The Washington Post

SAN FRANCISCO—The same week that Ron Brown took over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., won the chairmanship of the California Democratic Party. National headlines went to the installation of the first black party chairman in history.

But there are many Californians who think the return of the other Brown, the former two-term governor, will have larger long-term consequences for the party’s future.

By 1992, California’s population growth may give it as many as 54 electoral votes, seven more than it has now and one-fifth the number needed for a White House victory. With the Republican tide still rising in the South, reestablishing a competitive Democratic presence in California—a state Republicans have won in six straight presidential elections since 1964—is vital for the Democrats.

In the eyes of many elected Democrats in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., Jerry Brown is the worst thing that could have happened to their party. His quixotic policies and appointments, they say, allowed the Republicans to recapture the governorship and take over the state supreme court. They worry what further damage he can do in his new job.

Brown’s critics tried to change the rules to keep the old chairman in office and, when that failed, tried to recruit a prominent opponent. But he outflanked their opposition, as he had done when he won the gubernatorial nomination as a 36-year-old ascetic ex-seminarian in 1974, trading on the good name of his father, the governor from 1958 to 1966.

The younger Brown also served two terms in Sacramento, notable for a variety of social-policy experiments and non-traditional appointments and for two stunningly unsuccessful presidential campaigns. He lost a bid for the senate seat in 1982, the same year that his legacy crippled Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley’s bid for the governorship. In time, the Republicans mobilized enough support against Rose Bird and Brown’s other appointees to the state supreme court that they were able to oust them and take over that citadel of power as well.

While all this was going on, Brown went on a journey of self-discovery, which took him to a Zen master in Japan and Mother Teresa in Calcutta. But it surprised no one when he came back to politics, a field in which he still thinks he has some points to prove.

At 50, he looks barely older than the day he took over in Sacramento from Ronald Reagan. Patrons of a San Francisco coffee shop seek his autograph as if he were still governor. But Brown wants you to know that he has changed.

He is punctual, business-like and serious now. Much of the midnight bull-session, light-hearted quality has been drained from his conversation. He’s dropped the affectation of the beat-up blue Chevy he insisted on using as governor because, he says, he now realizes “it made people uncomfortable.”

He’s also changed ideas. “I talked about ‘the era of limits,'” he said, “but in the last decade, California has just exploded in both population and wealth. Of course we have to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, but I think Democrats have found talk about the decline of American power too congenial. Samuel Gompers’ motto was ‘More!’ and I think we can aspire to more. The Democratic Party needs a more expansive idea of what America is and can become.”

Brown’s new guru is not “think small” economist E.F. Schumacher, but political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. Burnham, now at the University of Texas, has argued for years that the decline of political parties has given a conservative tilt to our politics, because low-income, less-educated voters simply don’t get to the polls unless they are mobilized and “voted,” as the old city machines used to do.

Brown appears an unlikely prospect to be Burnham’s disciple. His own career was a perfect embodiment of California media politics. While in offie, he had no time for party organization or party people.

But Brown is not operating in a vacuum. With the financial encouragement of Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., a group of Saul Alinsky disciples, veterans of the farm worker and community organizing battles, have been training Democratic precinct workers at a Monterey academy for two years. They claim some successes in local campaigns and, in some areas, helped Michael Dukakis stay close to Bush in California.

They helped organize Brown’s victory as state chairman and now count on his personality and crowd appeal as a catalyst for expanded registration and organization efforts in the 58 counties.

The history of such grassroots activist efforts—including the California Democratic Council of Pat Brown’s day—is that they become vehicles for the Democratic Party left. That would be fine with the people backing Jerry Brown. It’s less comfortable for the officeholders, especially now that the party has gained the right to make pre-primary endorsements. They can see themselves being subjected to the same kind of litmus-test questionnaires which have dogged Democratic candidates in the presidential primaries and made problems for them in the general election.

Brown knows this history, but he insists he is trying to strengthen the party—not cause trouble for its incumbents or dictate its dogma. Given his history, the skepticism about his return is eminently understandable.