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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.