By: Paul S. Marchand
Tomorrow, history will be made in Sacramento, as Jerry Brown is sworn in as the 39th governor of California, 36 years after being sworn in as California’s 34th governor. He will succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger, the only governor in California history to take office as a result of the recall of his predecessor, Gray Davis. No matter where one stands, such events are history-making.
Jerry Brown’s was the first governorship of which I was old enough to take cognizance. When Gov. Brown took office for the first time, in January, 1975, the world was a much different place. To some extent, we could take comfort in the reassuring certainty of the Cold War; knowing that we had one major adversary, the Soviet Union, with whom we shared the capacity for Mutually Assured Destruction.
Today, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union -- and the existential threat to the West it represented -- is gone, replaced by a series of failed state or nonstate actors. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War sometimes find ourselves nostalgic for its relative simplicity.
Jerry Brown’s first governorship was also simpler time insofar as the technology available to us did not include the Internet, smart phones, and all the various other devices which have made communication both increasingly rapid and increasingly vapid. When Jerry Brown first took office, most of us watched television in real time, sent documents by mail, shopped in brick-and-mortar establishments, used landline telephones, typed letters on honest to God typewriters, and got up to change the channel; in those days, if you had a remote, it was usually the youngest person in the room: “you, get up and change the channel.”
Most importantly however, when Jerry Brown took office the first time, California was still living in the golden afterglow of the postwar period of unprecedented growth, advancement, and prosperity. The governorships of Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, and Pat Brown had been some of the most forward-looking and dynamic in the state’s history. The momentum engendered on their watches helped carry California through the eight years of Ronald Reagan and into the early years of Jerry Brown’s first governorship.
The state the once and future governor will lead in the second decade of the 21st century is a less promising, less golden one than that which he led a generation ago. We have become, in many ways, prisoners on unsustainable paradox; Californians increasingly demand a comprehensive range of quality public services, but balk at paying for them; Californians profess to distrust and despise the public sector, while ignoring the reality that in a state which is home to one of the 10 largest economies in the world, a workable public sector is a critical concomitant to private prosperity.
The state our once and future governor will lead seems to be suffering from a kind of schizophrenia; if on the one hand Californians often suffer from a crisis of confidence about the future of the state and its ongoing governability, we also preserve a robust frontier faith that California is still a place where innovation happens, where progress is real, and where, if you wish upon a star, dreams still come true.
The challenge for our once and future governor will be one that every governor has recognized for the last 30 years, but which no governor, not even Jerry Brown, has successfully overcome. Simply put, Gov. Brown will need to be a combination of Moses, John the Baptist, St. Paul, and Hiram Johnson. He will stand challenged from day one to lead the state like Moses through one of the worst crises in its history; he will need to call us to repentance like John the Baptist from the unsustainable politics that has developed in the last generation; he will need to inspire us like St. Paul, and he will need to put in train comprehensive reforms of similar magnitude to those which Hiram Johnson brought about after his election to governorship in 1910.
There is a saying that “youth and skill will always be overcome by age and treachery.” Jerry Brown at 72 is twice the age he was when he first became governor. The days of “Gov. Moonbeam” are over. A public grown weary and fretful, a public made angry and fearful, will expect more from Jerry Brown then they probably would have from Meg Whitman. The Californian people will expect from Jerry Brown a combination of age and skill, not youth and treachery. We must not only take the once and future governor at his word when he says that, at 72, he has the wisdom and experience to do the job, and do it right, but also hold his feet to the fire to make sure he does just that.
We must insist that our once and future governor understand that California is in need in 2011 of reforms like those of 1911. We must not only confront the fiscal crisis that seems to be our constant companion, we must confront those aspects of our political system which pre-engineer our best efforts for failure. We must again look to either substantially revising the Constitution of 1879, or calling a new constitutional convention; the eighth largest economy in the world is simply too large to be run in the 21st century by a constitution written for a prairie farm state in the 19th.
We must insist that our once and future governor not repeat some of the mistakes of the past generation, and we must insist that he and we take a hard look at an initiative system in California that has become, far too often, a vehicle for all manner of special interests to advance pet causes through ballot box budgeting. No Californian should want to abolish the initiative system in its entirety, but every Californian should want an initiative system that does not cause the state to be buffeted to and fro on ever-changing winds of doctrine and ideology. The idea that civil rights should ever be the subject of an initiative should be the first target of reform of the initiative system; ballot box budgeting should be the second.
Like every democratic-republican society, California is an ongoing act of faith; no one seeks office at whatever level, whether that person be Jerry Brown or Meg Whitman, who does not have some degree of faith that California, our common home, is worth the effort not merely of governing, but of improving. Whether Jerry Brown can apply his prior experience as governor to help turn the ship of state back on course toward safe harbor is an open question; the larger question is whether all of us irrespective of our political affiliation, are willing, in our own well considered self-interest, to come forward and do our part as well.
For when all is said and done, California remains not merely our common home, but also one which we hold in trust for those who will come after us. All of us have too much invested in this quixotic, pragmatic, always-in-crisis, always-daring-to-dream, Golden State for any of us to wish it or us ill. No Californian in this hour should be heard to call down failure on California or upon her people on the basis of ideology or partisanship; now is the time for pragmatism.
Indeed, if his performance as mayor of Oakland and attorney general is any indication, the Jerry Brown of 2011 will be considerably more pragmatic than the Jerry Brown of 1975. Let us hope this is the case, and let us also insist that in this troubled time in our Californian history, the voices of pragmatism and common sense trump the siren songs of intransigent ideology.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, CA. He is a native of California, and remembers Gov. Brown’s first time as chief executive. The views expressed herein are his own.
