Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When an endorsement is as tepid as Jerry Brown’s—call it a non-endorsement endorsement—does it really make any difference at all? Perhaps not—except as a bellwether. The California governor’s eleventh-hour announcement on Tuesday that he’s supporting Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, only a week before the biggest primary election in the presidential race, is emblematic of the months-long head-heart dilemma that has plagued the many Democrats who have a complicated history with the Clintons.

No one embodies this ambivalence, in fact, more than Jerry Brown himself, who a generation ago was seen more or less as the Bernie Sanders of his time. After all, it was Brown who, in the heat of his insurgent 1992 primary campaign for president against Bill Clinton, denounced him as “the prince of sleaze,” and described the work for the Arkansas state government of Hillary Clinton’s law firm as “a conflict of interest” and “a scandal of major proportion,” while carrying his candidacy to the bitter end at the Democratic National Convention in New York.


“I don’t care what you say about me, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife,” Bill Clinton told Brown in an angry Chicago debate in which the rivals pointed fingers in each other’s faces. “You’re not worth being on the same platform with my wife. I never funneled any money to my wife’s law firm. Never.”

Twenty-four years later, politics has once again made strange bedfellows—and Brown’s accommodation points to where many other progressive Democrats will likely end up, whether or not they are directly influenced by his action. It’s not that they like Hillary any better now than they did before, but much as the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, the looming nomination of Donald Trump appears to supply the necessary nudge. If Hillary Clinton wins, it will be as part of a “Stop Trump” movement by many Democrats, nothing more.

Brown, in his faint-voiced “open letter” to California Democrats, posted on his Web site, said he’d decided to cast his vote for Clinton “because I believe this is the only path forward to win the presidency and stop the dangerous candidacy of Donald Trump.” In the next breath, he confessed that he was “deeply impressed with how well Bernie Sanders has done.” Brown went out of his way to praise Sanders for driving “home the message that the top one percent has unfairly captured way too much of America’s wealth, leaving the majority of people far behind,” adding drily, “In 1992, I attempted a similar campaign.”

That argues for an endorsement, you might think—of Sanders. But not in a year when the White House could go to Trump, and realistically only another Clinton stands in his way. Last week, Brown met privately in Sacramento with his old archrival Bill Clinton, and his endorsement had an air of acknowledging the inevitable, noting that “Clinton’s lead is insurmountable and Democrats have shown—by millions of votes—that they want her as their nominee.”

“It’s not the most heartfelt endorsement I ever read,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy and a veteran watcher of Golden State politics. “Was the word ‘endorsement’ in that endorsement?”

It was not. Some California polls show a tight race between Clinton and Sanders in next week’s primary, but the evidence suggests that voters also agree with Brown’s assessment of her prospects in the fall. A recent survey of likely voters by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 87 percent of self-identified liberals, and even two-thirds of voters aged 18-to-34 who make up the core of Sanders’ support, would choose Clinton over Trump.

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Jerry Brown’s long roundabout journey into the Clinton camp also reflects the Democrats’ doubts about the strength of a Clinton candidacy—then and now. In 1992, Brown polled only about 4 million votes and some 600 delegates (against more than 10 million votes and 3,330 delegates for Bill Clinton), compared with 10.5 million votes and some 1,500 delegates for Sanders so far this year. But then as now, there were worried rumblings about the weakness of a Clinton candidacy, even as Bill Clinton moved to lock up the nomination.

“Doubts of Voters Temper Euphoria in Clinton’s Camp” was the headline on an April 9, 1992, story in the New York Times by the late R.W. Apple, Jr., which quoted Brown as allowing, “He’s in the lead, all right,” but adding, “there are enough questions” to make the Arkansas governor vulnerable.

It was partly that conviction that led Brown to press his case all the way to the national convention—much as Sanders is pledging to do today—where at one point his supporters interrupted a speech by Hillary Clinton demanding that he be allowed to speak. “I’ve never known Jerry not to speak when he wants to speak,” she said then in Madison Square Garden. “He’s always speaking, near as I can tell.”

In the end, Brown seconded his own nomination, insisting, “Whatever nice programs we speak of, whatever dreams we share, unless the basic fact of unchecked power and privilege is acknowledged and courageously challenged, nothing will ever change.”

At 78, Brown is in his fourth and last term as governor of the biggest, bluest state in the nation, and faced little or no political risk by endorsing either candidate or neither. If anything, his own base of donors and supporters is more closely aligned with Clinton’s than Sanders’, despite his always overblown and long-outdated national reputation as a kooky liberal.

In fact, Brown is a practitioner of the “canoe theory” of politics: Paddle a little to the left, a little to the right, and you’ll go forward. His second tour as governor—40 years after the first—has been marked by a bipartisan pragmatism, honed in his years as mayor of Oakland, and Sanders’ costly promises of free college tuition and increased government spending were not calculated to win the backing of a politician who has always been something of a fiscal conservative at heart.

Indeed, Brown’s endorsement of Clinton was rooted in his pragmatic assessment that “this is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other,” and Bill Carrick, a longtime Californian Democratic strategist not involved in the race, says that Clinton would find his backing “very good to have.”

Still, as many as half of California voters cast absentee ballots in advance of Election Day, so it is hard to say just how many wavering voters Brown’s endorsement, coming just a week out, might actually sway—especially in a contest whose combatants are both already so well known by Californians.

But Brown may well have succeeded in articulating what many of them are thinking.

Brown, by the way, is far from the first politician to offer an intellectual rationale for an endorsement that might tug at his emotions, but which he made anyway to save the nation, as he perceived it. In 1800, Alexander Hamilton endorsed his bitter rival Thomas Jefferson for president over Aaron Burr, on the grounds that “Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government,” while Burr “loves nothing but himself.”