Reagan? Wallace? No, Brown

Democratic Political Consultant Joe Cerrell was needling Donald Livingston, a member of former California Governor Ronald Reagan's cabinet. "Reagan must be ecstatic about his successor," joshed Cerrell. "No," Livingston retorted, "he thinks Jerry Brown has gone too far to the right."

If Democrat Brown, 37, bewildered people when he was running for Governor, he dumbfounds them now. Considered by opponents to be an unpredictable sort who would promote all kinds of costly innovations, Brown preaches frugality and the limits of government as much as the conservative Reagan ever did. In part, dwindling revenues in a recession year have forced him to hold down the budget. The same dilemma confronts many other governors (see box following page). But Brown takes pride in his restraint, as if he were doing people a favor that they scarcely realize. Too much government, he maintains, has been bad for them. "I think you've got to focus on individual accountability," says the onetime Jesuit seminarian. "You just can't get everything without pain and suffering or without having to pay a price. There is no such thing as a free ride anywhere."

No Mansions. Brown's spare approach is most apparent in his life-style in office. The conservative Reagan had operated in rather sumptuous fashion; he traveled in a Cessna jet or in limousines guarded by a squad of highway patrolmen. Brown put the limousines up for auction; he flies commercial and rides in a 1974 Plymouth with one plainclothesman. He vows never to move into the $1.3 million Governor's mansion that was started by his predecessor. Instead, he lives in a modest Sacramento apartment and pays the $250-a-month rent out of his own pocket. Gifts are invariably returned to the sender: a gold pass to Disneyland, a copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in Latin. Brown even rejected a volume commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Los Angeles Music Center, a gift from Buff Chandler, matriarch of the politically powerful family that publishes the Los Angeles Times. With that, his father, former Governor Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, complained, "Jerry goes too far. He could have at least sent a personal note."

Brown demands similar restraint by the state. After scrutinizing every agency's spending proposal--a feat performed by no other California Governor in memory--he offered a supertight budget of $11.3 billion for fiscal 1976.

This represented a 4.6% increase over the previous budget--scarcely enough to keep up with inflation and far less than the 12.2% average yearly boost in the Reagan administration. Tirelessly, Brown proselytizes for reduced spending, probing with Socratic questioning that leaves many listeners in a rage. He startled the University of California regents by dismissing their verbose academic plan as a "perfect example of the squid process: ink spread across the page in unintelligible wordlike patterns that tell me absolutely nothing." He suggested that University President-designate David Saxon take a cut in his scheduled $59,500-a-year salary. Asked Brown: "Why in the world are salaries higher for administrators when the basic mission is teaching?"

Declaring that the "liberalism of the '60s is dead," Brown emphasizes the failure of many great-expectations programs. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Jess Cook, Brown said: "The fact that there's a problem doesn't mean that more government will make it better. It might make it worse. The interventionism that we've seen in our society is analogous to Viet Nam. With our money, power and genius, we thought that we could make the people over there be like us. Then we did the same thing to our cities. When problems don't go away, we escalate the attack until someone gives up. I'm rethinking some of that escalatory social interventionism. Inaction may be the highest form of action."

As a gesture to keep state employees from acting more than they have to, he has even stopped the practice of giving them free attache cases (savings: $153,355 a year). Says Brown: "Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases."

To instill a new spirit in jaded government, Brown has made most of his appointments outside the political parties. Many of his appointees are associates from environmental or antiwar crusades. Prominent among them are blacks, Mexican Americans and women. Claire Dedrick, 44, secretary of resources, was a vice president of the Sierra Club. The secretary of health and welfare, Mario Obledo, 42, a former Harvard law instructor, was once on welfare.

Making Enemies. Pollster Mervin Field recently found that 86% of Californians expect that Brown will do either a good or at least a fair job in office. Brown is attempting to forge a new constituency that will cut across traditional liberal-conservative lines and gather support from both ends of the political spectrum. He aims to attract people who are discontented with the established institutions of business, labor and government, and who are moved by his calls for a return to individual initiative.

But Brown is rapidly making enemies among special interest groups and in the Democratic-controlled legislature. A top California Democratic organizer calls him "a cleaned-up George Wallace." In fact, Brown's anti-Establishment stance is not too far removed from Wallace's attacks on "pointy-headed" bureaucrats, though Brown is more cerebral and lacks the Alabaman's folk venom. The California Governor is not so much concerned with the "little man" as with Everyman. With a slight twist on Spiro Agnew's "rad-libs," Brown's supporters might be called "rad-cons."

For the moment, the talk of last fall that he might run for President has died down. Asked about his presidential ambitions, he replied: "Are you kidding? I think even the governorship is a pain in the ass." Politics is obviously not the Governor's overriding interest, and for that reason he may prove to be less than a skilled politician. Still in the seminary in many ways, he argues that "government isn't a religion. It shouldn't be treated as such. It's not God; it's humans, fallible people, feathering their nest most of the time."

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