TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011392/0113104.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 8.7 KB | 176 lines

                q╬                                                        ╚NATION, Page 19

DEMOCRATS

Strong Message, Wrong Messenger


Jerry Brown issues a powerful appeal for a voter uprising against
politics-as-usual. But that old "Governor Moonbeam" image keeps
getting in the way.

By JORDAN BONFANTE/LOS ANGELES


    Only one presidential candidate would dare to stump for
votes at a convention of crystal-worshipping New Agers in Los
Angeles. Prowling the stage with a hand mike like a stand-up
crooner, Jerry Brown trumpets his current theme about the
hopeless corruption of the political system, then offers his
audience more specialized wares. He cites Buckminster Fuller's
appeal for a fundamental "design change" of society. To loud
applause from the assembled acolytes of acupuncture,
psychoshamanism and touch therapy, he declares that any vast
health-care reform "should also recognize alternative healing
modalities." The custom-tailored sermon, delivered with
rat-a-tat intensity, goes over so effectively that he is coaxed
into a second performance for all the healers and spiritualists
who were unable to squeeze into the auditorium for the first
one.

    And so it goes as Brown, the former two-term Governor of
California, makes his third bid for the White House. With a
forthrightness bordering on naivete and an all-too-Californian
tendency to let it all hang out, Brown, 53, does not even try
to protect himself from the image consequences of his esoteric
passions. In fact, he sometimes seems to relish making himself
an easy target and regularly walking into the propeller of his
unshakable image as a double-dome space cadet. "I don't know
which image you have of me," Brown tells new audiences, as if
to exorcize his cartoon nicknames. "Governor Moonbeam? The
Governor who drove a Plymouth? Slept on the floor?"

    Brown's unshakable counterculture image undercuts a
fervent message that needs to be heard: a call not just for a
jobs-and-income revival but for an American political
reformation. Even Brown's adversaries grudgingly acknowledge
that in an era of term limits, the Keating Five and a general
climate of voter restiveness, his message strikes a chord. It
very obviously unnerved his rival Democratic candidates at their
first televised debate in December, though Brown undercut its
effect with his bristling appeal to viewers to call in
contributions to his 800 number like a shop-by-phone huckster.

    Brown says Big Money has hopelessly corrupted the
political system, which no longer seems to solve problems but
only to maintain the power of officeholders. As he sees it,
politicians, aided and abetted by party structures,
special-interest contributors and the "co-conspiratorial" media,
are stuck in a vicious circle of fund raising and
self-perpetuation. The only way to break the cycle and "take
back America," Brown argues, is from below, with a "grass-roots
insurgency." Accordingly, he has pledged to accept contributions
of no more than $100. Until last week that appeal had netted him
a shoestring $500,000 from 20,000 donors. "There is a
constituency," he insists buoyantly. "If I had enough time,
there are several million people who would contribute to my
campaign."

    Brown does not spare his party. On the stage of the
Democratic National Committee meeting in Los Angeles last fall,
he accused party chairman Ron Brown of having conspired with his
Republican counterpart, the late Lee Atwater, to ramrod a
congressional pay raise through the House of Representatives in
virtual secrecy. Ron Brown, sitting a few feet away, winced. On
the road, Jerry Brown's message is a hit with student audiences
but draws mixed responses from older crowds who listen, but with
some skepticism. The message keeps running afoul of the
messenger's past reputation.

    Take the recent joint appearance of Brown and Iowa Senator
Tom Harkin at a breakfast for 1,500 liberal Democratic farmers
and senior citizens in Moline, Ill. Harkin rolled up his
working-class sleeves, quoted from the Old Testament and Abe
Lincoln, and with drawling, oratorically expert highs and lows,
hammered away at the Bush Administration on bread-and-butter
issues.

    When Brown's turn came, he also peeled to his
shirtsleeves, but wound up resembling a somewhat ill-tempered
Peter Lawford as he quoted Gandhi and Vaclav Havel. With no
compromise of either his academic references or his gravely
aggressive tones, he hammered away not only at the Republicans
but at the whole political superstructure: "Here's the picture,"
he said. "The very idea of America is being destroyed because
we have economic decline, the country's managers are paying
themselves handsomely, and our public servants are spending half
of their time cajoling the top 1% ((of income earners)) so they
can get tens of millions of dollars to buy television ads.

    "You know the ads: You take your coat off like this. You
walk along the beach, and you say, `I hate crime . . . And I
hate taxes . . . And, oh, I love the environment . . .' You
have seen those ads!"

    His listeners have, and they laugh appreciatively. Yet
many Democrats seem more comfortable with Harkin's familiar
boilerplate than with Brown's jeremiad. "Whew! What a free
market of ideas. And I sure respect the way he gets on that
freight train of passion," said Sam Barone, executive director
of Ohio's Democratic Party organization, after a Brown speech
in Chicago. "But I'll tell you this, if he should dispatch a
bunch of those pony-tailed Californians with earrings into Ohio
or Indiana as volunteers, then he can just forget it."

    The curious mix of intellectual exhilaration and spacy
West Coast image has dogged Brown ever since the bushy-browed
onetime Jesuit seminarian first vaulted into the governorship
in 1974. What most characterized his administration was
incessant questioning of the status quo. Long nights were spent
brainstorming about everything from cost-cutting to energy
conservation -- and virtually no idea was considered too absurd
to be dismissed out of hand. Recalls state controller Gray
Davis, who was Brown's chief of staff: "Upon learning that
Nevada had reneged on a tentative agreement to provide greater
environmental control over Lake Tahoe, Jerry spent several
minutes debating the merits of invading Nevada." Liberal on
social issues but tightfisted on taxes and spending, Brown
introduced a new emphasis on limited resources and environmental
conservation. He also changed the face of state government by
appointing more than a thousand women and minorities to key
positions.

    Brown was overwhelmingly elected to a second term as
Governor in 1978, but he increasingly turned his back on state
affairs to wage a second unsuccessful presidential campaign two
years later. In 1982 California voters had so tired of his
mercurial approach that he was soundly trounced by Republican
Pete Wilson in a race for the U.S. Senate.

    After that loss, Brown went into exile, studying Buddhism
in Japan and working with Mother Teresa in India. The
experiences, says Brown, "gave me distance on the whole business
of power and ambition. With Mother Teresa there was so much
openness and joy in the midst of what appeared to be hopeless
situations. I believe what is missing from politics is that
sense of joy, service and integrity."

    Yet when Brown re-entered politics, he plunged neck-deep
into the very cynical side of the business that he now
deplores. In 1989 he became chairman of the state Democratic
Party, a post that required him to devote himself to shaking
down fat-cat contributors. In less than two years he raised $2
million -- but spent much of it on an outsize personal staff and
other infrastructure at the party's chaotic office in San
Francisco. That performance seems to clash with Brown's current
lecturing. "Only last year he spearheaded an effort to throw out
contribution limits. He was against many of the things he now
says he's for," says Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis' campaign
manager in 1988. Concurs Republican political consultant Ed
Rollins: "Right message. Wrong messenger."

    How does Brown reconcile his background and his
preachments? He doesn't, at least not fully. Serving as state
party chairman, he says, was "a learning experience" that opened
his eyes to the debilitating impact of money on politics. As
Governor, he claims, he was "never one of the boys; the locker
room of incumbents was never open to me in a spiritual sense."
Now, he says, he is trying finally to do what he should have
done years ago, "to close the gap between what I am saying and
what I am doing." That is a welcome conversion, but in Brown's
case it is probably too late.