The Reincarnation of Jerry Brown

If California, the home of Proposition 13 and the cradle of the celebrated Taxpayers Revolt, is to be the host of a Great Republican Resurrection, the services of the Holy Ghost and the 12 apostles will once again be needed. In one of the most astounding collapses since the 1978 Dodgers walloped the Yankees two straight before lying down for four in a row, the California G.O.P. let Public Enemy Number One, a Jarvis-hater by the name of Jerry Brown, win the race for governor by 1.3-million votes.

This no-nonsense collapsing was most ably handled by Attorney General Evelle Younger, a man who won the G.O.P. gubernatorial contest last year by successfully saying the least and spending the most. Now, out of office, it is not at all unlikely that Mr. Younger will be asked to join the cast of TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” which would make him available to play leading parts in all “Nurd” sketches without benefit of make-up or rehearsal.

It wasn’t always so. In the beginning, before God (aka Mervin Field) created a “born again tax-cutter” in the image of Governor Brown, Younger had all the biorhythms of the political universe pushing him. After the June 1978 primary, the respective candidates were dead even in the pollsters prognostications, an exceedingly weak position for any incumbent; and, more importantly the Proposition 13 tidal wave was breaking right on top of poor Governor Brown’s little paddle-board. Younger had mildly endorsed 13; Brown had fought it viciously.

But only days before the June 6 election, the crafty Brown pulled out of the wave, quit his campaigning as the leading critic of Jarvis-Gann, and returned to Sacramento to “make Proposition 13 work.” Ed Davis, Younger’s 2nd place challenger in the Republican primary, caustically quipped at the time, “In a week he’ll have everyone thinking he wrote the damn thing.” Davis underestimated.

In a flash, “Small (economy) is Beautiful” became “Small (government) is Beautiful.” With the vindictiveness of a reformed taxaholic, Brown slashed the “wasteful” extravagances that his Administration had instituted, and denounced the “obstructionist” officials he had appointed.

The transformation in rhetoric was sensational. It was as if Bella Abzug were to appear on television commercials for Chanel No. 5. As the L.A. Times detailed the post Prop 13 miracle:

Brown resurrected his “era of limits” rhetoric and—while GOP gubernatorial nominee Evelle J. Younger was vacationing in Hawaii—seized a rare opportunity. Using a huge state tax surplus he had stockpiled, Brown went all-out to implement Proposition 13 without either raising state taxes or forcing a reduction in vital local services.

Brown then made spending and taxes—traditional Republican issues—his No. 1 campaign issues. Other Democratic candidates, responding to the voters’ loud Proposition 13 message, also began talking and acting like Republicans. And confused Republicans seemed to suffer an identity crisis.

This is not the first time in history that a scheme as cynical as this has been put over on the electorate; we musn’t forget that a man who smiled like Jimmy Carter was elected president of the Republic during the very height of America’s Era of Disillusionment. But the California Republicans had Prop 13 working for them—which is to say, quite simply, that they had the greatest mass issue in state history.

Opposed by the AFL-CIO, the Chamber of Commerce, Bank of America, the Democratic Party, 90% of the state’s politicians and Jerry Brown, Jarvis-Gann passed by a two-thirds landslide. The incumbent governor, the ace fighter against the people’s choice (which he had dubbed a “rip-off” and a “consumer fraud”), was a sitting duck, with spotlights and without wings.

All persons viewing the California political jungle poised themselves for quite a show, ready for some real hot stuff. What timing would Younger employ to blast the distortions, threats, and blatant lies which had been the primary source of argument of the Jerry Brown forces in attacking Prop 13? How would the G.O.P. garner headlines in denouncing the ignominious manner in which Brown’s Finance Director had reported the state’s $7-billion tax surplus as only a $3-billion surplus? How would Younger take maximum political advantage from the use of public funds, by numerous government agencies and by the governor’s office itself, to defeat a political measure?

We’re still waiting. Not poised, but slumping.

While the state of California wrote Evelle Younger’s victory script and offered him a chauffeur driven limousine to take him to the governor’s mansion, he was lying down on a tropical surfing beach somewhere, undergoing an identity crisis. It truly must have been some bizarre form of mind control the mystical Brown picked up from some Far Eastern cult and used on his Republican opponent. We must conclude that Jerry Brown was playing politics the same way the Russians play chess.

It developed that if you had turned the Younger campaign upside down and shaken it you wouldn’t have found three eager volunteers who had joined up on account of Proposition 13. Beyond Younger’s incompetence and Jerry Brown’s connections with the supernatural, the fundamental liability in the Republican cause was its overwhelming, pervasive, all-intensive inferiority complex.

Old-time Republicans like Younger have been “number two” for so long that they have given up trying harder and will now settle for looking a little more like “number one.” Amongst GOP politicians, in fact, it is the adolescents (like Jack Kemp and Jeff Bell) and the converts (Ronald Reagan and Ed Davis) whom we see manning the tax-cut bull-horns. Career Republicans have long since ceased to take their platform seriously, and are deeply suspicious of any who do. They have been thoroughly Nixonized.

Jerry Brown, untroubled by a guilty conscience (or any other), takes the GOP platform extremely seriously. “I want to be able to say,” he says, “I’ve slowed the historical rate of state government’s growth in California … I’m going to try to do something Ronald Reagan couldn’t accomplish.”

Now the idea is being advanced that this blurring of party affiliations is a good thing, in that voters will now concentrate more on “the man” and less on “the label.” Dismayed Republicans might inquire why it was good to have strong party labels when the Democratic platform was winning elections for the past 45 years, and good not to have ’em when the G.O.P. platform is winning elections today? Jerry Brown can answer that very simply: He’s a Democrat, and he represents a Party without the intellectual honesty to relinquish its throne while its competitors lack the intelligence or cunning to acquire it.

The Younger campaign

If Evelle Younger did not raise the Proposition 13 argument in his defense, what vital issues did he invoke to crush the panicked and vulnerable incumbent? His chief recommendation, in his own song, was nothing even tangential to the political questions of concern, but a sociological gimmick—Evelle was constantly bringing up the subject of “life-styles.” In each and every interview the press endured with him he was lightning-fast to chip in the observation that his opponent was a bachelor, and, while he wasn’t saying there was anything immoral about being a bachelor, it was just a lot different than having family responsibilities like your average American Attorney General like Ev Younger. This thought might have been overlooked as mere jealousy on the part of the Republican candidate, had he not insisted on interjecting this incredible comparison over and above any political issue—including the omnipresent Prop 13. But there he was, doggedly pointing out that while he had noisy children, two house mortgages and a middle-aged wife, his opponent was simply young, single, and dating Linda Ronstadt. It is likely that Mark Lane could construct a plausible conspiracy theory involving Mr. Younger, his breakfast milque toast, hallucinogens and Brown campaign operatives.

Let us move over to the winners’ circle, and inspect the cosmic effects of the elusive Mr. Brown, Jr. What should we expect from the triumphant Governor? More triumphs, certainly. But that is about as specific as we may get. To wit, a campaign interview with Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer:

Scheer: Do you feel that liberalism is an old-fashioned position, and do you want to disassociate yourself from it?

Brown: Well, my position is rather extensively delineated through this campaign and over the last four years, and I don’t feel the requirement to hew to some ideological line. I see in the coincidence of opposites and the blending of a certain amount of contradiction a more limited ideological thrust.

Scheer: Are you trying to have it both ways, though? When you went campaigning in Maryland against Carter, you identified yourself with the liberal Democratic tradition of Hubert Humphrey, of the Kennedys and so forth. …

Brown: I’m trying to carve out a new path with the Democratic Party and its outlines are not totally clear yet.

Scheer: Well, then, do you think it is fair for you to wear the mantle of the liberals when you are among the liberals, and yet that’s not really your position? Why don’t you just come out and say that?

Brown: Because I haven’t gotten the right adjective to characterize my position yet. …

“Obfuscation” might be just the word he’s hunting for. It is somehow ironic that the Voice of the People has now been heard, a mighty tax-cutting reform has shaken the structure of government, and we emerge with a politico who says nothing—with great authority. This, incidentally, is the largest asset in the political portfolio of Jerry Brown, that in an age of cynicism His Honor can electrify a radio microphone with caustic condemnations of political squishies and bureaucratic boners, and then glide away in his used Plymouth without ever leaving a trace of a decipherable position on any issue of controversy. He has a knack for pouring out the grayest platitudes in the brightest, most revolutionary tone. His nimble statements feel very good to the ears, and strike the heart as tough, no-nonsense positions. But just try to mull the script over in search of a dangerous stand.

Brown’s ideology is ubiquitous: he darts from UAW meetings to Sierra Club rallies to T.V. commercials with, yep, Howard Jarvis. Only that legendary guru of political iconoclasm H. L. Mencken could really get a bead on this peculiar mind-set, as he did so artfully in undressing the campagn strategy of Harry S. Truman in the famous joust of 1948:

Unhampered by anything resembling a coherent body of ideas, he was ready to believe up to the extreme limits of human credulity. If he did not come out for spiritualism, chiropractic, psychotherapy and extra sensory perception it was only because no one demanded that he do so. If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer’s expense.

Combine Jerry’s agility with Brown’s authoritative bellowing and you have Jerry Brown: The Consumate Welfare State politician. So skillfully has he perfected his craft that he no longer must lie in waiting for political opportunities to arise—he creates his own. So it was during the late gubernatorial campaign when the California Coastal Commission made headlines by commanding dozens of Malibu residents to file for permission to rebuild their own homes which had just been destroyed in a disastrous fire. Gaining “permission”, naturally, required compliance with encyclopedic regulations and the construction of fifteen foot-wide walkways right through each beachfront property to allow “public access” for “the people.” A furor arose in Malibu which, significantly, involved many movie stars and rock idols who had been nailed by the Coastal Commission. Governor Brown pounced at once, popping onto front pages around the state by cursing the Commissioners as “bureaucratic thugs.” Indeed! Appointed by Brown, as part of an agency created by Brown, enforcing laws drafted by Brown, these “thugs” were of the governor, by the governor and for the governor. Evelle forgot all of this and was simply heard murmuring soft endorsements of the Guv, whose newspaper copy confirmed that today’s political campaigns really can be Do-It-Yourself affairs. From problem to solution, Jerry Brown does it all! At long last, self-respectability has returned to American politics.

“The Democratic Party is ready for a new historic mission: And that is to control inflation and government spending.”

—Jerry Brown, November 5, 1978

“Any Democrat who adopts the Republican platform can’t lose.”

—William F. Buckley, Jr., November 6, 1978

“BROWN WINS HANDILY”

—LA Times Headline, November 8, 1978

The presidency beckons

And so we come full circle. Brown, having avoided a drowning, has maneuvered so deceptively and brilliantly as to actually be riding the very same wave today. The Times, on the very day following the November elections, commented that “virtually everything the California governor does in his second term will be pointed toward another presidential contest. … The lure of 1980 for Brown is that by then he may be riding the crest of a nationwide [“rip-off”] tax revolt against high taxes and government spending.”

But the Times noted that the charismatic young governor is not home free: “One important Brown aide said that if he had anything to do with it, voters would not become disenchanted with Proposition 13 for at least two years—when the next presidential election is held.”

Brown’s aide worries much too much, and underestimates his boss. The Artful Dodger has, since burying the Attorney General-next-door, turned his sights on Mr. Big, Jimmy E. Carter, a man more conversant in the politics of posturing. Brown’s headlining call for a constitutional convention was a Nobel Prize Winner that will be dissected in vote-stealing seminars centuries hence.

Firstly, it gave young Jerry visibility. One sees his mug nowadays as redundantly as John Travolta’s—and Brown can’t even dance. Secondly, it made everyone whisper about the Governor running for the White House, and those low tones can raise loud bucks. Thirdly, Senior Shrewd knows that the constitutional convention idea doesn’t have the chance of an honest man in the U.S. Congress (or a snowball in Hell, if you prefer) within his own party. He thusly dramatizes himself as the “outside” candidate on the inside track.

To wit: the front-page performance fortissimo tax-axer Jerry staged when the busy Mr. President mistakenly condemned Brown’s cry for the convention as “extremely dangerous.” Jerry swung into his anti-rhetoric rhetoric: “People are just talking before they analyze the concept. Some of that reminds me of the scare tactics and the rhetoric that I heard during the Proposition 13 campaign. It sounds like a replay.” And, whilst the fascinated press corps swooned for the Governor’s modest pause, he completed the circle: “And I should know because I used some of the language myself.”

If “know thy opposition” is truly the key to victory, Jerry will prove invulnerable. And do not be fooled by his tax-cutting defeats in the California legislature or his cold greetings at Democratic Party operations. While actually having to cut some taxes has so far proved a nuisance that the Governor has occasionally been unable to avoid, the show must go on. And big defeats—one man versus the government type defeats—haul down the Nielsens. Proposition 13 informed Junior Brown just where the votes lay, and once he has the ballots in his pocket the sycophants and losers who populate the halls at Democratic establishment functions will be panicked to jump in with them—and damned thankful for the chance to be forgiven. The “new politics” is a game of out man in, and racking up a few healthy rebukes at the hands of the old political establishment will give Jerry his own perceptible wish: the chance to personally become the next old political establishment.

Tom Hazlett is completing his Ph.D. in economics at UCLA. His articles have appeared in a number of magazines, including National Review and Inquiry.