Brown’s balancing act — change, constancy
In an era in which politicians poll-test ideas and strategies scripted by hired guns, Jerry Brown has long favored far more enduring sources: the ancients.
During the nearly three years he spent as a young seminarian in what was once described as “medieval isolation” — praying, meditating and conversing in Latin — “there was a phrase that became very important to him,” said Father John Coleman, who walked the same halls as Brown at Sacred Heart Novitiate in Los Gatos.
“Age quod agis,” Coleman said. “Do what you’re doing.”
“It basically says do one thing at a time,” Brown said in an interview in which he explored his life in the public eye, from teenage years to the pres-
At 76, Gov. Jerry Brown is vying for an unprecedented fourth term in office, a position he first held when he was just 36.
ent. “It’s an admonition,” he said, to “be clearly engaged” in the task at hand, and “give it your full attention.”
After more than four decades in politics, the minimalist philosophy still informs the life of the 76-year-old Democrat as he seeks an unprecedented fourth term as governor.
Brown’s “tasks,” however, have changed a great deal. The
man who was once the nation’s youngest governor, and who is now the nation’s oldest governor, has reincarnated himself so many times that as the veteran reporter Martin Nolan once wrote, he has “become to American politics what ‘Lady of Spain’ is to an accordion player.”
Nolan penned those words in 1992 as Brown was preparing a third run for president, after he had already served as a community college board member and secretary of state, spent eight years as governor and made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate.
Since then, he’s added to the resume chairman of the state Democratic Party, host of a radio talk show, stints as Oakland mayor and state attorney general, and now, another term as California’s chief executive.
He has been on the ballot 21 times and spent more years as governor than anyone in state history. His Republican opponent in the Nov. 4 election, 40-year-old Neel Kashkari, was born five years after Brown won his first election.
With each change of the chameleon’s skin — from the young model Jesuit who rejected the collar, to the brash young “Governor Moonbeam” and populist presidential candidate, to the spiritual seeker, mayor and political graybeard — Brown’s transformations have always managed to be convincing.
“I can’t think of a single politician, even nationally, who has a more varied and contradictory background — or series of lives — than Jerry Brown,” said Chuck McFadden, author of the Brown biography “Trailblazer.”
“This is a guy who was enfant terrible when he went into office at age 36, and now he’s the elder statesman and the only adult in the room. Decades have passed — but that is a remarkable change for anyone.”
Brown’s political endurance, his admirers say, is attributable to his own “canoe” theory: “You paddle on the left, you paddle on the right, and it takes you straight down the middle.”