The elder statesman
Kicking off his 2010 campaign for governor, the former political boy wonder, now bald and gray, took to the Internet, stood before a brick wall and looked straight into the camera.
“I’ve lived in California for all my life. ... I’ve seen our government from every angle,” Brown said. Far from downplaying his senior-citizen status, he used it as a selling point: “At this stage of my life, I’m prepared to focus on nothing else but fixing the state I love.”
His efforts to do that led some Democrats to grumble that he’s the best friend Republicans have in Sacramento. He killed local redevelopment agencies, vetoed scores of bills passed by the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority, and pushed through a budget-balancing ballot measure that relied in large part on higher sales taxes.
Those who have known Brown for decades say the governor has his own polestar.
“Adaptability is a fact of surviv- al in politics,” said Steve Glazer, a longtime adviser to Brown. “Adaptability is: What’s the world in which you find yourself ? And how do you adjust to it, and talk about it in a way that is meaningful?”
Brown said, “Isn’t that what life is? Species that don’t adapt go extinct.
“You need principles, but you do need flexibility. You need rigor, but you need imagination,’’ he said. “There’s change and there’s conflict — and I’m very aware there has to be a balance.”
Steinberg calls Brown a master of the art: “I have never met someone with as finely tuned a skill, in terms of understanding the public opinion and the voting public, as Jerry Brown. He knows, better than anybody, how far to push on a given issue in a particular time.”
After his many reincarnations, Brown is very unlike the antipolitician of the 1970s, O’Connor says — and yet, in fundamental ways, he’s unchanged.
“The irascible, brash, trying-todo-too-much-at-one-time person is gone,” O’Connor said. “The curiousness and inquisitiveness and the love of Socratic dialogue is still there.”
Brown says he looks back at his earlier life with “more insight and grasp of things. ... I can see all the things that I didn’t know.”
He has become, comfortably, the rare politician who no longer needs to concern himself with polls, strategists, campaigns — or image. He has come full circle in his latest political quest: age quod agis.
He readily acknowledges his status as the elder statesman, and appears to relish it.
“Well, most of the people I ran against are dead,’’ Brown laughs. “But there’s a lot more to do, and a lot of exciting things up ahead.”