For Many, Jerry Brown Is the Life of the Party

Interesting. Entertaining. Engaging. Charming. Fluent. Nimble. Formidable.

Our subject here is Jerry Brown.

And who uses words like this to describe him? Well, as it happens, it’s not only his friends. California’s reigning Democratic electoral war horse has cranked up his 11th campaign for public office, and once again he’s the talk of politics.

In this case, these exact words are from the mouth of a sworn foe -- a longtime Republican activist who spoke anonymously for the sake of candor but who wants nothing more than to see Brown permanently retired.

That’s the thing about Edmund G. Brown Jr. Love him or loathe him, it’s hard to deny the strengths of a politician who has always stood apart even when he has been in the center of things.

And the journey is not over. A former governor and son of a former governor, a repeat presidential candidate, a loser for the U.S. Senate, an urban mayor, the brother of a state treasurer who was herself a candidate for governor, Brown is now running for attorney general -- the state’s top law enforcement office and, also, a position once held by his father. At 68, he’s on the stump in what appears to be high spirits, talking tough about crime, the environment and worker rights, but also having fun coloring outside the lines.

For starters, Brown, now the two-term mayor of Oakland, has his past to contend with.

Didn’t he run all those years ago as a fresh-faced reformer? Wasn’t he the guy elected Los Angeles Community College trustee in 1969 and secretary of state the following year on a platform “to throw the bums out?”

“Now I have a totally different view,” he says, laughing along with his audience at a recent luncheon in Long Beach with maritime executives.

“Forget everything I said. There is no substitute for experience.”

Actually, Brown is acutely aware that memories work for him as well as against him, and always have.

In a speech to the Los Angeles Business Council and in a long, relaxed interview with The Times, Brown expounded a candidacy founded on his long experience and his reputation as a maverick and a thinker.

“People say, ‘Why are you running?’ It’s a question I sometimes find irritating. Why not run? Why wouldn’t I run?”

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Brown began his political apprenticeship early. Among his first memories: sitting on Dad’s lap for a family-man campaign portrait of Edmund G. Brown Sr. It was 1943, the boy was 5 and his father was a candidate for San Francisco district attorney. A framed copy of that Pat Brown campaign’s slogan is displayed in Jerry Brown’s office today: “Crack down on crime, pick Brown this time.”

He didn’t use to talk about his father much. Now he draws attention to it as evidence of what he calls his “sense of history.” No one in California politics can touch him, Brown says, in understanding what works and the way it works. Add it up: 12 years in statewide office, three quixotic runs for the White House, seven years and counting as mayor of a struggling big city.

Interspersed along the journey were intervals of reflection. Brown studied for the priesthood, inquired into the tranquil rituals of Zen Buddhism, tended the sick with Mother Teresa, was the host of a radio talk show, and for a time practiced law.

To him, it is a coherent whole. “You have to have tradition. That’s the backbone of stability in our society. But you have to have innovation, or you ossify. I think I know how to match those two.”

He describes himself in terms of the Jesuit: “A contemplative in action.”

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The case against him is told in strings of details and episodes that add up to damning generalities: that he is a radical thinker, that his judgment shows lapses, that he is alternately impulsive and calculating, that he is flighty to the point of, well, weirdness.

Sometimes, one still hears echoes of that old epitaph coined by the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko: “Gov. Moonbeam.”

In the June 6 Democratic primary, Brown is paired against Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, who has probed for soft spots in Brown’s judgment and his recent record. (A recent Field Poll shows Brown with a 41-point lead over Delgadillo.)

Delgadillo needles Brown for writing to officials in Florida in 1988 and urging the release of a headline-grabbing protester with a history of disrupting abortion clinics. Brown, who has a long record of supporting abortion rights, said he wrote on behalf of the woman because she was not convicted of a violent crime and because Mother Teresa asked him to.

Delgadillo has sought to make an argument over Oakland’s crime and gangs. He points to statistics showing a spike in the murder rate; Brown offers other numbers showing an overall decline in crime.

If this was a race for governor, perhaps, these statistics and details of Brown’s service -- as well as Delgadillo’s -- would receive greater scrutiny and reflection. But in a down-ticket contest, most politicking occurs at a different level, schmoozing for endorsements, for volunteer support, for money to be used in advertising.

Both candidates have law enforcement support, Delgadillo holds the edge among labor groups, and Brown swept the important environmental endorsements. Typically, though, primary elections wind up digging only so deep into substance.

In a sign of Brown’s front-runner status in the June race, his potential general election opponent, state Sen. Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno), has joined the sniping over Oakland’s murder rate. When the city recorded its 42nd homicide this year, the puzzling shooting of an 18-year-old high school student, Poochigian complained, “Brown was on Fox News talking about the war in Iraq when he should have been in East Oakland dealing with the war on the streets.”

Still, Brown says he welcomes the focus on Oakland. His own cheery self-evaluation of his tenure can be read in his State of the City speech at: www.oaklandnet.com/government/mayor/MayorStateofOakland2005.pdf. In short, he ran to revitalize the troubled city and argues that he has strengthened the mayor’s office via ballot initiative, attracted more than 10,000 new downtown residents and boosted construction and business.

He counts the number of nightclubs that have opened in the once ghostly city center, 18, as well as 14 new galleries. One of his proudest accomplishments was establishing a military charter school for sixth- to 12th-graders run cooperatively with the state National Guard.

Along the way, he has angered some of his old liberal allies and confounded longtime critics. These days, for example, he delights in showcasing friendships with urban developers.

“He has remade Oakland,” said Greg Vilkin, president of the multibillion-dollar Forest City West development company.

To those who question his fidelity to the California Democratic Party -- of which he once was chairman -- he directs a hawk-like stare beneath eyebrows as prominent as tailfins and quips, “Some people think that I am the party, the Browns are the party.”

But try to corner him as a liberal at heart, and he counters that, as mayor, he registered as a “decline to state” and governs in “the language of nonpartisan local government.”

This kind of reaching two ways at once comes as no surprise to those who have closely followed Brown’s career. Paddling on one side of the canoe and then the other, he has said, keeps it moving forward.

What is unexpected, perhaps, is that a man once known for his worldly intellect and almost cosmic concerns seems to have relished his years as Mr. “Downtown Brown,” as the San Francisco Chronicle called him. To visit his apartment only blocks from the city core is to see a man who walks his dog down streets where he knows the names of those who wear $400 shoes as well as those who are shoeless.

Based on this, few people question whether Brown’s eagerness to be second fiddle in Sacramento at this stage of life is anything but wholehearted.

He spends a good deal of campaign time, as he tells it, studying the intriguing possibilities of the attorney general’s office. Representing the governor and state agencies is part of the mission, but the constitution also instructs the attorney general “to see that the laws of the state are uniformly and adequately enforced.”

Which laws? Enforced how and according to what priority? The potential is beyond casually interesting. As Brown points out in his speeches, California adds 1,000 or so new laws to its voluminous statute books each year. Space for interpretation is nearly boundless.

When asked, Brown agrees that New York’s headline-savvy Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer offers something of a possible model.

For instance, Brown says, “I would like to think that when they were gaming the California energy market, I would have moved when no one else did.”

But Brown added that the Spitzer template should not be carried too far. He pauses. “I am in a different place.”

For one thing, Spitzer has emphasized enforcement of financial laws on corporations. By contrast, Brown lists his personal priorities as environmental protection, fighting crime and protecting workers, maybe up to a million of them, who are part of the underground economy and who do not uniformly receive the benefits of California’s labor laws.

There is something more. Brown sizes up California’s problems as more than just legal. They are political too.

More than a generation ago, the fire-eater went to Sacramento to shake things up. Now he speaks of settling things down.

“I can’t unwind the system up there. It’s dysfunctional. But I think I can be a positive force. I think,” he says, “I’ll be of help.”