The Daily Recorder
By Cheryl Miller October 3, 2006
SACRAMENTO - Attorney General candidate Chuck Poochigian delights in calling opponent Jerry Brown "a flaky liberal." Imagine Poochigian's surprise, then, when the very un-liberal American Tort Reform Association, or ATRA, recently poured $5,600 into Brown's campaign.
Brown is, after all, mayor of Oakland, the city that joined environmental groups in filing a global-warming lawsuit against two federal agencies. And ATRA is, of course, the organization whose president called California's recent global-warming lawsuit against auto manufacturers "another outrageous affront to democratically elected policy makers."
Even ATRA's communications director was initially taken aback when a reporter asked about the group's donation. After double-checking, Darren McKinney confirmed the payment.
"Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the old saw goes," McKinney said. "In this case we're going to bunk down with Jerry and wish him well."
Such political coziness stems from 1975, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law California's landmark Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, better known as MICRA. The law caps pain and suffering judgments at $250,000 and is the bane of the plaintiffs bar.
"It's not as though [MICRA] was shoved down his throat," McKinney said. "He and his staff developed it."
Indeed, Brown and future Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman championed the law after angry doctors - and their wives, who staged a legislative sit-in - complained that soaring malpractice insurance costs were driving them out of business.
"He's been an advocate for comparable state reforms around the country," McKinney said. "At least in this regard, we have much in common."
Like many things about Brown, the AG candidate's position on MICRA is nuanced. In 1993, Brown wrote a letter to then-President Clinton, urging him not to include similar caps in his national health care plan.
"MICRA has revealed itself to have an arbitrary and cruel effect upon the victims of malpractice," Brown wrote. "It has not lowered health-care costs, only enriched insurers and placed negligent or incompetent physicians outside the reach of judicial accountability."
Last week, however, Brown told The Recorder that he has no plans to promote MICRA reform as attorney general.
"I think that's a legislative matter," he said. "It is what it is."
Prominent trial lawyers don't seem to have a problem with Brown's evolving position on medical caps. Peter Hinton, Allan Steyer, Frank Pitre, Joseph Cotchett, Niall McCarthy and James Sturdevant gave Brown's campaign a combined $20,000 last week.
The Consumer Attorneys of California, however, has not endorsed an attorney general candidate yet.
TIME TO PANIC?
Perhaps when Jerry Brown and his odd array of political bedfellows get together they can snooze inside a panic room. A Southern California manufacturer of entry-resistant hideouts gave Brown's campaign $5,600 in September.
American Saferoom Door Co. of Westlake Village provides its clients with "the single most important means for reliably separating the home owner or employees from intruders," according to the company's Web site.
It's unclear why American Saferoom supports Brown. No one answered the company's phone last week, and a message was not immediately returned.
Jerry Brown and a panic room? You can bet the Poochigian campaign is already thinking of ways to tie the manufacturer's donation to Oakland's soaring homicide rate.
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