CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DESULTORY BROWN EFFORT RAISES QUESTIONS”
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DESULTORY BROWN EFFORT RAISES QUESTIONS”
Just like this fall, there was a
desultory quality – some called it murky – to the way Gov. Jerry Brown
campaigned two years ago for his pet Proposition 30, which raised sales taxes a
smidgen while considerably upping income tax levies on the wealthiest in order
to bail out schools and a few other state services to the tune of $6.5 billion
a year.
Sure, Brown campaigned. But in the
last weeks of his effort, there were no big labor rallies. No speeches to
massive crowds in the main squares of the state’s biggest cities. There were
few days when the governor made more than one appearance and plenty with none.
Most of his appearances came on public college campuses, where his measure was
already popular because of the likelihood that it would forestall more tuition
increases.
In short, Brown was no dynamo. He
looked and in some ways acted like the 74-year-old he was.
He’s been no more active this fall, at
76. If, as expected, he wins a fourth term next month, he’ll be the oldest
person ever elected governor of California.
There is little doubt Brown is in top
physical shape. He hikes, he bikes, he runs, he lifts weights. When New
Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie famously called him an “old retread” in
a 2013 speech, Brown challenged him to a three-mile road race and nothing
further was heard from the obviously overweight, out-of-shape easterner. Brown
also has been fortunate, never having had a serious health crisis.
And he’s hinted that he wants to
accomplish a lot more in what figures to be his last term in any public office.
“My goal over the next few years is to pull people together,” he said in one
talk. “We have our antagonisms in California, but we can find a common
path…California has a lot of dynamic future ahead.”
In
another, he said, “The key to administering this state is having a
disciplinarian in the corner office.” He referred, of course, to himself.
The
implication was that he’s uniquely equipped to unify the state, even though
he’s failed somewhat at that task in the first four years of his second
go-‘round.
Whatever the reason, he hasn’t
campaigned much against Republican Neel Kashkari, the sacrificial lamb opposing
his reelection. But he has relatively quietly overseen major changes in
education financing and prison policy.
Brown’s style when campaigning this
year has been pretty similar to when he was attorney general, his most recent
previous job. His speeches then were mostly low-key affairs, with no rousing
emotional appeals and little apparent forethought.
“I haven’t written a speech in
awhile,” he said at one appearance. “They’re hard to write and even harder to
read, so I just stick to my notes.”
At
times, he’s seemed nostaligic for a slower-paced past. “In the world I live in
now, there isn’t much past, not much memory,” he said. “It’s all about the
news. So we work on all the chaos, hope and fear that drive us all.”
But no one can doubt Brown still has a
passion for California. He sees that the state’s problems are mostly new
versions of those that confronted his father, Pat Brown, governor from 1959-67:
water, transportation, education and crime prevention. As then, he remarked,
the question today is “how much (money) do we keep for ourselves and how much
we contribute to the commonweal.”
That’s mostly in
the category of musing, though. If anything aroused passion in Brown in the
last few years, it was the influx of money from unidentified donors to an
Arizona committee that kicked more than $10 million into the campaign against
Proposition 30. “Who are
these guys?” he demanded. “Are they foreigners? That's illegal. Are they
Californians using Arizona to hide from their own state's sunshine laws? Also
illegal.”
That’s about as fiery as Brown gets
these days. Will he be even lower-key in his expected new term?
The answers to that kind of question
will determine whether Brown can govern effectively as a lame duck over the
next four years. His future is entirely up to him.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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