Acceptance, change and wisdom
by digby
James Fallows has written the most fascinating political profile I’ve read in a long while — about none other than Governor Jerry Brown. I live in California but political journalism is so bad here that it’s very difficult to get a real sense of what’s going on in state government. This piece cleared up more questions about Brown’s overall approach than anything else I’ve read.
It would appear that he is one of political characters uniquely suited to the moment. But as Fallows notes, there may be some lessons about political skill, experience and talent that could be learned by all of us as we make decisions about who to represent us:
The truth is that a reliance on rules and a mistrust of mere politicians have come close to ruining public life in California. “When given a choice between human judgments and formulas, we’ve always chosen the formulas,” Joe Mathews says. He is critical of Brown in many ways, and yet he says, “I would rather let the Jerry Browns of the world make decisions for me than some crazy set of rules someone thought would help.”
California has once more led the way for the nation: through the past generation in showing the damage that disdain for politics can do, and in the past three years in its demonstration of the all-fronts embrace of politics needed to repair the damage. That California’s broken government is still functioning is largely because Jerry Brown has spent his life studying its machinery. In California, new governors are expected to propose detailed budgets within weeks of their election. Brown had the advantage of having already been through eight budget cycles. From his years as mayor, he knew the budget tricks that cities try to pull on the state, for instance the redevelopment-agency con. From the many campaigns he had won, and lost, he had learned the difference between fights that were tough but winnable, like the push to pass Proposition 30, and those that mean certain defeat, like challenging California’s direct-democracy system. With the perspective of 30 years, he has seen which of his early programs have proved to be farsighted and effective, notably his environmental and clean-energy initiatives; and which have gone nowhere, notably his fascination with colonizing space.
From his earliest days, the mother tongue Jerry Brown heard spoken around him was that of politics. California is an exceptional state, and his career in politics is not likely to be duplicated. But a country conditioned to dismiss the skills of deal making, persuasion, and sheer immersion in politics can learn a great deal from what he has achieved.
Maybe political experience matters after all.
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