Long Hot Summer of Discontent

Brown lurches left as he plans his run for the White House

California Governor Jerry Brown has become a serious presidential contender, in part because of his engaging unpredictability as he looks for fresh approaches to old problems. First a move to the right, then one to the left, in a deft political dance that has confused and enraged his enemies and charmed and encouraged his friends. Brown now plans to announce for the presidency in late September or early October. But during a summer of discontent, of battles fought and lost, he may have miscalculated and taken one step too far to the left. The man who has stressed cutting spending and balancing the budget has wound up on many issues in the same camp with those left-wing luminaries, Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden.

For the ever restless Governor, his shifts to the right did not seem to be paying off. Determined to honor his pledge to reduce spending, he vetoed two bills that would have given state employees a bigger pay increase than he favored. But both vetoes were overridden by a mutinous state legislature, which also overturned a third Brown veto. Until this rebellion, the legislature had overridden only three vetoes in 33 years. Another of Brown's favorite conservative causes is bogged down: the drive for a Constitutional Convention to approve an amendment to balance the federal budget.

With little action on the right, Brown has been cozying up to the left. He believes the Haydens can help him put together a national constituency based on opposition to nuclear power, all-out support of solar energy, attacks on big corporations, a noninterventionist foreign policy and a lingering nostalgia for the impassioned politics and communal undertakings of the 1960s. The Governor has even adopted much of the Haydens' rhetoric, including their favorite image for describing the energy crisis: "The Viet Nam of the 1980s."

Brown revealed his new strategy in a series of controversial appointments. In July he named Edison Miller, a former P.O.W. in Viet Nam, to the Orange County board of supervisors. Miller had been formally censured by the Navy Department after an investigation into charges that he had collaborated with the North Vietnamese. But he was recommended by Fonda, who met him when she was broadcasting anti-American messages from Hanoi during the war. She also served as matron of honor at Miller's recent second marriage; Hayden was best man.

The California Democratic establishment was livid over Brown's choice. State Assemblyman Richard Robinson described Miller as "Hanoi's answer to Tokyo Rose." Unable to block the appointment, the Democratic-controlled legislature sought revenge. Earlier, Brown had appointed Fonda to the California Arts Council, a post of no great consequence. But in retaliation for Miller, as well as for Fonda's defense of the North Vietnamese for expelling the boat people, the senate rejected her appointment, 28 to 5. Expressing the feelings of most of the people who had written to the senate, Republican Robert Nimmo said: "By all standards by which I was raised, Fonda was guilty of having committed treason."

Brown denounced the senate as a "group of small-minded politicians," and Fonda accused them of "McCarthyism," a charge that was echoed by 200 other show-biz celebrities, including Jane's father Henry. But Brown's cause was not helped by an earlier appointment. On Hayden's recommendation, he had named Chris Matthews to the Santa Cruz County board of supervisors. Matthews, who had spent a year and a half in prison for smuggling marijuana, then appointed John Hanna to the agricultural advisory board in Santa Cruz. Hanna is appealing a five-year sentence for bombing crop-dusting aircraft in protest against pesticides.

Looking ahead to his run for the White House, Brown has formed a committee to raise funds, and he offers his first clear challenge to Carter when he goes to New Hampshire to campaign on Sept. 9. Later in the fall, he expects to campaign around the country. The Governor will also get a boost from the Haydens, who, starting at Three Mile Island in late September, will tour 50 cities with the occasional assistance of such notables as Cesar Chavez, Gloria Steinem and Jesse Jackson. Though they have not formally endorsed Brown for President, the Haydens consider him to be the most "relevant" politician for America and the one most likely to be converted to their Campaign for Economic Democracy.

Whether that will help or hinder their candidate is another question. The Haydens' political philosophy seems to run counter to the conservative trend in America. There may be new interest in the Viet Nam War, but it is highly questionable that evoking the Haydens' approach to the conflict is a way to make political capital. Indeed, there is the very real possibility that stirring memories of the war may strengthen the revisionist beliefs of those Americans who feel that the conflict need not have been lost after all.

In a Harris survey in July, which asked Democratic and independent voters to choose among three possible nominees, Brown was backed by 18%, compared with 52% for Ted Kennedy and 25% for Carter. California Pollster Mervin Field thinks Brown has a fifty-fifty chance against Carter if Kennedy stays out of the contest. Brown, on the other hand, may have lost some of the luster that enabled him to beat Carter in all three of the primaries in 1976 where he appeared on the ballot. His unconventionality has by now become rather conventional; he is expected to do the unexpected. Behavior that seemed refreshingly uninhibited at first now may strike people as overly opportunistic. Asserts Tom D'Alesandro III, the former mayor of Baltimore who supported Brown in 1976: "He was a mystery then--this unique young man from out of the West who came in on a whirlwind. People now either like or dislike Jerry Brown. The mystery is gone."

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