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At around lunchtime on Oct. 28, California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown releases his itinerary for the home stretch of the campaign. With the vote set for Nov. 2, Brown and his Republican rival, billionaire businesswoman Meg Whitman, have been playing chess with the map, snaking through sun-drenched valleys as they vie for undecideds in the land of high technology and fiscal catastrophe. After a good month, Brown, governor of the state from 1975 to 1983 and its current attorney-general, has a double-digit lead in the polls. His early disclosure seems like a display of contempt, a warning of inevitable checkmate.
Brown’s plan includes a Nov. 1 get-out-the-vote rally on the steps of L.A.’s giant Central Library, an Egyptian-influenced 1920s bizarro-Deco edifice. The library is a natural choice. It signifies all the virtues Democrats, and Brown in particular, see themselves as standing for: intelligence and learning as opposed to instinct and faith; harmony between the civilizations of East and West; the power of public works to beautify the city and elevate the soul.
Almost immediately after the itinerary is announced, however, a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of creatives are standing in front of the main doors, making rectangular frames with their fingers and quizzing each other. The pair confirm that they’re Brown volunteers. Neither Mutt nor Jeff will say much, but obviously camera angles are the problem. The space in which Brown intends to speak is cramped, terraced, tree-filled—awkward for both video and live theatrics. Some would say that’s Jerry Brown in a nutshell: an improvisational dreamer who lets the details sort themselves out.
Brown’s return (he would go on to win) shows how strange things have gotten in California. In the state where the future is forever being born, a man first elected to its highest office at 36 is back again at 72. In the seventies, Gov. Brown waxed poetic about Zen Buddhism and space colonization while putting a fearsome stranglehold on state spending. Californians of all political stripes still remember his asceticism fondly. “He wouldn’t move into the governor’s mansion. He rented an apartment and slept on a mattress,” says Donna, a nostalgic 53-year-old job-seeker eating a bagged lunch in the Maguire Gardens adjacent to the library. “And instead of using the limousine, he drove himself to work”—specifically, in a blue Satellite sedan now preserved for posterity in the California Automobile Museum.
Brown subjected civil servants, schools, and road builders to the same discipline he imposed upon himself. But he was also the governor who first gave California state employees collective bargaining rights—something the previous governor, Ronald Reagan, had refused to consider. In a not-unrelated story, the state’s unfunded pension liabilities are now estimated by the Stanford Institute for Economic Research at half a trillion dollars.
Meanwhile, as Brown was running hard-earned surpluses, local authorities were on a historic tax binge; when Californians “revolted” in 1978 and used their initiative powers to limit property taxes under the state constitution, Brown dutifully stepped in, using his budget to cover front-line services like libraries. The state has been taking on local responsibilities ever since, and while Brown’s budget plan discusses reversing that process, the talk is bound to remain talk until those 1978 changes to the constitution are reversed or significantly mitigated.
The personal computer and the Internet, twin industrial revolutions in which California played an essential role, helped keep the state solvent as its fiscal structure became more and more distorted. Now Californians are looking around anxiously for the next economic quantum leap. Like Donna, they wonder: “Where are the middle-class jobs of the future going to come from?” California, with about 12 per cent of the U.S. population, had an estimated 21 per cent of the country’s foreclosure filings in the third quarter of 2010. Headline unemployment in the state is above 12 per cent, and since California leads the U.S. in discouraged and underemployed workers, things are worse than even that number suggests.
The environment of pervasive anxiety has intensified the fantasyland aspects of California life: the strip-mall usury shops; the huge insta-colleges of dubious provenance; the ubiquitous billboards for lap-band surgery. All of it is set, of course, against a surrealistically well-manicured background, made possible by two masterpieces of engineering: the California Aqueduct and mega-immigration from Mexico. Maybe nothing can save this precarious paradise, but for now Californians are looking for a manager and visionary who can tighten the budget while securing the Golden State’s traditional place at the heart of technological progress.
Brown, who was into alternative energy before alternative energy was cool (or remotely practical), has the credentials. On paper, so does his rival. Whitman, 54, was CEO of eBay during a decade when it went from being a trendy online gadget to serving as the supreme symbol of e-commerce for the common man. Critics note, however, that eBay was already on the verge of an IPO when she joined. The signature move of her tenure was the auction site’s purchase of peer-to-peer voice chat application Skype—a strategically baffling move that ended in painful writedowns, embarrassing lawsuits, and Whitman’s departure.
Whitman is the latest and most extravagant in a growing line of self-funded gazillionaire American politicians. There can no longer be any question that campaign-finance regulation opens a path to power for those rich enough to pay for nearly everything themselves. Some, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, have succeeded. Most, including past California gubernatorial candidates Al Checchi and Bill Simon, didn’t quite make it. Whitman ploughed $141.5 million of her own money into the campaign, a U.S. record; overall, she outspent Brown by a factor of 15 to 1.
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