As Oakland Mayor, He Has Embraced a Military Academy, Wooed Big Business and Fought Environmental Regs. And He Insists He’s Just the Same Old Jerry Brown.

For one brief moment they are all there--every Jerry Brown we’ve had the pleasure of watching for the past quarter century, all the incarnations of a man who has alternately delighted and confounded, annoyed and enriched, angered and engaged the American public. Everyone from the Philosopher Prince to Mayor Fix-It, all on one small patch of cracked asphalt.

First the scene: a chilly Monday morning in West Oakland, on the scruffy grounds of a decommissioned Army base, now home to Brown’s latest pet project, the Oakland Military Institute. Brown has turned out to review the troops, OMI’s inaugural class, 170 or so cadets in uniforms that match but whose neatness levels dramatically do not. They are seventh-graders from mostly poor families fleeing Oakland’s other public schools for Brown’s grand experiment in discipline, education and incongruity.

On this, the very first day of class, the media are out in force. They’re listening to National Guard sergeants drill 12- and 13-year-olds and dress down stragglers. They’re listening to proud parents gush about Hope and the Future and the importance of a Good Education. But mostly, they’ve come to hear the man who opposed Operation Desert Storm explain the difference between military and militaristic, to hear Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, in the relatively carefree weeks before Sept. 11, impatiently describe how it is possible to oppose combat while embracing the discipline that leads to it.

“This is tradition, and it’s a structure. It’s part of this country and what the state is all about. And it’s being made available by choice to those families and kids who want it,” Brown says of his new charter school. “It’s not engaging in foreign policy or going to a Gulf War or engaging in debates on ‘Star Wars’ or having army commandos. That’s just something that some folks from Berkeley conjured up in their mind one evening a year or two ago.”

Brown’s black jacket is zipped high against the morning cold, its black-and-silver OMI patch bearing the school’s cryptic Latin motto, one the cadets have a little trouble grasping: Age Quod Agis. What does the motto mean? he is asked. Brown slides out a small smile. Suddenly he is berBrown, a little bit of every Jerry he’s ever been.

“It’s from the seminary,” he replies. “We used to use the motto Age Quod Agis. And it means to focus on what you’re doing. It actually comes from a Roman playwright, Terence. That’s where it derives from. And then I learned it in the Jesuits. And it also has a certain Buddhist ring to it, because it’s focus and consciousness and attention. Do one thing at a time. And when you’re studying, that’s a very good idea. You might apply it by saying, ‘Turn off the radio.’ Or ‘turn off the television.’ And just do that which you’re doing.”

But you gave them the motto? he is pressed. “Yes. And also the black and silver, too. Like the Raiders,” Oakland’s professional football team.

The Buddhists, the Jesuits, the Romans, the Raiders, all in the space of a 10-second sound bite. It is a performance that only Edmund G. Brown Jr. could give, a performance that could happen only now, more than halfway through Brown’s first term as mayor of California’s eighth-largest city.

The 63-year-old with a face like a bird of prey--hawk nose, firm brow, sharp eyes and spare black plumage gone white at the temples--has left an indelible stamp on the city of Oakland after nearly three years at its helm. There were 10,000 new jobs by midsummer. Nearly 7,000 housing units are in the construction pipeline, mostly in a drab downtown that Brown wants to turn into some kind of Manhattan. Crime is mostly down--except for homicide. Pride is mostly up. The camera crews that once watched a two-term governor and three-time presidential candidate campaign for mayor (How the mighty have fallen! ) are back to watch a city rise up from the depths.

But Oakland’s isn’t the only evolution taking place on the low-rent side of the San Francisco Bay. As much as Brown has changed this city, being its mayor has changed him. The man who once derided government assistance to business as AFDC--”Aid to Financially Dependent Corporations”--now does his best to bring businesses to town. The man who chatted with political theorist Noam Chomsky about the “fabricated war on crime” walks into his City Hall office each day to review overnight crime stats and shows off a picture of his maternal grandfather, San Francisco Police Capt. Arthur Layne, in uniform. The man who brought the house down at the 1992 Democratic Convention with a denunciation of politics as we know it now speechifies about buying better bus shelters.

He used to be known for Big Talk. Now he is known for small actions. He used to be a cartoon. Now he is--again--a success. For as much as Brown is helping to revive long-struggling Oakland, this underdog city is rehabbing its mayor. Jerry Brown’s “name identification couldn’t have gotten any higher, but it had a lot of room to get better,” says Dan Schnur, a veteran of California politics who headed up Richard Riordan’s gubernatorial exploratory committee. “There’s no question that his time as mayor has improved his image. He’s not just a caricature anymore. He’s a mayor who’s gotten things done.”

some point to the busy cranes along interstate 880 as a symbol of Brown’s Oakland. Others look to the construction at the bay-side entertainment center called Jack London Square. Brown has lived in a converted warehouse near the square since the mid-1990s, and now he is bringing in his own neighbors by encouraging loft development down the road.

But perhaps Brown’s footprint is best seen in Frank Ogawa Plaza--one of the toughest places in the Bay Area to bring in retailers, and the heart of what the mayor hopes will be Oakland’s revitalized downtown.

If you face City Hall, on the west side of the plaza, to the right you see a seven-story brick building undergoing renovation. Soon the bottom floor will house Allegro Too, a rare fine-dining restaurant for a downtown that shuts down soon after 6 p.m. To your back, on the ground floor of the Lionel Wilson Building, is Spaccio, an Italian men’s clothing store with Zegna fabrics and East Bay prices. To your left is a new branch of the Gap. Ubiquitous throughout America, the store is only the company’s second in Oakland.

The plaza reveals why Oakland voters embraced their celebrity mayor. Many of Brown’s rivals grumbled during the 1998 campaign that Brown was just a big fish flopping into their mid-sized pond. Instead of running for an office, they said, he made them run against a name. But the voters had a different take. Brown “has a lot of clout statewide and the connections to give the city what it needs--a shot in the arm,” Richard Allison, a longtime resident of hardscrabble East Oakland, said at the time. He voted for Brown, and so did 59% of the electorate. As a victory gift to their mayor later that year, they resoundingly approved Measure X, a strong-mayor initiative that gave Brown more power.

Just as voters had hoped, Brown brought his friends along for the ride. Allegro Too will be bankrolled by Angelo Quaranta, a friend of Brown’s for some 20 years and owner of Allegro restaurant on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Spaccio is owned by Maurice Himy, who has been dressing Jerry Brown and Brown aide-de-camp Jacques Barzaghi for more than 30 years. Himy moved across the bay after selling Spaccio’s lease in South of Market San Francisco. As for the Gap--the retailer’s legal counsel is Ann Gust, Brown’s companion for the past decade or so and chief caretaker of the couple’s black Labrador retriever, Dharma.

For all their loyalty, however, business owners don’t throw their futures away on a troubled city just because they’ve been serving its mayor capellini with tomato and basil for nearly a generation. Quaranta, for one, is no lovesick fool. An insurance man turned restaurateur and member of the San Francisco police commission, he wouldn’t open a business unless he believed it would succeed. “Naturally, I move for Jerry Brown. Naturally, the city is changing also. I would not go if there would be no change in the city. Even if it was my brother, I would not go. . . . [But] Jerry knows everybody in the United States. Jerry is a landmark, an institution. Jerry gives the name to Oakland. Not Oakland gives the name to Jerry.”

Brown waves off the issue, impatient as always. The three retailers mean little compared to the city’s 10,000 new jobs and the growing list of corporations calling Oakland home. He says the important change is the “climate of confidence, especially with some of these developers,” that he believes he has nurtured by moving here himself. “I put down roots here,” he says. “I think that has encouraged people.”

Himy agrees. “I moved completely here because I believe in Jerry and Jacques,” says the man who, as Brown’s clothier, is probably the only person in America to describe the mayor as conservative. “They say that Oakland is the place.”

mayors lead more than they do, which makes measuring their impact difficult. As a candidate and then as mayor, Brown has stuck to several themes: Crime needs to drop. Schools need to improve. Ten thousand people need to move to the city center. Since he took office in January 1999, Brown has made strides in some areas and has had mixed results in others.

To fight crime, Brown brought in a new police chief and studied how New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani achieved his controversial crime cleanup. Brown had new computers installed to track offenders better. He instituted a system to break out statistics geographically and to hold police commanders accountable for their regions.

The measures have largely helped. In his state-of-the-city address last January, Brown declared, “Oakland is a much safer city than it’s been in the last 30 years.” Officials boast that crime dropped 20% between 1999 and 2000. At the same time, however, homicides rose 33%, from 60 to 80. If this year’s pace of murders continues, the 2001 total could top 80.

Yet as overall crime dropped, complaints about harsh police tactics increased, and Oakland is enduring a Rampart-like police scandal, in which four officers are accused of charges ranging from kidnapping and assault to false arrest. More than 70 convictions have been overturned as a result of investigations into their actions.

Oakland’s economic development, particularly in downtown and along the waterfront, has surged in the last several years. Many of the projects began before Brown took office, but he is given credit for making government friendlier to business and for changing outside perceptions of the city.

One high-profile building under construction is 555 City Center, owned by the Shorenstein Co., a San Francisco-based firm with more than 25 million square feet of office space nationwide. Shorenstein first stepped into Oakland in 1996, when it bought the City Center, a downtown office and retail complex that had gone into foreclosure. At the time, the company also had options to build on four sites nearby but had no plans to do so, says Douglas W. Shorenstein, the company’s chairman and chief executive. That changed after Brown was elected and began pushing downtown development. Shorenstein was interested, but he warned that if the permitting process dragged, 555 City Center would never happen. Construction began 10 months after Brown took office and should be complete next spring, giving Oakland its first high-rise built with private money in a decade.

“When Jerry became mayor of Oakland, I was scared to death that he’d use Oakland as the petri dish for weird ideas that were very high risk and didn’t work out,” Shorenstein says. “He didn’t do that. He came in and took some very basic concepts--jobs, the power of economic development--and pitched them.”

Others are less delighted. Brown’s push for downtown has brought criticism that he is ignoring neighborhoods or focusing on high-end construction to the detriment of affordable housing. West Oakland activist Ray Kidd, who has pushed to make evictions more difficult in the gentrifying city, worries about displacement of longtime residents who can’t afford high housing costs. “I saw something in the paper the other day,” Kidd says. Brown “had been asked about affordable housing. He gave a flip answer: ‘Who can be for unaffordable housing?’ I regret at this point that I voted for him.”

Improving education is perhaps where Brown scores lowest. Critics say he has paid little attention to most of the schools in the struggling 54,000-student district, concentrating instead on the military academy and a charter school for the arts, which is still in the works. Brown argues that mayors don’t run school districts and that the best way for him to improve education is to push for charter schools.

“His whole strategy for education is a couple of charter schools,” says school board member Dan Siegel, who is particularly critical of the military school. It receives $2 million from the U.S. Department of Defense and $1.3 million from the state each year. “If you give me $20,000 per kid per year, we could guarantee a successful education for each of them.”

it’s july 24. the oakland city council agenda is packed, but one item has been moved to the top in honor of a special guest: Jerry Brown, urban mechanic and relative stranger to the Tuesday night meetings. In Oakland’s “strong-mayor” government, Brown is not required to attend council meetings. He drops by only to end stalemates and make pronouncements. This night there is a 4-4 impasse over street furniture, also known as bus shelters. Should they have three sides or four? Should they have advertisements and therefore bring the city revenue? Should they have toilets? Who will keep them clean? Will the contract go to AdShel or Infinity?

The regular council watchers, of course, have strong opinions. Heidi Manfroi goes way over her allotted time to throw her support behind Infinity, whose shelter has more sides than AdShel’s and, therefore, offers better protection. Jerry Rose excoriates the mayor standing in the wings. “I know you’re probably going to come down here,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Ooh, maybe you’re right here, invisible but present. Maybe you’re gonna come down here and cast the deciding vote. That would be a first, won’t it? Ooh, no, the second. I forgot. One time, you voted for a raise for yourself.”

A study in monochromatic charcoal gray, Brown takes the lectern and waxes as poetic as anyone can on the subject of street furniture. Politics are always present, he says, but an independent committee “uninfluenced by any politics that I know of” recommended AdShel. The crux of the matter, Brown says, is the balance between enhancing Oakland’s livability and getting a little extra money from bus shelter ads. The money is far from certain, he warns, but “the AdShel people have agreed in detail to be bound by a contract that submits them to a $1,000-a-day penalty if one of their shelters should become defaced and dirty. A thousand dollars a day. That kind of a hammer does not exist anywhere else. It’s going to guarantee that these shelters will not be like those Infinity put up in San Francisco, where 85% had graffiti a few months ago.”

The crowd does not go wild. But then again, this isn’t New York in 1992, where Brown was an outsider crashing the big guys’ convention to the rousing cries of “Let Jerry speak!” This is not a slam at politics in the race between Bill Clinton and then-incumbent George Bush: Instead of government by the people and for the people and of the people, President Bush and his allies give us government of, by and for the privileged. Nor is it a blast at Dallas billionaire Ross Perot: Mr. Perot, we can afford to pay for our own democracy. We don’t need you to lend it to us.

No, this is the business of running a city in all of its grit and minutiae, and Brown is fully engaged--to the surprise of friend and foe alike. After all, he spent his entire adult life throwing rocks at the establishment. As California’s first governor after Vietnam and Watergate, Brown stocked the courts and his Cabinet with women and minorities. He championed then-odd ideas such as satellites and solar energy. He turned his back on former Gov. Ronald Reagan’s opulent, suburban governor’s mansion and slept on a mattress on the floor of a $250-a-month Sacramento apartment. He ran for president three times, U.S. Senate once. He dated Linda Ronstadt. He tended the poor with Mother Teresa. He meditated. He ranted on a radio show called “We the People.” And now he’s meeting with developers, considering bus shelters, fighting crime. Brown has changed. The question is how. when brown talks about being mayor, he sounds at times as if he’s channeling Strom Thurmond, the Republican senator from South Carolina and father of the modern day state’s rights movement. Sitting in his City Hall office, pondering how being mayor of Oakland has affected him, Brown gives a full-throated defense of a concept known as “home rule.” Coming from Brown’s lips, this rallying cry of the Grand Old Party is tarted up with the trappings of a classical education.

This is how Brown thinks about home rule: Florence had 80,000 residents at its city-state peak. Athens had 40,000. They were capable of deciding their own destinies, so why not Oakland? Why should his city, any city, have to go to a judge if it wants to replace an abandoned building with a housing development or a vacant lot with an office tower? “If a people of 400,000 is incompetent to govern itself,” Brown demands, “then where is the democracy? Why in the world can’t we decide things?”

The answer is that decisions must be in keeping with restrictions under the California Environmental Quality Act, the kind of well-intentioned regulation Brown would figure to embrace. After all, Gov. Brown gave this state the California Conservation Corps, the beginnings of an energy policy and a swath of urban parks. But Gov. Brown stepped down in January 1983.

Mayor Brown now sits in City Hall, and Mayor Brown successfully lobbied the Legislature this fall to get these nagging regulations changed so that he can bring in more housing. Housing brings people, and people drive away crime, and safe streets attract retailers, and soon you have a revitalized downtown. How could anyone argue with that?

“I was--and am--a strong supporter of environmental protection,” he says. “There’s probably no chief executive in America with a stronger record. But when it comes to building housing in downtown Oakland, in the midst of bus zones that have 100 buses passing on both sides in an hour, lots of cement, cars, office buildings, I say bring in housing. But every building you put up, you have to do a nine-month environmental analysis. The only real issues are traffic, congestion, shadows, parking. So I have to say to myself: A city of 400,000 people is uniquely competent to manage its particular traffic problems. But under the law of California, that’s not true. Anybody who wants to challenge what the city does by virtue of an EIR can go to court.”

It was this Brown--the red-tape ripping, development-pushing, crime-fighting Mayor Brown--who was lauded last May by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public-policy organization. And this Brown has become an irritant to those who supported his earlier incarnation.

Oakland City Councilwoman Nancy Nadel worked hard to elect the Brown who questioned the status quo and embraced environmental justice. Nadel represents a district in troubled but rapidly gentrifying West Oakland, where home prices have skyrocketed, affordable housing is in short supply and there is not enough substance-abuse treatment available for people paroled weekly into the neighborhood. She feels betrayed, and she has fought Brown’s efforts to sidestep environmental laws.

The mayor is “180 degrees different” from the candidate, Nadel says. “I thought that he would be really working on sustainable development. He was touting the principle of Oakland for Oaklanders. Neither has been happening. Sustainable development has disappeared. Oakland for new Oaklanders--not existing Oaklanders--has become his theme.”

a conversation with brown is a hybrid of lecture and argument. There are long, looping speeches punctuated with a Who’s Who of economics and philosophy. There are short bursts of chew-it-over give-and-take. There are harangues. Long harangues. There are no sound bites. There are challenges and impatient sentence-enders. He is impossible to paraphrase, difficult to take notes from. Close attention is an utter necessity.

What begins as a talk about why murder in Oakland is up when overall crime is down, for example, sweeps through generational patterns and failing schools, automation and the global economy, prisons that warehouse instead of rehabilitate, low wages and teacher turnover and substance abuse and absenteeism and “confused governance among conflicting federal, state and local rules” and racial politics and gentrification. “It’s pretty hard to describe that in a newspaper story,” he admits. “I’ll be impressed if you can pull that off.” The discussion ends up, thanks to a mind that admiring friends describe as “associative,” on the topic of whether or not being mayor has changed him.

“How am I different? What have I learned? It’s very specific. There are blocks where murders happen. There are rashes of car thefts. There are schools where only 12% of the kids are at the national average in math and reading,” Brown says, abrupt, emphatic. “You can actually meet these people. You can talk to the teachers. You can talk to the principals. So out of that very immediate slice of reality, I can see and reflect on what action I want to take. That is not available if you’re a governor or at a higher level, or president. . . . You get down here and see how it is. It’s very concrete. I think I understand more.”

On the subject of change, that’s about all Brown cops to. That and the fact that “the importance of discipline in school is certainly more salient in my mind than it was five years ago.” Otherwise, the man who’s made a career of personal reinvention describes himself as “pretty consistent over time.” He says people think he has become more conservative, but he hasn’t. He says he has a better appreciation for law enforcement and the problem of crime, but then he quickly points out that, as governor, he signed a slew of tough-on-crime laws, more than former Gov. Reagan.

Asking Brown’s friends and supporters whether the mayor is different feels a lot like picking a fight. In life, change is often growth; in politics, change is often a flip-flop, disingenuous, wrong. What that leaves us with, of course, is government by ventriloquist dummy. Or thinking human beings who insist they are not.

“We deprive our politicians of the ability to be original, or imaginative, or to learn,” says Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, a Brown friend and author of a book simply titled “Brown.” That said, Schell believes Brown hasn’t really changed but “is operating differently,” is “better integrated,” more “practical.”

Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who has watched Brown since he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, argues that he has not changed his core beliefs. But being mayor, Carrick says, has given Brown “more meaning and something he can point to as concrete accomplishment, as opposed to what sometimes seemed in ‘92, the howling-at-the-moon aspect of his campaign for the presidency.”

OK, then, so he hasn’t changed. But he has.

the big question is whether it even matters if Edmund G. Brown Jr. has grown from meditator to mediator, from loud mouth to mayoral action figure, whether his soul is circa 1976 or 2001. The answer? Who he is today will have great impact on who he becomes tomorrow. He is running for a second term as mostly grateful Oakland’s celebrity mayor. Only one man is challenging him--Wilson Riles Jr., a local activist and son of Brown’s former state superintendent of public instruction.

Riles argues that there are seething pockets of anti-Brown resentment in Oakland’s poorest neighborhoods, the ones that saw no benefit from the economic boom and are enduring pain from the downturn. The smart money says Riles hasn’t got a chance, that unless Brown makes some colossal mistake between now and March 5, he returns for four more years.

But giving Brown a second term is no guarantee he’ll take it. The down side of a restless intellect is a short attention span. There’s been little indication so far that Brown is bored. He insists he isn’t. He will not address the rampant speculation, the scenario on the street that goes something like this: Brown is reelected, serves one year and casts his eye on Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat--provided she doesn’t run again in 2004. (She says she will.)

There is also some talk that he could make another run for the White House, but no serious presidential candidate has ever lost three bids and even run again, let alone won. Still, there are two interesting things about the rumors. The first is what it proves about him: After nearly three years at Oakland’s helm, Brown is, again, a viable candidate to more than just the residents of this city. Being mayor has made Brown “look more normal,” says Oakland-based political strategist Larry Tramutola. Today, “he’s a middle-of-the-road-guy with some out-of-the-road ideas.” As decades of American politics has proven, it’s often the middle-of-the-road guy who wins.

The second interesting thing is what the speculation shows about us: We’ve watched Brown for a generation, and we’re still tuning in.

Brown explains why.

Question: People wonder why you change so often.

Brown: What do you mean?

Q: I can’t count the number of articles I’ve read that say, ‘Here’s the new Jerry Brown.’

Brown: Well, I don’t want to be a bureaucrat. As opposed to what? Becoming a bank clerk? You can keep your job too long. Didn’t Bill Clinton tell us we have to have seven jobs in our life? So, I don’t think I’ve changed that much. Maybe not enough.

Q: So why are people still so fascinated with you?

Brown: Maybe because I keep changing.