Campaign Gaffes Highlight 2 Jerry Browns
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SAN FRANCISCO -- On Wednesday night, at a party held for young San Francisco Democrats, Jerry Brown took the microphone and gave the kind of stirring, if somewhat eccentric, speech that has defined his 40 years in politics.
"California is not only a state of place, it's a state of imagination," Mr. Brown said. "This is the place of Hollywood movies, it's the place of rocket ships, it's the place of wind machines. It's the place of all sorts of ideas," Mr. Brown riffed, quickly building in a crescendo, saying that California politics were "screwed up" and broken.
"But if we can summon up the spontaneity and the creativity in California," he said, "we can transform what is a breakdown into a breakthrough. And that's why I'm running for governor."
The crowd roared in approval. But just a day later, it was a different kind of episode that would raise questions about Mr. Brown's campaign, after The Los Angeles Times posted a muddy audio recording on Thursday night in which a campaign aide is heard calling his Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, a "whore."
The Brown campaign apologized soon after, and the political fallout from the comment -- which Ms. Whitman's camp called "an appalling and unforgivable smear" -- is uncertain. It is not clear whether Mr. Brown even heard the remark, or acknowledged it, but the episode is serving as a reminder for Democrats of the sometimes vexing dichotomy of Mr. Brown's long career: a politician prone to both dreamy idealism and cold pragmatism, capable of being both poetic and profane in the same sentence and often surrounded with starry-eyed do-gooders and the occasional fringe character.
"He is most definitely not the blow-dry-haired, antiseptic, focus-group-tested candidate that most are used to in this day and age in politics," said Christopher Lehane, a Democratic consultant. "And that cuts both ways."
A serious student and literal son of California government -- his father, Edmund G. Brown Sr., was governor from 1959 to 1967 -- Jerry Brown, now 72, has worked to throw off a past image as the bad boy who dated Linda Ronstadt and earned the sobriquet "Governor Moonbeam" (for his unorthodox political outlook) during his own two terms as governor, from 1975 to 1983.
First Published October 9, 2010 2:01 am
