Attorney General Jerry Brown’s nomination for governor is now certain, and given the rapid Republican decline in California, he has to be the odds on favorite for November. So it is time to concentrate on Brown’s next campaign for president.
President you ask? Well, each time he has been elected governor (1974 and 1978), he has immediately begun running for president (1976 and 1980). He even ran when he was not governor, in 1992. So a fourth campaign for president should not be totally dismissed, even if, as is likely, Brown denies it.
Additionally, there is a logic for another quixotic run in 2012. Brown always runs for president from the left, and the left wing of the Democratic Party is increasingly disenchanted with President Obama. He has betrayed them on public option health care, on withdrawing from Afghanistan, on closing Guantanamo. This is the fodder Brown has used in his past campaigns; there is no reason he cannot reprise this strategy again.
Brown’s earlier campaigns were against the two most recent Democratic Presidents before Obama, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Those campaigns tell us much about how he would try to take down the current Democratic president.
Let’s start with his first campaign for President in 1976, and the woman who made his near success possible. In March 1976, he entered the race against front runner Jimmy Carter, and the first primary he won was Maryland in May, followed by New Jersey and Louisiana, and then he swept California with 59 percent to just 21 percent for Carter. But all this was too late, as Carter had won too many of the early big primaries and sewed up the 1976 nomination on the first ballot.
However, Maryland was the most important Brown win that year, because of how he won the state and what it may portend for 2012. As Carla Marinucci recently related in the San Francisco Chronicle, Brown had a secret weapon in Maryland, a wealthy San Francisco political activist who was the daughter of one Baltimore mayor and the brother of another. Her name: Nancy Pelosi. Nancy’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro, had built a powerful Maryland machine, and Pelosi saw to it that the machine favored Jerry Brown. Without her support, it is unlikely he would have won.
Fast forward 34 years and Pelosi is the twilight of her career in Congress. This year she faces serious losses in the House, perhaps enough that her Speakership could be in peril. And who will be to blame: Obama, for his failure to excite the Democratic base. Liberal columnists are making that point today. No politician is better than Brown at rallying the base; in 1976 Cesar Chavez placed his name in nomination for president to the emotional cheers of Democratic delegates who truly wanted to nominate Brown.
If Pelosi loses badly in 2010, she will have good reason to look for an alternative to Obama in 2012. Marinucci notes in her piece that Pelosi began her political career in 1976 by delivering her former home state, Maryland, to Brown. How ironic if she ended it in 2012 by delivering him the Democratic nomination.
In his second campaign in 1980, Brown took on then President Carter also from the left. His platform, he declared, was rooted in Buckminster Fuller’s vision of the future and E.F. Schumacher’s theory of Buddhist economics that called for “protecting the earth, serving the people, and exploring the universe.” In the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, Brown also opposed nuclear power, and of course the oil industry. His positions drew support from some of the major leftwing leaders of that era, including Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and Jesse Jackson.
However, again he was too late, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy challenged Carter and by the time Brown got in, Carter had demolished Kennedy and guaranteed his renomination. But Brown made enough of national impact that Chicago Times columnist Mike Royko nicknamed him Governor Moonbeam, and it has stuck.
His 1992 campaign was against Bill Clinton, and he exposed Clinton’s personal corruption in the Whitewater matter (Brown was the first politician to bring up the issues that later led to Clinton’s impeachment). Again he started late, but he did manage to rally the Democratic left, and in the course of the 1992 primaries he pushed aside Clinton’s main challenger, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas.
But Brown made one major mistake. He had won several small state primaries and was close to defeating Clinton in the all important New York primary when he said he would consider Jesse Jackson as his running mate. Brown seemed too forgiving of Jackson’s “hymie town” anti-Semitism, and New York’s Jewish voters turned on him, and Clinton won the primary and the nomination.
But Brown can only be the candidate of the “unhappy with Obama” left, if he can enact a true leftist agenda in California. His labor allies are promoting measures for November ballot to abolish the two third budget and tax rule, and impose a split roll on business property taxes. Brown can champion this and thus come into office promoting their agenda. He has already seized the initiative on another favorite issue of the left, ending greenhouse gas emissions with his pioneering lawsuits as attorney general, and no one has talked longer about “protecting the earth” and saving the universe than Brown.
In 1992, Brown promised in presidential campaign Number Three to “take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington”. Given the failures of “change we can believe in”, what better theme is there than that for presidential campaign Number Four? Such a crusade should not be discounted.