The turnaround has been stunning, not only for California but for Brown himself. Jerry Brown's 4th act

LOS ANGELES — It may just be that the most effective public sector leader in America today is a balding, flinty-eyed 76-year-old former mayor who is not only the oldest sitting governor in the nation but both the oldest and youngest man ever to lead his home state, coasting toward reelection next month with a 58 percent job approval rating in an age of bitter anti-incumbent feeling.

And if California, the megastate so often dismissed as ungovernable, is on something of a roll, it owes a large part of that fate to its improbable chief executive, Edmund G. Brown Jr., who has already surpassed Earl Warren’s record as the longest-serving governor in the Golden State’s history and is poised to win an unprecedented fourth term just one day shy of 40 years after he won his first.


In the past four years, Jerry Brown has led the way in turning a budget deficit of $25 billion into a surplus of more than $4 billion; sponsored a ballot measure that produced the state’s first broad tax increase in years; seen the creation of a million new jobs and a 4-percentage-point drop in the unemployment rate; signed landmark legislation to regulate the state’s dwindling groundwater resources and presided over a population influx that gives the lie to the notion that California’s days are numbered.

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Brown’s return engagement is an object lesson in outside-the-Beltway leadership that eschews conventional reliance on poll-tested positions and consultant-driven proposals. He has broken the mold by allowing his quirky — but brainy and authentic — personality to shine through. Voters — and legislators of both parties in Sacramento — have responded in kind. It’s a lesson that Washington’s squabbling, deadlocked leaders might well heed.

The turnaround has been stunning, not only for California but for Brown himself. He left office after two terms in 1983 with voters disapproving his performance by nearly the same margin they now applaud it, a casualty of his awkward presidential aspirations, his ambivalence about Proposition 13 (the revolutionary measure that capped property taxes and forever altered the state’s finances) and his hard-won reputation as not just an outside-the-box thinker but a New Age flake — “Governor Moonbeam,” as the columnist Mike Royko famously dubbed him.

So what happened?

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“In one word, it’s experience,” said Bruce Cain, a professor at Stanford University and an expert on the state. “This state goes through a cycle where for periods of time you’re looking for a fresh face, a new strategy, somebody who’s got an idea people can get excited about.” For a time, Cain noted, Arnold Schwarzenegger was such a face, “but I do think voters realized they were kind of paying for Arnold’s education, that he had to learn the hard way and was pretty naive. That set the table for the appeal of experience again.”

A crucial part of that experience, his critics and supporters agree, is not only Brown’s first eight years as governor but his eight years as mayor of Oakland, from 1999 to 2007. There, he received a midlife crash course in the gritty realities of municipal governance — potholes and public safety, neighborhood redevelopment and local finances — that he had skipped on his first trip to Sacramento. He returned to the governor’s chair with a greater appreciation of the practicalities of political leadership from the ground up.

“One thing that really changed his style of governance is that he learned a lot from being mayor of Oakland, and recognized that there’s a different approach to governing and looking at problems and just dealing with the real world issues he learned as mayor,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank. “He took a tough situation and made a lot of progress. Neighborhoods that were down and out are flourishing, not all of it due to him. But he got a new look at governing from that experience.”

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In his first governorship, Brown famously suggested that the state should have its own communications satellite, and he stood aloof from Sacramento’s clubby culture of long-serving politicos, who gathered by night at such watering holes as Frank Fat’s in Sacramento while Brown was more likely to be found at Lucy’s El Adobe Café in Hollywood with his then-girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt. This time around, Brown is still aloof, but that matters less in a state capital where term limits have broken up long-term power relationships. And his intelligence is still restless to the borderline of attention deficit disorder, but he has kept his focus on getting the state’s house in order.

To be fair, Brown also has some big, built-in advantages not shared by, say, Barack Obama. He is a Democrat in a state that’s increasingly deep blue, with majorities in both houses of the state Legislature (though not the supermajorities that are still needed by law to raise taxes). He took office in the midst of an economic downturn and has ridden the up cycle since. He has benefited from structural changes in state governance, including a relaxation of the strict term limits that had put political neophytes in charge of the Legislature starting in the late 1990s and the adoption of a 2010 ballot measure that for the first time since the Great Depression allowed the Legislature to pass the state’s annual budget by simple majority vote.

Still, Brown has had the skill and savvy to make the most of his good luck. In 2012, unable to win tax increases from the Legislature, he structured the state budget so as to depend on passage of a ballot measure that raised the sales tax by a quarter cent and increased income tax rates on those earning more than $250,000 a year. The measure passed by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent that fall.

Brown has honed his Zen approach to governance to a fine point. He has barely campaigned for reelection all year and plans to save much of his campaign war chest of more than $20 million — more than four times that of his Republican rival, Neel Kashkari — for ballot measures he might back in a final term.

“There’s not been a governor in modern California who’s made public and media attention such a low priority,” said Dan Schnur, who served as spokesman for one of Brown’s Republican predecessors, Pete Wilson, in the 1990s. “Rather than trying to get people interested in government who don’t care, he seems to have decided that the best way to get things done is to limit himself largely to the people who do care, and who have a direct stake in it — the business community, the labor unions, the players. He’s governing in a way that he believes is in the voters’ best interest, but he’s not particularly concerned if the voters pay attention or approve it.”

Kashkari has struggled to get any traction with his argument that Brown is out of touch with the problems of middle-class Californians and has made little progress in addressing the daunting problems — from troubled schools to crowded prisons — that still plague the state. Kashkari has sought to present himself as a different kind of Republican — supportive of abortion rights, sympathetic to gay rights — but voters already seem content that Brown is a different kind of Democrat.

Brown’s politics have long been tough to pigeonhole. He is personally ascetic, like the Jesuit seminarian he once was, and in his first term famously drove a plebeian Plymouth. He has always been a bit of a fiscal skinflint and now bucks liberal orthodoxy on questions like legalizing marijuana. His long-standing credo has been the “canoe theory” — that the best way to head in a straight line is to paddle a little to the left and then to the right. In contrast to a Legislature widely seen as left of center, he is viewed as middle of the road.

“By staking out the political center, he has essentially cut off the Republicans’ largest historical source of campaign money: the business community,” Schnur said. “You don’t need to argue that he governs the way he does in order to cut off money to Republican candidates. But the political ramification of his approach to governance has been to leave the Republicans almost completely severed from their most reliable contributors.”

Brown’s second tour in Sacramento has been different from his first in another important way. “When people ask me how he’s changed,” jokes Derek Shearer, the director of Occidental College’s McKinnon Center of Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Finland, “I say that he got married and got a dog.”

Indeed, by all accounts, Brown’s reliance on Anne Gust Brown, a former senior executive at The Gap whom he had dated for years and married in 2005, has been transformative. A lawyer by training, and 20 years Brown’s junior, she is speechwriter, strategist, sounding board and sanity-preserver, the first and last voice in the governor’s ear. For years, that role in Brown’s life had been filled by Jacques Barzaghi, an eccentric, black-clad Frenchman, who masterminded Brown’s quixotic 1992 presidential campaign. The universal consensus is that Brown has traded up.

“What’s really curious to me about Gov. Brown, what’s so fascinating, is that he doesn’t have a pollster; he doesn’t regularly do polls,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the venerable Field Poll, a nonpartisan survey of statewide public opinion. “He basically listens to his wife, and she is out there with a tremendous sense of where the public is. He goes into the issues with his eyes wide open.”

Perhaps Brown’s greatest strength is his freedom. He already apparently has the only job he wants and is no longer constrained by aspirations for higher office. If he were 20 years younger, with his current record, he would be a natural — and if Hillary Clinton passed, perhaps the prohibitive — contender for the presidency he sought in vain three times. Instead, his only ambition seems to be the best governor he can be.

In that regard, there is risk even in what appears to be such an easy reelection. If he stepped down now, the positive first line of his eventual obituary would be all but guaranteed. With four more years in office (he’ll be 80 when he’s done), he will face obstacles and uncertainties that could yet ding his reputation, including plans for two huge water diversion tunnels under the Sacramento Bay Delta to improve conservation and a high-speed rail line linking Los Angeles and San Francisco that is his pet project yet increasingly unpopular with the public.

Basic structural problems with the state’s finances — including an over-reliance on the volatile personal income tax, whose yield varies greatly with boom and bust — remain unresolved. Brown’s own 2012 tax increase was temporary (the income tax increases sunset in 2019) and will doubtless have to be extended if the state’s books are to remain balanced. The state’s prison population continues to rise, with all the attendant costs, and the University of California system — which has survived years of budget cuts by raising fees and taking more out-of-state students — will take years to recover, despite Brown’s vow to restore it to the glory of his father’s days as governor.

Precisely because Brown is, in so many ways, a sui generis politician, there is probably no easy recipe for replicating his success here. Nevertheless, there are some lessons, said Stanford’s Cain.

“One replicable part, or lesson to draw, is that it does take somebody with enough idiosyncrasy and strength in their personality to resist doing all the conventional things,” he said. “And I think a lot of politicians don’t think for themselves. They simply do what the consultants tell them, which is usually based on unsupported conventional wisdom. I think independent thinking is something that pleases voters, but it’s not easy to do, and it takes somebody thinking for themselves, and not just listening to donors, or the base, or the consultants. That’s the lesson that people have to pay attention to.”