular with cops. He goes on ride-alongs and sometimes stops at a waterfront bar frequented by off-duty officers to talk shop.

“I was a little worried. I thought he was too liberal and was going to be anti-police,” said Mark Angeja, a patrolman in one of the city’s tougher neighborhoods. “But he’s supported us.”

Out on the streets, there is a smattering of dissent.

Listen to Mike Brown, a resident of West Oakland. A mix of stately but aging Victorians, struggling businesses and boarded-up storefronts, the neighborhood recently celebrated the opening of a new supermarket, its first in years. Standing outside the market, the 21-year-old United Parcel Service worker criticized the mayor for police efforts he believes have swept up the innocent as well as the guilty.

“He says he’s cracking down on crime,” he said. “All he’s doing is harassing the black folks.”

Kelvin Henry watched the young man talk, then promptly disagreed. “I’m thinking Jerry Brown has done a damn good job,” said Henry, 38, who just got a job stocking shelves. “I have work because he cleaned this place up. They would have put this store somewhere else if not for him.”

Fresh from first-year victories, Brown still faces formidable obstacles.

UC Berkeley’s Cain said that the mayor’s aggressive redevelopment efforts risk further alienating the poor and that tough stands on crime could create tension by trampling civil liberties. He said the city’s schools are such a mess, with threats of a state takeover, that a true turnaround might be a generation away.

In recent weeks, Brown has tasted his first defeats. First, the school board hired a new superintendent against his wishes. Then the state Fair Political Practices Commission, citing conflict-of-interest rules that Brown himself crafted in the 1970s, said the mayor can’t weigh in on development projects within half a mile of his waterfront home, putting half of downtown off-limits to him.

Though Brown has three years left in his term, speculation is already rife about where he might be headed next. The U.S. Senate? A final run for president perhaps?

“My crystal ball is not clear,” he said, before hopping into a shiny black BMW driven by a staffer. “Right now, my only plan is to make an impact on Oakland.”