Jerry Brown, speaks to a small crowd at the Nokia Theater in June.
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The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the August 2, print and iPad editions of TIME magazine.
How do you want us to tell the Jerry Brown story? As a comeback tale? A mystery? A quest? A love story? A little-guy-makes-good story? He is all of them, the comeback kid at 72, the former two-term Democratic governor and three-time presidential candidate who fell from grace, searched for spirituality, found love and worked his way up from two-term mayor of Oakland (1998 to 2006) to current state attorney general to, possibly, governor again. He is a one-man political dynasty (scion of an actual dynasty, since his father Edmund "Pat" Brown was also governor), begetting yet another reborn version of himself, wiser, more empathetic, more effective, though he will argue that is a conundrum. "If I say I've learned anything, then it means I didn't know anything before. If I say I didn't learn anything, then I'm not learning anything." In this dark season of deficits and crises and panic and electorate revulsion at Sacramento gridlock --a version that makes Washington look positively efficient -- he claims to be, all conundrums aside, -- exactly who California needs.
Much has been made of California's crisis, of schools underfunded, prisons overcrowded, highways rutted, water polluted, businesses fleeing, house prices still collapsing, and the sense of crisis is omnipresent, from the potholes that jar you as you drive down I-880 to get to Brown's garage to the foreclosed properties that surround the charter schools he founded. Yet the ideas floated to fix the state by Republican candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman are blandishments that sound good -- yes, we should focus on jobs, schools and making government more efficient -- but that Brown will tell you are consultant-conceived generalities.
He is quick to contrast himself with Whitman, pointing out every instance where her theories crumble against the realities of actually governing. "I've done this," he explains. "I've been in government and overseen thousands of businesses. I've run charter schools. Those are businesses. She ran her ... her website. She can say whatever she wants. But if you have never worked in government...It's a different world. That's like someone who's never dove in a river and says, I know what swimming in a river is like."
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