Democrats Strong Message, Wrong Messenger

By JORDAN BONFANTE LOS ANGELES

Only one presidential candidate would dare to stump for votes at a convention of crystal-worshipping New Agers in Los Angeles. Prowling the stage with a hand mike like a stand-up crooner, Jerry Brown trumpets his current theme about the hopeless corruption of the political system, then offers his audience more specialized wares. He cites Buckminster Fuller's appeal for a fundamental "design change" of society. To loud applause from the assembled acolytes of acupuncture, psychoshamanism and touch therapy, he declares that any vast health-care reform "should also recognize alternative healing modalities." The custom-tailored sermon, delivered with rat-a-tat intensity, goes over so effectively that he is coaxed into a second performance for all the healers and spiritualists who were unable to squeeze into the auditorium for the first one.

And so it goes as Brown, the former two-term Governor of California, makes his third bid for the White House. With a forthrightness bordering on naivete and an all-too-Californian tendency to let it all hang out, Brown, 53, does not even try to protect himself from the image consequences of his esoteric passions. In fact, he sometimes seems to relish making himself an easy target and regularly walking into the propeller of his unshakable image as a double- dome space cadet. "I don't know which image you have of me," Brown tells new audiences, as if to exorcize his cartoon nicknames. "Governor Moonbeam? The Governor who drove a Plymouth? Slept on the floor?"

Brown's unshakable counterculture image undercuts a fervent message that needs to be heard: a call not just for a jobs-and-income revival but for an American political reformation. Even Brown's adversaries grudgingly acknowledge that in an era of term limits, the Keating Five and a general climate of voter restiveness, his message strikes a chord. It very obviously unnerved his rival Democratic candidates at their first televised debate in December, though Brown undercut its effect with his bristling appeal to viewers to call in contributions to his 800 number like a shop-by-phone huckster.

Brown says Big Money has hopelessly corrupted the political system, which no longer seems to solve problems but only to maintain the power of officeholders. As he sees it, politicians, aided and abetted by party structures, special-interest contributors and the "co-conspiratorial" media, are stuck in a vicious circle of fund raising and self-perpetuation. The only way to break the cycle and "take back America," Brown argues, is from below, with a "grass-roots insurgency." Accordingly, he has pledged to accept contributions of no more than $100. Until last week that appeal had netted him a shoestring $500,000 from 20,000 donors. "There is a constituency," he insists buoyantly. "If I had enough time, there are several million people who would contribute to my campaign."

Brown does not spare his party. On the stage of the Democratic National Committee meeting in Los Angeles last fall, he accused party chairman Ron Brown of having conspired with his Republican counterpart, the late Lee Atwater, to ramrod a congressional pay raise through the House of Representatives in virtual secrecy. Ron Brown, sitting a few feet away, winced. On the road, Jerry Brown's message is a hit with student audiences but draws mixed responses from older crowds who listen, but with some skepticism. The message keeps running afoul of the messenger's past reputation.

Take the recent joint appearance of Brown and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin at a breakfast for 1,500 liberal Democratic farmers and senior citizens in Moline, Ill. Harkin rolled up his working-class sleeves, quoted from the Old Testament and Abe Lincoln, and with drawling, oratorically expert highs and lows, hammered away at the Bush Administration on bread-and-butter issues.

When Brown's turn came, he also peeled to his shirtsleeves, but wound up resembling a somewhat ill-tempered Peter Lawford as he quoted Gandhi and Vaclav Havel. With no compromise of either his academic references or his gravely aggressive tones, he hammered away not only at the Republicans but at the whole political superstructure: "Here's the picture," he said. "The very idea of America is being destroyed because we have economic decline, the country's managers are paying themselves handsomely, and our public servants are spending half of their time cajoling the top 1% ((of income earners)) so they can get tens of millions of dollars to buy television ads.

"You know the ads: You take your coat off like this. You walk along the beach, and you say, 'I hate crime . . . And I hate taxes . . . And, oh, I love the environment . . .' You have seen those ads!"

His listeners have, and they laugh appreciatively. Yet many Democrats seem more comfortable with Harkin's familiar boilerplate than with Brown's jeremiad. "Whew! What a free market of ideas. And I sure respect the way he gets on that freight train of passion," said Sam Barone, executive director of Ohio's Democratic Party organization, after a Brown speech in Chicago. "But I'll tell you this, if he should dispatch a bunch of those pony- tailed Californians with earrings into Ohio or Indiana as volunteers, then he can just forget it."

The curious mix of intellectual exhilaration and spacy West Coast image has dogged Brown ever since the bushy-browed onetime Jesuit seminarian first vaulted into the governorship in 1974. What most characterized his administration was incessant questioning of the status quo. Long nights were spent brainstorming about everything from cost-cutting to energy conservation -- and virtually no idea was considered too absurd to be dismissed out of hand. Recalls state controller Gray Davis, who was Brown's chief of staff: "Upon learning that Nevada had reneged on a tentative agreement to provide greater environmental control over Lake Tahoe, Jerry spent several minutes debating the merits of invading Nevada." Liberal on social issues but tightfisted on taxes and spending, Brown introduced a new emphasis on limited resources and environmental conservation. He also changed the face of state government by appointing more than a thousand women and minorities to key positions.

$ Brown was overwhelmingly elected to a second term as Governor in 1978, but he increasingly turned his back on state affairs to wage a second unsuccessful presidential campaign two years later. In 1982 California voters had so tired of his mercurial approach that he was soundly trounced by Republican Pete Wilson in a race for the U.S. Senate.

After that loss, Brown went into exile, studying Buddhism in Japan and working with Mother Teresa in India. The experiences, says Brown, "gave me distance on the whole business of power and ambition. With Mother Teresa there was so much openness and joy in the midst of what appeared to be hopeless situations. I believe what is missing from politics is that sense of joy, service and integrity."

Yet when Brown re-entered politics, he plunged neck-deep into the very cynical side of the business that he now deplores. In 1989 he became chairman of the state Democratic Party, a post that required him to devote himself to shaking down fat-cat contributors. In less than two years he raised $2 million -- but spent much of it on an outsize personal staff and other infrastructure at the party's chaotic office in San Francisco. That performance seems to clash with Brown's current lecturing. "Only last year he spearheaded an effort to throw out contribution limits. He was against many of the things he now says he's for," says Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis' campaign manager in 1988. Concurs Republican political consultant Ed Rollins: "Right message. Wrong messenger."

How does Brown reconcile his background and his preachments? He doesn't, at least not fully. Serving as state party chairman, he says, was "a learning experience" that opened his eyes to the debilitating impact of money on politics. As Governor, he claims, he was "never one of the boys; the locker room of incumbents was never open to me in a spiritual sense." Now, he says, he is trying finally to do what he should have done years ago, "to close the gap between what I am saying and what I am doing." That is a welcome conversion, but in Brown's case it is probably too late.