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."