Jerry Brown, Eliot Ness Fan, Aims to Be California Crime-Buster By Roger Simon Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The Moonbeam has landed. Jerry Brown has come back to Earth.
Brown, the mayor of Oakland, California, is standing in the building where he lives and maintains a campaign office in his race for state attorney general. It is an old Sears, Roebuck store with the roof torn off and the inside hollowed out to form a courtyard. He is holding two DVDs that he's about to return to the rental store. They are ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' and ``The Untouchables.''
If anything sums up the dichotomy in Brown's political life, it is the starry-eyed idealism of Jimmy Stewart and the hard- nosed reality of Sean Connery. Asked which movie he liked better, Brown instantly chooses ``The Untouchables.''
``You know the part I like best?'' he asks. He quotes Jim Malone, played by Connery, who tells Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness how to fight crime: ``They pull a knife, you pull a gun!''
Brown, who became mayor of Oakland in 1998, is no stranger to statewide office. His father, Pat, was both attorney general, the state's top law-enforcement official, and governor. Jerry served as California's secretary of state from 1971 to 1975 and as governor -- where he earned the nickname ``Governor Moonbeam'' -- from 1975 to 1983. He also ran for president of the United States in 1976, 1980 and 1992.
Brown, 68, has changed. Once known for liberalism, environmentalism and often baffling political prose -- ``Ad astra per aspera'' (``To the stars, through the thorns'') was his 1992 presidential campaign slogan -- he now chiefly devotes his life to fighting crime.
``We can walk outside,'' says Brown, ``and I can introduce you to some criminals, dope addicts, crankheads. This is pretty down to earth, isn't it?''
Crime Wonk
Sitting at a paper-strewn desk in a long and mostly empty office with Dharma, his black Labrador, at his feet, Brown goes over crime statistics in dizzying detail. He examines the daily arrest records of every beat cop in Oakland and how they compare with last month and last year.
He talks about the state-of-the-art technology he has brought to the gritty streets of his city: global-positioning devices that can be strapped to the ankles of parolees to tell the police where they are; a license-plate-recognition apparatus that can be mounted on police cars to instantly identify stolen cars, and a ``ShotSpotter'' system that can detect the sound of gunfire and pinpoint it to within 15 feet. ``We are putting in six miles of that,'' Brown says proudly.
He walks over to a computer with an enormous horizontal screen and begins tapping the keyboard, pulling up charts, graphs and arrays of numbers. ``We have crimes that are up and crimes that are down,'' he says. ``We are way below what it used to be.''
Oakland as Model?
Brown calls up statistics on the murders, rapes, robberies, and other major crimes that are carried out in the city. ``I think we can set up what we do in Oakland as a template to help other police departments,'' he says. ``I don't think there has ever been an attorney general who will have a focus on crime at the micro level as I have.''
As of late August, Oakland had 95 homicides, one more than all of last year. In 2004, the city's murder rate was 20.6 per 100,000 people, compared with 5.5 nationwide.
The Republican candidate for attorney general, state Senator Chuck Poochigian of Fresno, says the retooling of Brown is all an act, adding that Oakland has the highest crime rate in the state.
``Brown lives on the left fringe of American politics and tries to adapt himself like a chameleon,'' says Poochigian's chief strategist, Ken Khachigian, a former top aide to President Ronald Reagan. ``He is more in sync with liberals like Michael Moore and Jane Fonda than he is with the average person in California.''
Fine With Anarchism
Khachigian points to past Brown ``wild statements,'' including one in 1995 when he told a conference in Santa Clara that ``there's nothing wrong with being an anarchist.''
``Brown may be qualified to be poet laureate of California,'' Khachigian says. ``But not attorney general.''
Kevin Starr, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, has known Brown since they attended a Jesuit high school together in San Francisco. He says Brown isn't a chameleon, but has contending impulses inside him.
``The enigma that is Jerry Brown comes from his Jesuit training,'' Starr says. ``He is a liberal on the need for the state to care for the poor, needy and disadvantaged. But he is also aware of human fallibility and misbehavior and the need for discipline, organization and hierarchy. These two things clash within him.''
Honoring Ignatius
Brown, who in 1958 entered a Jesuit seminary intending to become a priest, has a picture of the founder of the Jesuit order in his mayoral office. ``I think I am the only politician in America with Ignatius Loyola on the wall of his office,'' he says with a laugh.
The ``Governor Moonbeam'' label was hung on him by Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko in 1978 because of Brown's idea -- which today doesn't seem very odd -- of creating a California space academy and placing a satellite in orbit to provide emergency communications for the state. Royko later apologized for the label, but it has stuck.
Dan Schnur, a Republican strategist, says while Brown was a ``flaky governor 30 years ago,'' most voters don't care about that today. What they care about, Schnur says, is that Brown is running for an office, attorney general, in which his ``most debilitating political weakness,'' his opposition to the death penalty, ``is the most relevant.''
Brown says he will carry out all laws as attorney general, and that includes opposing all death-penalty appeals. ``My opponent deludes himself if he thinks this is an important issue,'' he says.
In the latest California Field Poll released in August, Brown led by 21 points. Responds Republican strategist Khachigian: ``Brown's name ID is in the 85 to 88 percent range, and he is only 21 points ahead of an unknown state senator from Fresno. So what does that tell you?''
Brown says it tells him he is going to win.
When he announced he was running for attorney general, some assumed he wanted to focus on white-collar crime in the mode of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
Brown laughs at the notion. ``Eliot Spitzer?'' he says. ``Try Eliot Ness!''