Jerry Brown Still Wants Your Vote

By Michael Duffy / Oakland

California's Jerry Brown, age 68 and ageless, is running for statewide office this year, 36 years after he did it the first time, and the question you have to ask is, Why doesn't he give it up? It's Thursday morning, and Brown, mayor of Oakland, is standing in incandescent sunshine outside the renovated Sears store he calls home. Not much is going smoothly this morning: the city had its 50th murder the night before, adding to a huge spike above 2005; his opponent in the race for California attorney general has just called him soft on crime; one of the two charter schools he helped start is in need of cash; and now Fox television wants him to go on camera as a commentator and defend a new text-messaging service being marketed to teens that offers information on sex. "I am a little stressed today," he says.

But asking Edmund Brown Jr. to give up politics is a little like asking the Rolling Stones to quit rock 'n' roll. It's just what they do. Brown is a rock star himself. The son of a storied California Governor and a veteran of nearly four years in a Jesuit seminary, he ran for California secretary of state at 32, was on the cover of TIME by 36, served two terms as California Governor, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate once and for President three times, moved to Japan, studied Buddhism, worked with Mother Teresa and was a radio talk-show host--all before diving into the unforgiving cauldron of Oakland politics a decade ago. He is at an age when overachievers in nearly every other profession would start to pack it in. But no man who wakes up at 5 a.m. to read and has been known to keep an eye on Fox News after midnight should be considered a candidate for retirement anytime soon.

BROWN IS IN AN AIDE'S CAR, TALKING nonstop, jabbing and gesturing, impervious to interruption, pointing out potholes and telling the aide where to stop and when to turn. Brown is fun to watch. He is trim, constantly in motion, his brown eyes still piercing and just a touch sad. Compared with almost any other politician, he's a riot to talk to, a one-man romp through everyone from St. Paul to Albert Camus. Jane Brunner, a city councilwoman who didn't vote for the mayor but thinks he has done a good job, says that when she goes into his office, she is never certain whether she is going to be in there for two minutes or two hours.

It's an old joke that Oakland has been a city of the future since forever, but that is finally coming true in ways that are good and bad. The city of 412,000 is roughly 35% black, 31% white, 21% Hispanic and 15% Asian. Refugees from more expensive ZIP codes across the bay have fled to Oakland in the past decade, seeking cheaper housing. But the city has long been slow to seize its opportunities, and Brown's time as mayor has been a test of whether even that can be changed. When he was elected in 1998, he successfully led an effort to restructure Oakland's government and give the mayor new powers to break through a stolid municipal bureaucracy. Since then, he fired his city manager and two city planners, replacing them with people who worked harder to lure private investment. As he tours through a booming residential area south of downtown, he sounds a little dismayed by how resistant some Oakland residents remain to change.

The neighborhood known as Jack London Square, a district of noodle factories and produce warehouses on Oakland Inner Harbor, is giving way to dozens of new loft-apartment and condo buildings. That explosion in private investment--although limited to only a few pockets of the city--is the centerpiece of Brown's tenure as mayor, the fulfillment of a promise he made eight years ago to bring 10,000 residents to downtown Oakland. Brown points to building after building, each financed with private capital, opening their doors to tenants or just completing construction. "That is new. That is new. That one is finished. This one will be finished soon," he says, as we drive around. "For 40 years, there was nothing here. Now there are going to be 10,000 people living in downtown Oakland." All that concrete and mortar may be a special source of pride for a man who picked up the nickname Moonbeam in the 1970s for being a little too theoretical. "This is the most visible achievement that I've ever done," Brown says. "This is a tangible. It wasn't there before."

This being the Bay Area, not everyone is thrilled. Longtime residents say Brown is driving up rents and tax assessments. Hard-boiled leftists say Brown has sold off the city's commercial heritage to profiteers. And affordable-housing advocates want builders to provide various givebacks and mitigations before putting up high-end condos--a demand Brown, sounding more like an Orange County conservative, can't fathom. "The problem with that is that this is just one of 100 possible markets where private developers can put their money. If we make it even a little harder to come here, they won't come. We need to be more attractive than those places, which is why some progressives don't like me."

But the main reason many liberals don't love him has to do with his battle to contain the city's crime rate. The number of murders this year has nearly doubled last year's count for the same period. There are problems with street robberies and what the cops call rat packers, gangs of kids who beat up people on buses and then head back to school to brag about it. The local jails are sometimes too full to permit arrests for certain crimes. A local television report recently quoted an Oakland police estimate that one-fourth of the city's prostitutes were underage. Crime has dropped since Brown became mayor, but it's rising again, fast.

All that is one reason Brown is spending part of the afternoon with 40-odd police supervisors, talking about crime trends. Another is that his main opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination in the state's attorney-general race, Los Angeles city attorney Rocky Delgadillo, aired an ad in mid-May accusing Brown of proposing to slash funding for Oakland cops. Although Brown did propose cuts in 2003, the police budget has grown more than 50% since 1999. Brown has pushed the force to transfer officers from desk jobs to street patrols, and he backed a 10 p.m. curfew on some parolees and probationers. The city is trying to raise bails to keep suspects in jail, and cameras have been installed in high-crime areas. Recently the city tested "shot spotter" technology to isolate gunshots using acoustic technology.

Brown has come under withering criticism from African Americans and civil libertarians who say he has turned Oakland into a police state, and the cops are under a court order to mend their more abusive habits. Some Brown critics have said he has adopted a tough-on-crime stance to help him elsewhere in the state in his race for attorney general. But as Brown questions the cops at headquarters, he doesn't sound like their friend. How many cops are on the street right now? How many of them are on patrol, and how many are responding to calls? Why don't we know that? Are they all paid the same? Is there special pay for the more effective officers? What time does crime pick up in the day? When does it slack off? It goes on like that for nearly 90 minutes, until it becomes clear that everyone needs a break. Walking out, Brown says his job is to keep the pressure on police. "I was trying to get them to think differently. We have a lot of dedicated criminals here."

BROWN SITS DOWN THE NEXT MORNING TO talk over a cappuccino at a downtown coffee shop. You don't really interview Jerry Brown. He does that for you. You just try to keep up. He talks about California and whether it is becoming more conservative. (He's not sure.) He is worried about the growing number of workers who can find jobs only in the underground economy. (It's not the taxes employers are avoiding, he says. It's the health benefits and safety regulations.) He complains that to reach undecided voters, candidates have to buy ads on American Idol and Desperate Housewives--an absurd context for messages about governing. (But he adds, "You gotta take 'em where they are.") He insists that journalists are clueless captives of the narrow-minded worlds they come from--a number he has been running on reporters for more than 30 years, but it's still pretty effective. "You are a prisoner of the TIME-LIFE world that sent you," he says. When I'm not immediately sure how to respond to that, he goes in for the kill: "Well, is it true, or is it not?"

Even when he is rolling, Brown will engage only briefly about national politics. Brown describes Hillary Clinton as "iconic" and disagrees with those who say she can't win. "Sure, she can win," he says. "Anything is possible." Al Gore "would be powerful" as an antiwar candidate if, Brown says, "he loses some weight." The mayor has no patience for George W. Bush. Brown calls him a "cowboy." Republicans are under fire for so many things, Brown observes, that even "Fox News is exhibiting signs of anxiety."

He can't run for mayor again. He made sure the job was term limited when he took it in 1998, he says, "in case I got tempted to stay." How come? "You lose your edge. You need new challenges. You start thinking you own the place." Why does he wants to be attorney general when he has already been Governor? Brown says the jobs are completely different. A Governor plays defense across a broad front, he says, whereas an attorney general can play offense in a more targeted way--on workers' rights, the environment and consumer protection, all at a time when the "rule of law has been undermined" by the Bush Administration. "The balance between change and continuity has always been a part of my life. Continuity looms a lot right now." He thinks about that for a moment and then adds, "In a society of rootlessness and rapid change, I'm running as the traditionalist."

Brown did the most traditional thing of all last year. He married Anne Gust, a former Gap executive he had been seeing steadily for 15 years. Friends say she has calmed down the frenetic Brown and given his sense of humor a beta boost. Brown, a Catholic, organized the ceremony, chose the medieval chants, cleared the whole thing with Rome and held the private service in the same San Francisco parish in which his parents were married. When I ask the obvious question--"So, how's married life?"--his reply is pure, distilled, 100-proof Brown: "It's a good thing. There is a certainty, a finality about it. I was very conscious that it was a vow, and I liked that. It's part of a higher order. In a frivolous age, it has a depth that is very welcome."

And, he might have added, so does Jerry Brown himself.