Will Governor Jerry Brown Run Again in 2018?

Most politicians are short-term thinkers. Their want to cut ribbons and go programs up and running means that few of them spend much time thinking about anything beyond the side by side campaign. Right now, however, there is at least one exception. Jerry Brown, as he completes his final term running California at age fourscore, is looking far into the future, governing in the belief that many of the state's most of import problems are ones that may not ripen for xx or 30 years.

Much of Dark-brown's last year in office has been defended to projects that volition come to fruition long after he leaves Sacramento. The question of moving water to thirsty Southern California has been a affair of political dispute throughout Brown'south six decades in public life, and indeed well before. His plan to reengineer the system with a pair of 35-mile-long tunnels, at a cost of $15 billion or more, won approval from the state'due south h2o agency in April. When the work is washed, many years from at present, it will accept the effect of extending Southern California's h2o claims and contracts for an additional half-century. Construction began this summer in multiple counties on Dark-brown's $100 billion bullet train betwixt Los Angeles and San Francisco, a projection that is at the very least more a decade from its opening.

But the centerpiece of the governor'south final term is his crusade against climate change -- peradventure the issue with the longest time horizon of all. Last year, he helped convince legislators to extend the state's energy cap-and-merchandise program, designed to reduce fossil fuel consumption. At the start of this year, Brown signed an executive order calling for 5 million electrical vehicles on California's roads by 2030. As the legislative session ended in September, Dark-brown signed a bill that reaches even farther into the hereafter, calling for 100 per centum carbon-free electricity by 2045. "The standard statement about the politics of climatic change is that the future doesn't have a constituency, that information technology'southward hard for politicians to brand hard choices when those choices are going to take bad effects now and the benefits are in the future," says Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at the University of California, Davis. "It'due south unusual to have someone like Brown to think about the future."

Brown comes from a distinguished political family, just he is really sui generis equally a politician. No one else has combined training in a Jesuit seminary and a sojourn in Japan to report Zen Buddhism. Other governors accept had separate runs in part, but none have begun them 28 years apart, filling diverse lower-level political posts in the interval. When he was 36, Chocolate-brown was the youngest governor California had seen in more than a century. Now he is the oldest. (Insiders distinguish his long-separated runs in office by borrowing somewhat dated Silicon Valley terminology, referring to his time in office in the 1970s as "Jerry 1.0" and his current stint as "Jerry two.0.")

Jerry Chocolate-brown, left, with his father, former Gov. Pat Brown, in 1980. Jerry ultimately rejected much of what his father stood for. (AP)

Because he is unusual, Brown has always been caricatured. But he returned to the governorship in 2011 non just older, only too more grounded. Politicians in Sacramento can tell yous what books he's been reading lately, which may include histories of the Weimar Republic or the treatment of American Indians, simply they insist he is not some ephemeral, abstract thinker. He explores ideas non for their own sake merely for how they might be put into practise. He's had the discipline in his later terms to promote his big ideas in small batches, setting articulate priorities each twelvemonth. He's gotten better both equally an executive overseeing the government and every bit a policymaker able to win legislators over to his indicate of view. He may quote Latin in his spare time, but on the job he does his homework. "He'south this combination of a cigar-chomping politician and a philosopher king," says Leonor Ehling, director of the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State Academy.

Thad Kousser, who chairs the political science department at the University of California, San Diego, describes Brown's uniqueness a trivial differently: "I can't encounter anyone patterning themselves on his persona." Kousser describes that persona as "be grouchy and supercheap, quote obscure philosophers, avert social media and never make a public presentation without a doomsday-predicting graph."

Perhaps the virtually telling example of Brown'south forward-looking stewardship has been his handling of the land budget. Throughout his concluding 8 years in function, he's worked with a legislature thoroughly dominated by his young man Democrats. But he's never given them everything they wanted. He signaled his intention to deed as a restriction on the legislature right abroad, vetoing the kickoff budget it sent him in 2011 because it didn't include plenty spending cuts. Every bit the land'due south economy has boomed during his tenure, he has resisted his party's impulse to spend any was bachelor. "In the last four or five years, there were plenty of chances for him to spend, and he chose to save," says land Sen. Steve Glazer, who one time served as a political adviser to Brown. "This is the key to proficient executive leadership, thinking not only about what it volition toll this yr just the projection of the out-years going forwards."

While exercising restraint on the spending side, Brownish has helped increase the country'southward revenue intake. California has a highly progressive tax code that relies heavily on taxing income and majuscule gains earned in more affluent places like Palo Alto and Beverly Hills. But Brown showed no hesitation in asking voters in 2012 to further heighten taxes on those with personal incomes over $250,000 equally office of a package that also raised the sales revenue enhancement. In 2016, voters gave him a 12-year extension of the income tax increase.

All these factors together -- Brown's fiscal constraints, his willingness to raise taxes and the overall health of the state's economy -- have turned California'due south finances effectually. Earlier he took office, it was common to hear that California, which faced chronic budget shortfalls larger than nigh other states' budgets, was going to be the adjacent Hellenic republic. The land was unable to pay its bills, often resorting to IOUs. California led the nation in municipal bankruptcies. Kevin Starr, a historic California historian, wrote that it was on the verge of condign America's "kickoff failed country."

You don't hear that kind of talk anymore. Brown inherited a shortfall of $27 billion, merely he'south leaving with $18 billion stashed away in the land's rainy day fund. He paid downward much of the short-term debt his predecessors had taken on, every bit they dug their way temporarily out of holes while leaving bigger messes behind. At present, the country has its highest bail rating in two decades. At one point this year, it was sitting on $31 billion worth of voter-approved only unsold bonds.

Every American governor elected in the large Class of 2010 is leaving his or her land in meliorate financial shape in 2018, thank you to the long recovery that followed the last recession. Just none has accomplished as dramatic a turnaround equally Chocolate-brown, who is leaving plenty of money in the banking concern for his successor (near certainly Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom) to play with. "He held the line single-handedly," says country Sen. Bob Hertzberg. "He made a lot of tough choices. The credit goes to him 100 percent. Not 96 percentage, 100 percent."

With Republicans dominating Washington and a majority of states, California has been a beacon for progressives and a target of scorn from conservatives. The state is an incubator for liberal legislation on matters such as the minimum wage, paid sick go out requirements, automatic voter registration, clearing protections and LGBT rights. This autumn, Chocolate-brown signed a law that requires women on the boards of public companies. Opening an environmental summit he hosted in September, Chocolate-brown was asked how he idea President Trump would be remembered on the climate issue. "I remember he'll be remembered on the path he's on now -- liar, criminal, fool," Brown said. "Pick your choice."

Simply past virtue of his age, Brown is not among the many Democrats plotting a 2020 campaign against Trump. (He has run three times before, in 1976, 1980 and 1992.) Dark-brown has kept a low contour in Washington, makes relatively few national boob tube appearances and -- most of the time -- makes less noise about "resisting" the president than California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who sues the administration practically on a weekly ground.

If Brown does non cut every bit sharp a contour on the national stage as he did earlier in his career, he's certainly had an outsized impact on his own state, which is home to one out of every viii Americans. "Jerry 2.0 has been 1 of the virtually successful governorships in California history, and too far meliorate than Jerry ane.0," says Ethan Rarick, acquaintance managing director of the Plant of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of a biography of Pat Brown, Jerry's father. "Jerry ii.0, in my opinion, deserves to exist up there with his father and Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren equally amongst the almost consequential governorships in the state's history."

Much of Brown'due south final year has been defended to projects that will come up to fruition long after he's gone, including a $100 billion bullet train and a $15 billion h2o tunnels project. (California High-Speed Rail Authority)

During his early career, Dark-brown rose like a rocket. He won his kickoff ballot, for a seat on the Los Angeles Community College Lath of Trustees, in 1969. He used that position equally an unlikely launching pad to statewide election as secretarial assistant of state the following twelvemonth. In both jobs, he showed a knack for earning publicity. He used the issues of entrada finance and lobbying restrictions as a platform for his first successful run as governor. In the post-Watergate year of 1974, Dark-brown succeeded Ronald Reagan, who had unseated his father viii years earlier.

To win the Democratic nomination that year, Brownish defeated the state assembly speaker and a senior member of Congress. He clearly benefited from his father'southward name. (His formal proper name is Edmund Yard. Chocolate-brown Jr.) Just Jerry Brown rejected much of what Pat Brown stood for, sharing Reagan's sense that state government had grown besides large and unwieldy. "I almost lost because of you," Brown told his dad during an Oedipal election nighttime moment defenseless by stage microphones. "People remembered you lot as such a big spender."

Frugality has e'er been a Brown characteristic. He was Mr. Era of Limits in the 1970s, believing the country couldn't beget the blazon of spending that typified his father'southward tenure. State spending did go up past v per centum during Brown's first year in part, but that was a much slower pace than the 12 percent average growth seen under Reagan. He became known for his "small is beautiful" approach, cutting his own role budget and creating the nation's first free energy efficiency standards. The showier side of Dark-brown'southward divineness -- he ditched the state limousine in favor of a Plymouth and refused to move into the governor's mansion, sleeping instead on a mattress on the flooring of a $250-a-calendar month apartment -- helped earn him national attention. So did his relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt.

Just two years afterwards being elected equally governor, Chocolate-brown ran for president. He got into the race late, announcing his candidacy in March 1976, but he won 5 out of the half dozen primaries he entered, finishing 2d to Jimmy Carter in the overall Democratic primary vote. "If he came in a month before, he probably would take go president," Hertzberg says.

Back home, cheers to Chocolate-brown's refusal to sign off on many new initiatives, the state ran up a $iv billion surplus, worth well-nigh $14.v billion in today's dollars. That rankled voters chafing at belongings taxation bills that were rising fast, along with home values. They wanted to see some of that money returned to them in the form of tax cuts. But Brown, in one of his biggest career failures, was unable to shepherd a tax relief bill through the legislature. That led to the passage in June 1978 of the election measure known as Proposition 13, reducing taxes for homeowners by 57 pct and imposing a requirement for two-thirds votes in the legislature to approve future tax increases. Prop. 13 set off a tax revolt across the country and severely constricted country and local finances in California. "A lot of historians aspect the passage of Prop. xiii to his disability to come upwards with a reform bundle in time," says Olmsted, the UC Davis history professor. "It was an opportunity to pass property revenue enhancement reform that was not near as draconian, and he muffed information technology."

Brownish's disability to get a tax relief bill through the legislature led to the passage of Prop. 13, which cut property taxes and required 2-thirds legislative blessing for futurity revenue enhancement increases. (AP)

Running every bit a self-described "built-in-again taxation cutter," Chocolate-brown easily won reelection as governor in the fall of 1978. But, passing up a campaign for a tertiary consecutive term as governor, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1982 and lost. Having failed in all his attempts at federal office -- including a second-identify terminate to Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries -- Brown started over, reinventing himself as a local politico. Every bit mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007, he was an early on rider on the downtown revival bandwagon, seeking to lure 10,000 residents to a city eye that was so mostly derelict. (Equally mayor, Dark-brown himself was sleeping on the floor again, this fourth dimension on a futon.) He left the Oakland mayoralty to become state attorney general, and immediately began planning for his gubernatorial improvement in 2010.

Brown may never have been a quasi-hippie, as he was portrayed during his starting time stint as governor, but he conspicuously brought more subject field to the job upon his return in 2011. He'd learned both from his earlier terms in Sacramento and from the other jobs he held along the style. With his national ambitions curbed, he'south lost the interest he showed early in his career in trying to bulldoze headlines all the time. "By all accounts, dorsum so he was not a very skilful manager of the state executive branch," says UC Berkeley's Rarick. "The 2nd time, there'southward been a much more than focused, disciplined, ordered administrative role."

Rather than dating a rock star, Chocolate-brown is at present married to Anne Gust, a lawyer and business executive who has been widely credited with helping to proceed him focused and on schedule. She's an indispensable adviser, part of a "troika" formed along with the governor and Nancy McFadden, his chief of staff, who died in March. "Anne was only perfect in terms of the human relationship and her strategic skills," Sen. Hertzberg says. "Jerry Chocolate-brown is not really a gracious guy who picks up the phone and says thank you. That's what his chief of staff did, Nancy McFadden."

Dark-brown talks with Master of Staff Nancy McFadden, who died this year, on his way to announce a new upkeep in 2015. (AP)

Brown runs a lean staff and has been disciplined nigh his policy proposals. His State of the Country addresses are not run-on affairs. Instead, every year he has picked two or three major initiatives that he'due south wanted to meet happen. You'd be hard-pressed to come up up with a list of large proposals he wanted and didn't get. "In moments of celebration, people volition talk about the next thing," says Associates Speaker Anthony Rendon. "What I remember about those moments is how belligerent he could get. In his office talking about cap and trade, he'd lean over and say, 'Well, we're not going to do anything virtually fracking like you desire to.'"

Brown wants other politicians to know that celebratory moments don't last, and that information technology's necessary just to keep governing. He's also "fearful of nostalgia," as Rendon says, reluctant to talk nearly what he's already washed. Chocolate-brown has certainly spurned any talk this twelvemonth nigh his legacy. Having said that, he'll often tell legislators why they shouldn't practise something that was tried and failed during his 1.0 days, or that he wants to undo mistakes he made during his first governorship. Notably, he changed from being a public safe difficult-liner back and so to questioning mass incarceration of irenic criminals.

But there are some challenges Brownish hasn't taken on. He never expended his political capital to attempt to roll dorsum aspects of Prop. 13, which has led to decades of complaints about inadequate financing of the country'southward schools and infrastructure. Setting aside Brown's loftier-profile rail and water tunnel projects, the infrastructure problem volition grow markedly worse if voters corroborate a proposition this month rolling back a gas taxation hike that was enacted last year. And, despite the billions that Dark-brown has socked abroad in the state treasury, California remains highly sensitive to boom-and-bust economic cycles because of its progressive tax lawmaking. The revenue enhancement on top earners that he convinced voters to approve and extend has made that problem worse.

In that location's as well fence about what sort of overall shape the state itself is in as Brown prepares to leave office. California has plenty of strengths, aside from its enviable climate and natural beauty. Its tech and innovation economy remains the envy of the earth. If California were a nation, as is frequently pointed out, its economic system would be the fifth-largest in the world. The country is home to more billionaires than anywhere other than the rest of the U.Southward. and China. California's unemployment rate brutal to tape lows this year.

But lots of people are not sharing in the wealth. The state's housing prices go on to spiral out of control. A packet of 15 housing bills Brown signed last year has still to result in a single dwelling beingness congenital. In large function due to exorbitant housing costs, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, with one out of five residents living below the poverty line. If the 7.5 million poor Californians constituted their own country, it would exist the 13th-largest in the country. Calculation in the millions who alive in well-nigh-poverty, or those who receive Medicaid assistance, California'due south low-income residents would exist the 5th-largest state in the nation.

Brownish has been skeptical about expanding some traditional safe-net programs, but it would exist wrong to say he hasn't addressed income inequality. He helped enact the state's earned income tax credit and expanded information technology twice. Prodded by labor unions and community groups, Brown canonical a $xv per hour minimum wage. He inverse the state'due south education funding formula to give more help to districts with concentrations of low-income children. His last budget similarly increased funding for community colleges serving low-income students. Information technology too boosted funding for early childhood educational activity, with most of the new dollars defended to day intendance slots for poor kids.

Ane sign of Dark-brown'south pragmatism is his willingness to work with just about anyone who can assist him go a bargain done, whether information technology is organized labor on the minimum wage or the Chamber of Commerce on the gas tax hike. He's always subscribed to the "canoe theory" of politics, that yous chart a direct form by paddling a footling fleck left so a fiddling scrap right. "Others would exercise well to steal some of his tactics: run to the eye, make transparent cuts that don't cripple services or anger unions, use the credibility that buys you lot to sell a tax increment," says Kousser, the UC San Diego political scientist. "Be loud when y'all are in the zeitgeist of public opinion -- taking on Trump and climate alter -- and quiet when yous are not."

During his early on years in office, Brown sometimes had to bring along traditionalists in his ain party who were dismissive of his forward-looking ideas. Over the by few years, he'due south been the clear leader of a party that has grown more progressive than he is. "He'south gone from existence a immature renegade to being the senior person of a party that sometimes he has to rein in a bit," says Raphael Sonenshein, who directs the Pat Chocolate-brown Plant for Public Affairs at California Land University, Los Angeles.

Afterward Brownish finally leaves the political scene, the younger politicians who follow will benefit from his insistence on planning ahead. "While the economy is booming, he's constantly reminding yous that it's not ever going to boom," says Rendon, the Assembly Speaker. "When we're in the midst of the next economic crisis, when Jerry is out on his ranch, nosotros'll accept him to thank for the cuts not being as draconian every bit they've e'er been."

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Source: https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-california-governor-jerry-brown-legacy.html

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