California Policy Options 2013

of his party’s union-driven contributions. Brown’s party has full control of the legislature for the first time since 1883. And while bills originate in the legislature, as a governor he has the power of veto and line-item veto, although in theory his party could override a veto.

Early History Ambitious, solitary, perspicacious, mystical, and frugal, Jerry Brown has charted an incomparable political course via an uncanny ability to be at both the edges and the center of the political circle at the same time. The son of former governor and Democratic icon Pat Brown, Jerry Brown was first elected to public office as a member of the Los Angeles Community College Board in 1969. In 1971, he ran for Secretary of State and built a reputation going after corporations for campaign finance fraud. He was first elected governor in 1975 on a wave of post-Richard Nixon/Watergate scandal distrust of Republicans.

Brown’s First Governorship In Act 1, young Governor Brown was seen as smart and brash; a former Catholic seminarian, Berkeley and Yale Law school graduate, with an unusual reputation for tough prosecutorial stands, opposition to the death penalty, and fiscal conservatism. He also had an ethereal connection to a New Age counter-cultural intellectual vibe that, coming out of the 1960s, had begun to view California and the world as an ecological system to be engineered rather than exploited.

Only one heady year into his governorship, Brown ran for president and finished third in convention delegate count behind Jimmy Carter and Mo Udall. He ran again for president in 1976 on a platform to “protect the earth, serve the people, and explore the universe.” Brown inspired independents and younger voters seeking an alternative to Edward Kennedy’s robust machine liberalism and Jimmy Carter’s trusted but anemic presidency. But he also invited derision for his “Governor Moonbeam” persona, a term that first surfaced in a Rolling Stone interview with his then girlfriend, the winsome songstress Linda Ronstadt. Brown did better the second time around, but again finished third in the primary season.

At the end of his second term as governor (full disclosure: I worked in the Governor’s Office of Appropriate Technology promoting alternative energy and hazardous waste disposal 3 207