The New, New Jerry Brown: Thinking Big

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By Peter Schrag

Jerry Brown, justly famous through a long public career for reinventing himself, last week re-emerged as that – for him -- most improbable of figures, Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, his gung-ho father.

Through most of his two prior terms as governor (1975-83), Brown II was a tempting analysand for amateur Freudians, who sometimes portrayed him as a young man in the throes of Oedipal rejection doing his best not to follow in his father’s gubernatorial footsteps.

Thirty years ago, Brown II was the man bending overboard to eschew big projects; this, he told us then, was the era of limits, the time for thinking small. His Secretary of Transportation famously spurned big highway projects; her boss in the Capitol took big whacks at the University of California, whose growth was one of his father’s proudest achievements.

Brown opposed Proposition 13 in 1978, but after it passed he became so comfortable with it that Howard Jarvis, its prime author, endorsed him for re-election that fall. Some people called him Jerry Jarvis.

But in his state of the state speech last Wednesday, there was Jerry Brown, the man once widely referred to as “Junior”, listing all manner of big public projects – the interstate highway system, BART in the Bay Area, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, California’s Central Valley Water Project, as arguments for thinking big.

For Brown II, the most immediate cause was California’s increasingly controversial (and pricey) high-speed rail project, now estimated to cost at least $100 billion. Brown enthusiastically endorsed it against all the small-thinkers who said we couldn’t afford it, that it would fail, etc. That’s what they once said, he said, about all those projects.

There were other big items on his list as well. One was a major overhaul of California’s school financing, governance and student testing systems. Another was what Brown called the “enormous” (and enormously complex) Bay Delta Water Project, which he implied would ship more water south and protect agriculture and the environment at the same time. It’s something that, as he said, both he and his father worked on (at different times) – Pat successfully, Jerry not.

But the biggest element in Jerry’s channeling of Pat wasn’t the programs but the cheerleading. Contrary to those he called “declinists”

“California is still the land of dreams—as well as the Dream Act. It’s the place where Apple, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, QUALCOMM, Twitter, Facebook and countless other creative companies all began.

“It’s home to more Nobel Laureates and venture capital investment than any other state. In 2010, California received 48% of U.S. venture capital investments. In the first three months of last year it rose even higher—to 52%. That is more than four times greater that the next recipient, Massachusetts. As for new patents, California inventors were awarded almost four times as many as inventors from the next state, New York…

“California also leads the nation in cleaning up the air, encouraging electric vehicles and reducing pollution and greenhouse gases. Our vehicle emissions standards—which have always set the pace—now have been adopted by the federal government for the rest of the country.”

Because of its environmental policies, Brown said, “California is attracting billions of dollars in clean tech venture capital investments. In 2011, almost 40% of such investments were made in California, making our state not only the leader in the nation but in the world. “

Yes, a lot was left out: The state’s looming unfunded pension obligations and the almost equally heavy unfunded health care commitments made by local school districts to their retirees got only passing or no attention.

There was no mention of the fact that to reduce the state’s deficit over the past decade, both school funding and funding for crucial social programs have been cut and cut again – cut beyond anything that’s economically or morally tolerable. There was no indication that even with Brown’s proposed tax increases, hardly a sure thing, there is no hope of restoring most of that funding.

In the days when Pat Brown was building – water systems, university campuses, freeways, schools, parks – there was still a powerful sense of common purpose, much of it left from World War II. Voters sometimes needed to be recalled to it, but it didn’t need to be created, as it does now. That makes it hard for any latter-day governor to be Pat Brown.

It’s useful to remind Californians, especially those sitting in Sacramento, that the state has great resources and vitality, that our tax burden is not greater than it was under Ronald Reagan – that Reagan in 1967 signed the largest tax increase in the state’s history – and that our most creative people are not leaving the state in droves.

But merely reminding ourselves that the dire assessments of those Jerry Brown calls “declinists” are premature or even wildly off the mark may not help in creating the public engagement  -- and the funding -- that our overstressed schools, universities, transportation systems and social services so urgently need.

It will not make clear where the real obstruction to the state’s great possibilities comes from, obstruction of a kind that didn’t exist or could be outvoted during the heyday of Pat Brown and his Republican predecessor Goody Knight.  There are no such Republicans any more. Much as he may now like to, Jerry Brown can’t go just home again; probably no governor can.

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Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Monday in the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His newest book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration is now on sale.