The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  As the campaign progressed, the old crew returned. Actor and author Peter Coyote, who had headed the state arts council in Jerry’s first term as governor, taped ads. Tom Quinn helped with strategy and insisted Jerry prepare for the debates. Quinn, who had recruited Mary Nichols to the Air Resources Board in 1975, now recruited her to play Meg Whitman in debate practice. Nichols watched videos, bought a blond wig, and stood on a box to mimic the Republican candidate’s height. Like most everyone involved in the campaign, Quinn and Nichols quickly recognized that Anne Gust Brown was in charge, though the candidate sometimes ignored even her advice.

  Anne had refined her role, through the experience of the attorney general race and three years of working closely with her husband. “I think a lot of the campaign stuff, it’s kind of common sense,”17 she said in an interview in the campaign’s Oakland headquarters, around the corner from what had been the old We the People loft. A strategic thinker, she had little difficulty applying her acumen to political campaigns. “Because, as someone who likes politics and watches it, you kind of know what can resonate and not. I also know Jerry well enough to know what sorts of things he would agree to or not agree to.”

  At a Halloween rally a week before the 2010 election, the candidate makes a comment that elicits laughter from former Brownies Diana Dooley (left) and Sherry Williams (far right), who worked for him in the 1970s. (Courtesy of Sherry Williams)

  While much of the campaign focused on fiscal issues, immigration again played a central role. Sixteen years earlier, Pete Wilson had ridden the anti-Mexican fervor of Prop 187 to victory over Kathleen Brown. During his second term, Californians passed a proposition outlawing bilingual education and another banning affirmative action in admissions to public universities. By 2010, those efforts had backfired. This time, reflecting a decade of demographic shifts, the question of how California treated immigrants worked in the Democrat’s favor.

  The number of Latinos in California, overwhelmingly Mexican, had doubled in the past two decades to about 14 million, 38 percent of the population. In Los Angeles in particular, Latinos formed the core of a resurgent labor movement that had become a powerful political force, helping elect Antonio Villaraigosa as the first Mexican American mayor of the city. In March 2010, John Pérez became the fourth Latino speaker of the California Assembly, the third to come out of the Los Angeles labor movement. Democratic activists who had gotten their start decades earlier protesting Prop 187 continued to tie Republicans to the increasingly unpopular measure, which became shorthand for “anti-Mexican.” As the number of ethnic Mexicans in the state edged close to the number of whites, they became increasingly woven into the fabric of California life, as partners, colleagues, students, and neighbors. Support for anti-immigrant measures diminished even in difficult economic times.

  “I cannot win18 the governor’s race without the Latino vote,” Meg Whitman said at Cal State Fresno, in the heart of the Central Valley, where the candidates made history in the first gubernatorial debate hosted by a Spanish television channel, Univision, and broadcast bilingually.

  Whitman said she would have voted against Prop 187 had she lived in California (the fact that she had not registered to vote until 2002, when she was forty-six years old, also became a campaign issue). But her positions did little to win support among the more than five million eligible Latino voters. When an undocumented student asked if she supported the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for children brought into the country illegally, Whitman waffled, then said no. “She wants to kick you out19 of this school because you are not documented and that is wrong, morally and humanly,” Jerry said, promising to support financial aid for undocumented students at state universities and colleges.

  Whitman’s admission that she had for nine years employed an undocumented Mexican housekeeper, whom she fired as she began to campaign for governor, amplified her image as not only anti-immigrant, but hypocritical and heartless. Jerry jumped on Whitman’s hypocrisy in urging that the state pursue and prosecute employers who hired undocumented workers. “I strongly oppose state police, state sheriffs, the attorney general’s office, going after undocumented people,” he said. “That is not the business of the state at all.”

  Jerry’s adherence to his father’s “one world, one people, one dignity, one justice” creed influenced his actions on an issue that gained him support with another politically engaged constituency, the gay community. A June 2008 Supreme Court ruling had made California the second state, after Massachusetts, to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Thousands of couples joyfully wed, only to have their marriages thrown into limbo five months later when voters narrowly approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage. Gay marriage supporters sued, and months of litigation in state and federal courts followed. Both Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown refused to defend Prop 8. Jerry argued that a majority vote could not deprive Californians of an inalienable constitutional right. He based his refusal to defend the law on the only precedent in California history, a landmark case close to his father’s heart. In 1964, Governor Pat Brown and his friend Attorney General Tom Lynch had refused to defend Proposition 14, the initiative to overturn the state’s fair housing laws, which was eventually thrown out as unconstitutional. In August 2010, in the midst of the gubernatorial contest, a federal judge ruled Prop 8 was unconstitutional. Jerry’s refusal to defend it ultimately became a key reason the U.S. Supreme Court voided the initiative.

  Whitman had begun airing radio ads more than a year before the election. She spent $19 million in 2009 and launched her first million-dollar television buy in early 2010, saturating the airwaves for months. Despite polls that consistently showed Whitman with a narrow lead, Jerry resisted pressure from Democrats to launch a counteroffensive. The Brown campaign husbanded its relatively limited resources to use after Labor Day, a decision widely credited to Anne’s influence. By mid-September, soon after Jerry’s television commercials began to air, he pulled slightly ahead. “There were a lot of pundits across the state who said we wouldn’t be around if we didn’t spend money,” said Joe Trippi, a national media consultant who was volunteering his services. “Well, we’re around and we’re competitive, and a lot of that is due to Anne.”20

  Whitman broke national records for a self-financed campaign, spending $144 million of her personal fortune. The Brown campaign raised $40 million. Three quarters of that went to television buys, and the strategy of waiting till Labor Day enabled Jerry to outspend Whitman on TV in the final month. As Election Day neared, polls showed him pulling away.

  Oakland, the city that had been key to the improbable return of Jerry Brown, had the unusual honor of hosting his victory party. Jerry, for whom symbols were always important, had chosen an election night venue that held great significance, for the past, present, and future.

  The Fox Theater was an exquisitely crafted 1928 masterpiece, the last of its kind to open before the Depression. The theater, which had seated almost four thousand for vaudeville shows and first-run movies, was closed in 1965. Within a decade, the Fox became so run-down that it was slated for demolition. Supporters rallied to place the theater on the National Register instead, but the landmark remained in disrepair. Homeless people camped out in the lobby beneath the colored tile dome. Squatters cooked meals that blackened the intricate Moorish patterns in the plaster ceiling. When the city bought the decaying theater in 1996, the Fox stood as a symbol of Oakland’s desolation. Mayor Jerry Brown had seen the Fox as one of the catalysts that could help revitalize downtown. His friend Phil Tagami came up with a plan to restore the theater, where Tagami’s parents had once gone on early dates. Jerry helped put together $90 million in public and private money. Key to the project was his arts charter school, which moved into space above the theater; its rent helped pay off the loans. In early 2009, restored to its original elegance, the Fox reopened as a twenty-eight-hundred-seat concert hall.

  Like Jerry, the bui
lding was a unique melding of old and new. “The new comes out of the random,”21 was a quote from Gregory Bateson that Jerry often repeated. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” he said during the campaign. “Some people think I am a little random. But unless you open the possibilities, you rarely come up with something new.”

  On Tuesday, November 2, 2010, thousands crowded expectantly into the Art Deco theater, ready to party. When the results showed Jerry easily beating Whitman, Anne Gust Brown took the stage. “Here we are in this beautiful Fox Theater,22 that was renovated under the mayorship of my wonderful husband, Jerry Brown!” she said to cheers. She spoke for only a minute before calling onstage, and kissing, the man about to become the oldest governor ever elected in California.

  “You know, I did this thirty-six years ago!” Jerry said, speaking extemporaneously as usual. (Anne tried with limited success to get him to stay on the X where the television cameras wanted him to stand.) “And I tried during the campaign never to mention the word ‘experience’ or tell too many old stories because after a while, people are looking for something new. But I’m a little something old. So that’s why I wanted to be here at the Fox Theater, the home of the Oakland School for the Arts.”

  Jerry had choreographed his victory celebration with care. Standing at attention onstage were cadets from the Oakland Military Institute, now in its tenth year, sending a quarter of its graduates to the University of California. Behind them stood the chorus from the Oakland School for the Arts. “I wanted the military to represent my sense of honor, and duty, and leadership, and camaraderie, and I wanted the arts school to exemplify creativity and imagination,” Jerry said. “Because all that is what California needs over the next four years. And I want everyone here tonight and throughout California to know, this is why I’m doing it. I built these schools because I want to build for the future … Will this help the next generation? That’s going to be my watchword.”

  He condemned the polarization in Sacramento and in Washington, yet acknowledged the existence of real divisions that needed to be recognized and addressed. “I take as my challenge forging a common purpose, but a common purpose based not just on compromise, but on a vision of what California can be. And I see a California leading once again in renewable energy, in public education, and in openness to every kind of person, whatever their color is. We’re all God’s children. While I’m really into this politics thing, I still carry with me my sense of, kind of that missionary zeal to transform the world.”

  21

  Second Chances

  Fond of peppering his comments with Latin phrases and classical references, Jerry Brown began to occasionally compare himself to Cincinnatus. Laymen likely missed the analogy to the Roman dictator called out of retirement to rescue the Republic in 439 B.C. Fewer still caught the echo of the Order of Cincinnatus, the Depression-era group of young San Franciscans dedicated to honest government, founded by Pat Brown.

  As Jerry returned to Sacramento, the spirit of Pat Brown hovered over the capitol, this time welcomed by his son as a lodestar rather than a burden. In his office, Jerry hung framed posters from Pat’s early campaigns, photos of Pat meeting with John F. Kennedy, and a nine-foot marlin caught by his mother that had been displayed on the wall of Pat’s office in the Mansion. Jerry’s victory had vindicated the family, avenging after more than four decades his father’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Governor Pat had kept track of how many more days he needed to beat Earl Warren’s ten years and nine months in office. On October 13, 2013, Jerry’s staff presented him with a cake inscribed 3,927 DAYS AND COUNTING. He had broken the record his father coveted, adding longest-tenured California governor to his improbable résumé.

  Jerry embraced his father’s vision in substance as well as sentiment. With faith in elected officials near an all-time low, and California branded a failed republic, Jerry set out with missionary zeal to make government a force for good. He had undergone something of a conversion; rather than preaching that small is beautiful, he argued that the traditional functions of government were more essential than ever to protect people in perilous times.

  In 1975, Jerry had arrived in Sacramento determined to blow up the status quo, to disrupt the comfortable, clubby world of older white male politics. In 2011, he came to mend a dysfunctional system that had brought California to the brink of financial collapse. “Those pillars1 that I certainly endeavored to pull down to some degree have already fallen down,” he said. “Now I feel that we’ve got to build them up and to create structures and foundations on which we can build this ever-changing, complex, diverse world.”

  Both times, his goal was to restore faith in a government that alienated the people it was supposed to serve. That became a theme of the inaugural address he finished editing in the car with Tom Quinn, his first campaign manager, en route to the ceremony on January 3, 2011:

  This is a special moment as executive power passes from one governor to another, determined solely by majority vote. It is a sacred and special ritual that affirms that the people are in charge and that elected officials are given only a limited time in which to perform their appointed tasks. For me this day is also special because I get to follow in my father’s footsteps once again—and 36 years after my first inauguration as governor, even follow in my own.

  Then—1975—it was the ending of the Vietnam War and a recession caused by the Middle East oil embargo. Now, as we gather in this restored Memorial Auditorium, dedicated to those who died in World War I, it is our soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our economy caught in the undertow of a deep and prolonged recession. With so many people out of work and so many families losing their homes in foreclosure it is not surprising that voters tell us they are worried and believe that California is on the wrong track.

  Yet, in the face of huge budget deficits year after year and the worst credit rating among the 50 states, our two political parties can’t come close to agreeing on the right path forward. They remain in their respective comfort zones, rehearsing and rehashing old political positions. Perhaps this is the reason why the public holds the state government in such low esteem. And that’s a profound problem, not just for those of us who are elected, but for our whole system of self-government. Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle, and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.

  Jerry looked to his own past for strength. He summoned the courage of his great-grandfather and again read from the diary August Schuckman had kept on his difficult journey across the Plains in 1852. Then the governor invoked his father once more as he called for a return to the “Philosophy of Loyalty” laid out by the nineteenth-century California pioneer Josiah Royce: The needs of the community come first. “A long time ago, my father spoke to me about his philosophy of loyalty. I didn’t really grasp its importance. But as I look back now, I understand how this loyalty to California was my father’s philosophy as well. It drove him to build our freeways, our universities, our public schools, and our state water plan.”

  In his own way, Jerry, too, inspired loyalty. His inauguration drew his oldest friends and many of the original Brownies, who celebrated at a reunion the night before. Some came to stay. Marty Morgenstern, who had been director of employee relations in the first Brown administration, came out of retirement to join the cabinet as secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency. Diana Dooley, hired by Morgenstern in 1975 as an assistant when she was twenty-four, had become a lawyer specializing in healthcare administration; she took over the Health and Human Services agency and worked in the building named after Gregory Bateson. Mike Picker, who got his start in the mailroom, became president of the Public Utilities Commission. Michael Kirst, a Stanford professor who chaired the state Board of Education during Jerry’s first two terms, went back for a second tour. Dan Richard, who had worked as a deputy in science and energy, moved back to California to chair the High Speed Rail Authority. The Brownies found it hard to turn do
wn a governor trying to rebuild the state in a time of crisis. Besides, Jerry had taken a chance on them decades ago when they were very young, and his faith shaped their lives.

  Jerry brought to his new job political instincts refined over decades and a clearer analysis of the tactics necessary to govern effectively. He needed two distinct skill sets: an “inside game” of persuasion within the capitol to cut deals, and an “outside game” to inspire the public. “There are all these things that I’ve devoted my whole life to in one sense. And now I’m trying to make them work,” he said, midway through his term. “Unlike when I was here [before]. I said, ‘Oh boy, I can be president.2 I can beat this guy. Who’s running for president? Ford? Carter? I can beat these guys. So let’s go.’ But it was kind of ridiculous. I was only thirty-eight and I had only been governor less than two years. But I’m an enthusiast. Now I find each of these things extremely fascinating; every one of these topics, I don’t care what it is.”

  While there remained flashes of the unpredictable spontaneity and the revolutionary spirit that characterized Jerry 1.0, on the whole, the tenor of Jerry 2.0 was comparatively conventional. Jerry engaged in the political rituals he had spurned the first time around. Where he had once condemned his father for immersing him in that world since childhood, he now paid credit. “I thought I had a ‘purer’ view3 and was above politics,” he said, “But here’s the truth: It’s like a little duck who learns to swim by following the mother duck. Obviously I was imprinted early with these skills and propensities.” He courted legislators with drinks and dinners, no longer the young upstart, now often twice their age. Most key aides were subordinates who treated him with deference and worked with a discipline that had been absent the first time around when Jerry was surrounded by peers—in age, intellect, and, to some degree, ambition. “I have a group of people,4 many of whom were here with me last time, and they are now working I think at a higher level of knowledge and intensity and effectiveness,” Jerry said.