What Jerry Brown has learned California’s four-term governor leaves office with a long record and advice on which fights to avoid

What Jerry Brown has learned California’s four-term governor leaves office with a long record and advice on which fights to avoid

SACRAMENTO — When Jerry Brown’s fourth term in office ends Monday, he’ll be leaving as California’s oldest and longest-serving governor, a politician whose split tenures bookend 44 tumultuous years in the state and in the nation.

It’s also a job he’s leaving with few regrets — and, he says, a far greater understanding than he once had of what any one governor can accomplish.

“Maybe I’ll miss the mansion,” Brown said in an interview in the breakfast room of the three-story Victorian on H Street that housed its first governor in 1903. “It’s very nice here.”

But for all Brown’s protestations that “I don’t look back much,” he’s quick to boast of “an extraordinary period” when it comes to his last two terms.

Timeline: Jerry Brown’s farewell

“I’m surprised with all we got done,” the governor said. “I don’t think there’s any precedent for all the initiatives.”

With his time in office growing short, the 80-year-old Brown has been more reflective about what he’s done and what it’s meant for the state where he has spent almost his entire life.

Turning a staggering budget deficit into a rainy-day reserve of more than $14 billion, renewing the cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases, and passing a wave of climate change initiatives and prison reform measures are successes that are happening only in California, the governor said.

Just don’t call it his legacy.

“I’m not here about some cockamamie legacy that people talk about,” Brown thundered during a 2017 state Senate hearing on climate change and his cap-and-trade program on carbon emissions. “This isn’t for me. I’m going to be dead. It’s for you.”

Casually dressed for the interview in a blue flannel shirt and with his corgi, Colusa, curled up on a chair next to him, Brown was quick to say that in a state as big and diverse as California, he knew he was never going to satisfy everyone.

But he said focusing on some issues dear to the Democratic left, such as making housing more affordable and narrowing wealth inequality, would have been a waste of his time and political capital.

“Now, you can always find people who talk about the cost of housing, the gap between the rich and the poor, but this is true in Sydney, Australia. It’s true in London, it’s true all over the world,” Brown said. “Those are challenges people ought to address, but I’d say just looking back at the time I was there, either these things were not as salient as the problems I dealt with, or they weren’t as high a priority as the ones I dealt with.”

It’s always a matter of picking and choosing, of deciding both what needs to be done and what can be done with a governor’s limited resources of time, money and clout, Brown said. And those choices are always going to leave someone upset.

“Not only can’t you make them all happy, but you can’t solve all problems — otherwise, you’d be dead,” Brown said. “As long as you’re alive, you’ve got new issues for tomorrow and next week and next year.”

If politics is the art of the possible, Brown, in his second stint as governor, has shown himself to be the ultimate pragmatist, someone unwilling to fight political battles he doesn’t think he can win.

Tax reform is one of those quixotic struggles, he said. Economists warn that California’s good budget times are overly dependent on wealthy people’s taxes, which tend to dry up when the stock market and capital gains taxes take a tumble.

“You might say, why didn’t you lower the tax on the rich and spread (state taxes) out on services or something else?” Brown said. “I didn’t feel that was a fruitful line of activity. There’s the Legislature, and you wouldn’t get that (tax change) by a two-thirds vote. ... Some of those other things that people might talk about, the problem is they’re not teed up in a way that we can get that.”

Jerry Brown 2.0 is a very different person from the 36-year-old who was elected governor for the first time in 1974, confident not only that he knew all the answers, but that those answers were very different from the ones offered by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, and his father, Pat Brown, an old-school Irish pol from San Francisco who was governor from 1959 to 1967.

“We’ve got to retool it, rethink it, readjust it, recalibrate it,” Brown said in a 1975 Chronicle interview. “Government is amok.”

But eight years as mayor of Oakland starting in 1999 tempered many of those early views. They also showed him how politics worked at the ground level, which shaped many of his views as governor.

“In Oakland, I would see people show up at City Council and protest almost any project, even relatively low height limits that they thought affected the character of the neighborhood,” Brown said. “So, great resistance to change, usually argued in terms of grand environmental or quality-of-life issues that I thought were patently misguided, ill-founded and distorted.”

During his first eight years as governor, with a political resume limited to two years on the community college board in Los Angeles and four years as secretary of state, he didn’t have the direct experience of how government and politics actually operated, Brown said.

“After I had been in Oakland, I got a good sense of how things worked, a more concrete sense,” he said. “I learned that from my own experience, which you don’t get from going directly from secretary of state to governor.”

Those years of going cap in hand to state officials to get help for his city and attempts to deal with the growing number of rules and orders from Sacramento also left Brown wary of looking to the Legislature as the source of all wisdom.

In 2011, the governor shocked legislators, including many of his fellow Democrats, when he vetoed a bill that would have required helmets for skiers and snowboarders under 18.

The Legislature was usurping the role of parents, he said in his veto message, adding, “Not every human problem deserves a law.”

Attempting to change that legislative culture wasn’t one of his most successful efforts, Brown admitted.

“The Legislature exists, in their minds, to produce more laws,” he said. “They don’t exist to solve problems, they exist to make laws. Now, they’d like to solve some problems along the way, but the essential functioning of a legislature is lawmaking.”

In Brown’s 2013 State of the State address, he suggested that legislators “lay the Ten Commandments next to the California Education Code” to see how the legal system has changed.

Brown didn’t excuse himself from abetting the wave of legislation, admitting that he often signed bills while shaking his head.

“We have more lawmaking than in any time in human history,” the governor said. “Many of the laws are stupid. Many of them are not warranted. But in order to get along with the Legislature, you’ve got to sign bills that aren’t needed. And you even have to sign bills that you’d prefer not even to have.”

That’s just one place where Brown has run afoul of the all-or-nothing approach of California’s increasingly progressive Democratic Party. The governor’s willingness to cut deals when he needed Republican votes, as he did to get the state gas tax increase passed in 2017, and his tightfisted refusal to spend much of the state’s surplus on education and social programs has left many Democrats looking to Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom for changes.

“You can’t solve everything, ever,” Brown said. “What’s hard is when you’re in conflict, and you know if you say ‘no,’ maybe next time they’ll say ‘no’ to you. So this is a give-and-take business. Just like I ask them to do something they don’t want, they get to ask me to do something I don’t want.”

The call for statewide prekindergarten classes for 3- and 4-year-olds, which would cost more than $1.5 billion a year to implement, is an example. Newsom, many Democratic legislators and even former President Barack Obama have called universal preschool necessary, especially for low-income families that can’t afford private preschools. But Brown has resisted, vetoing a 2015 bill that would have guaranteed one year of part-day preschool to every low-income 4-year-old.

Universal preschool “would take another level of taxation that hasn’t occurred yet, and there are no proposals on the table that I know of,” Brown said, although Newsom has said it will be a priority. “That’s not to say you can’t do it for a year or two, but then you’ll fall off the cliff and the money won’t be there.”

Paying for programs like universal preschool, universal health care and other inequality-ending efforts backed by many California Democrats is going to require huge changes that most people aren’t willing to make, Brown said.

Wealth is created by innovation, and “the winners of all that get enormous sums of money,” the governor said — leaving less for those at the bottom.

“If people want to say we don’t want that, they’re going to have to curb those who are highly successful and not allow them to make as much money and make sure it’s redistributed, either by raising wages or benefits, by curbing salaries and wealth, and that’s not even on the table,” Brown said.

While Brown acknowledged that he’ll miss the activity of the governor’s office and the intensity of being directly involved in the issues surrounding California, he knows it’s time for a change — for him, at least.

“It will be different,” he said. “I liked being mayor. But I like to change. I liked being (California) attorney general, but I like being governor better. But after being governor for eight years, it can be very nice to do something else. So I’m constantly inventing new things or finding new pathways.”

Those pathways don’t include fading away into a quiet retirement. With about $15 million sitting in his campaign account, he can stay directly involved in California political issues, such as prison reform. And he’s already looking at working more intensely on international issues, such as climate change and what he sees as the burgeoning threat of nuclear weapons.

Gov. Jerry Brown, with press secretary Evan Westrup (right) and a member of his security detail, heads to the Stanley Mosk Courts Building. Gov. Jerry Brown, with press secretary Evan Westrup (right) and a member of his security detail, heads to the Stanley Mosk Courts Building. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close What Jerry Brown learned leading California: ‘You can’t solve all problems’ 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

“I’ve got the means, I’ve got the knowledge and I’ve got the interest to participate at the international, national and state level,” Brown said.

There are also more local concerns for Brown. He and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, will be moving to their new home outside the town of Williams in rural Colusa County, on a 2,500-acre ranch once owned by his great-grandfather August Schuckman.

“I’ve also got my olive trees, to learn how to make proper oil and pick them at the right time and make sure they don’t get diseased,” he said.

GOP-leaning Colusa County is anything but Brown country. In his past three elections, he hasn’t come close to winning a majority there.

But even as Brown leaves office, intent on carving out a new and even more visible role on the national and international stage, it’s hard to step aside from a life in state politics, dealing with California’s problems, big and small.

“They’re friendly people out there, even if they didn’t vote for me,” Brown said as he took his dog outside the governor’s mansion for a walk. “Revitalizing Williams — now there’s a project.”

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth