The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  He fought laws that he had created. A section of the Political Reform Act of 1974 blocked elected officials from taking action that might benefit any area within twenty-five hundred feet of property they owned. That meant Jerry could not support a downtown redevelopment project near his loft. He sued to obtain an exemption and won. “I think it’s a very salutary experience to make laws and unmake them,26 all in the same lifetime,” he said. “Because you see every law has unintended consequences.”

  Unlike the tiresome nuts and bolts of politics, the unfamiliar details of governing a city presented a captivating challenge. “I want to tell you why I’m so focused on potholes,”27 he told a group of Bay Area government officials. “They’re small, they’re physical, people don’t like them. And you can eliminate them in a short period of time. I am interested in down-to-earth stuff, like more policemen on the streets, fewer potholes to drive over.”

  Oakland Ecopolis gave way to the more politically acceptable phrase “elegant density.” He maneuvered to get the first floor of a brick office building next door to City Hall set aside for a café. He used connections to attract businesses to space that had been hard to fill: the Italian men’s clothing store where Jacques Barzaghi bought suits; a well-known San Francisco restaurateur. The opening of an Oakland Gap became a high-profile media event, attended by Jerry and Anne Gust, whose connections had facilitated the new store. “The suburbs are cheaper, cleaner, safer,28 and they have better schools. The city has to trump that, and it can do so with culture, accessibility, and a flow of human activity that is ultimately more satisfying and fulfilling,” Jerry said. “And I believe that having people live closer to where they work will begin to illustrate a different form of development.”

  His high profile bolstered the city’s morale, reassured investors, and helped expedite action. Gray Davis, Jerry’s former chief of staff, had just been elected governor. When city officials went to retail conventions, they no longer had to beg for meetings; people wanted their picture taken with the ex-governor who had slept on a futon, driven a Plymouth, and dated Linda Ronstadt. “They all want an autograph,”29 said city attorney John Russo.

  Maya Angelou and Angela Davis turned down Jerry’s offer to be library director, but Harry Edwards, a star sports sociologist at Cal, accepted the job of head of Parks and Recreation. Edwards was an expert on race and sports, a former Black Panther, and the college athlete who inspired the Black Power salute by two American sprinters at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. He wanted, Jerry said, “to shake things up30 and bring charismatic leadership to energize the young people of Oakland.”

  The mayor’s most successful and controversial accomplishment was the “10K plan,” to bring ten thousand people to downtown Oakland, a goal he pursued with unabashed support for developers. “Every single project31 that has surfaced in the first one hundred days has been opposed,” he said in his first State of the City address. “Many of these reasons are fine, but if we let them decide the day, we’re moving back to stagnation.” He had no patience for those worried about the impact on the people who could never afford the new apartments and might find their substandard housing razed if property values soared. He did not hesitate to take on his liberal critics. “There’s this kind of negative cheering section that says, anything that happens, ‘whoaaaa, that’s going to disrupt something. We’re going to be displaced.’ They get a name for it. They’ll call it gentrification.32 Or they’ll call it … something.” Some people began to call it Jerrification. They were unimpressed with his defense (“If gentrification means neighborhood improvement, well, what’s wrong with that?33 Please show me some neighborhood that doesn’t want to improve”), which sidestepped the question of where poor and working-class people would live.

  One of the keys to Jerry’s downtown plans was Phil Tagami, a young developer making his mark in the city where he had grown up. Jerry and Tagami had met a few years earlier through Matthew Fox, a defrocked Dominican priest who started his own divinity school.34 Tagami was an autodidact who had skipped college; he enrolled in classes at Fox’s University of Creation Spirituality. When Fox needed a new home for the school, Tagami found a building two blocks from the downtown BART station. The neighborhood was dicey, but the piano company and Meals on Wheels program downstairs paid their rent on time. Jerry helped raise the money for the school to buy the building. Fox had pioneered what he called the Techno Cosmic Mass, a religious rave designed to attract young people to the church. In 1996, the rave mass debuted in Jerry’s loft. When crowds outgrew the auditorium, Tagami found an abandoned Art Deco dance hall downtown. He helped them fix up the long-vacant Sweet’s Ballroom, once the most famous venue during the Big Band era, hosting jazz greats like Duke Ellington and welcoming black and Latino musicians.

  “Economic development is somebody who has some money and somebody who has an idea,” Jerry said. “They put them together and take some risk.”35 Tagami had ideas. Jerry had access to money. Both were willing to take risks. Tagami had started a construction company when he was twenty-two and learned to renovate old buildings. He developed contacts in city politics, working on campaigns for Mayor Elihu Harris, Jerry’s predecessor, and Councilman de la Fuente. In 1998, Tagami got his big break. City officials picked him over major national developers to renovate an elaborate Beaux Arts building across from City Hall, boarded up for more than a decade and dubbed by the San Francisco Chronicle “a beached whale.”

  With $12 million in city loans and private investment, Tagami turned the beached whale into the Rotunda, a stunning space that opened in 2000 as one of the city’s most desirable office complexes. Tagami had restored the building to its early grandeur, with gold-leaf-trimmed columns and wrought iron railings that encircled an open center courtyard, seven stories of offices under an elliptical glass dome more than 120 feet overhead.

  The Rotunda established Tagami as a major player, and by then he was an important ally of the new mayor. Jerry appointed Tagami to the Port Commission. “Jerry and I talk about Oakland every day,” Tagami said. “He pelts questions at me.36 It’s no-holds-barred. It could be parks, it could be union dues, it could be the port, it could be planning. It’s a dialogue.” Jerry’s style and intellectual curiosity had not changed. He solicited multiple opinions and wanted as much information as possible. Not knowing is not good, Jerry often said to the developer. If he asked Tagami a question, he’d take his answer to a dozen other people. If he concluded Tagami’s views had merit and were supported by data, he came back to talk some more.

  Lowering crime rates was essential to the 10K plan, to attract people and businesses. Jerry consulted former New York City police chief Bill Bratton and modeled a reporting system after the changes Bratton had pioneered. Every morning, a crime stat report broken down by fifty-seven beats was on the desk of the mayor, city manager, police chief, and City Council members and posted online for the public. Overall crime decreased, though homicides remained high.

  In probing the numbers, Jerry unraveled a problem that went far beyond Oakland. “They have this thing called the determinate sentence which I happened to have created twenty-five years ago,” he said at a conference sponsored by the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Santa Monica. As governor, Jerry had signed strict sentencing laws that took discretion away from judges and parole boards. “It was a big mistake.37 What you do is you just go to prison. You sit there with no rehabilitation. You’re just getting punished. And then they let you out. Ninety percent do get out. And then as soon as you get out, you have no skill, and you’re kind of irritated at everybody anyway. So you’re then violated, and back you go, about eighty percent. Then after you’re there for a little while, then you come back, and it’s just a pinball. So it’s a total scandal. It’s a failure.”

  For years, the recidivism rate in California had been so high that it skewed the national average. Each year, California prisons released about seventy thousand inmates. Within three years, about 60 percent would be back in
prison, the majority for violating conditions of their parole. Decades of get-tough policies, antigang sanctions, rigid sentences, and the Three Strikes law had overcrowded prisons, where inmates absorbed more about how to be part of a criminal enterprise than how to avoid it.

  The overwhelming majority of the homicide victims in Oakland were young black men, many of them among the one in fourteen adult men in the city who were on parole or probation. “It’s a treadmill. It’s a merry-go-round. It’s a scandal,”38 Jerry told a state commission, calling prisons “postgraduate schools of crime.” He instituted a protocol under which teams of Oakland police and parole agents met with every parolee as he was released and offered job training, substance abuse counseling, and a support network for reentering the community. The concept was not universally embraced by the police. “There is tension,”39 Jerry said, “and I would say this is a different kind of culture that has to be slowly introduced into the police force.”

  Even as he focused on potholes and crime statistics, Jerry still yearned to create the intellectual community he had sought in different guises since his seminary days. The opening page of the mayor’s website quoted the “Charter of Calcutta,” adopted in 1990 at a conference in the Indian city, which proclaimed “The city can save the world!” The Arts section of the website quoted a letter John Adams sent his wife about ensuring that their sons studied poetry, painting, and music. We the People offered public yoga and tai chi classes. Jerry raised money for a project he called “research by people,” which would bring scholars in residence to focus on “reclaiming the ethical basis for civic action.” Oakland, and the loft, were the perfect setting for “deep intellectual exchange40 and civic engagement—all in a context of hospitality and friendship.”

  The result was the Oakland Table, two six-week sessions in 2000 and 2001 that Jerry described as a more open version of the Berkeley Faculty Club—“a group of people sitting around a table, reading books, talking about ideas, in friendship pursuing truth.”41 The first Oakland Table focused on the city as place, with a 450-page binder of readings available at the public libraries; the second was on the history of hospitality. “Why am I doing this?” Jerry said. “The primary reason I’m doing this is because I find it interesting.”42

  The Oakland Table featured the philosopher, historian, and social critic Ivan Illich, who had been a significant influence on Jerry Brown since the two met in 1976 at the Green Gulch Zen retreat in Marin County. Illich was a radical ex-priest living in Mexico, a scholar and writer best known for his work Deschooling Society, a critique of modern education. In the summer of 1983, six months out of the governor’s office, Jerry and the director of his nonprofit institute, Nathan Gardels, had lived at Illich’s compound in the small village of Ocotopec, outside Cuernavaca. For six weeks, they studied Spanish and spent time with Illich, whose work focused on the nature of technology and modern institutions and the ways in which they were destroying common sense.

  “When I try to understand Ivan Illich, I am forced back upon my experience in the Jesuit Novitiate in the 1950s,” Jerry wrote in a eulogy43 in 2002.

  There, I was taught Ignatian indifference to secular values of long life, fame and riches. It is only through that mystical lens that I can grasp the powerful simplicity of the way Illich lived. Ivan Illich was the rarest of human beings: erudite, yet possessed of aliveness and sensitivity. He savored the ordinary pleasures of life even as he cheerfully embraced its inevitable suffering. Steeped in an authentic Catholic tradition, he observed with detachment and as a pilgrim the unforgiving allure of science and progress. With acute clarity and a sense of humor, he undermined, in all that he wrote, the uncontested certitudes of modern society.

  Illich’s work influenced Jerry’s deep skepticism about the educational establishment and his views about schools, perhaps the most failed institutions in Oakland. Across California, the public school system that had once drawn families to the Golden State had never regained its strength after Prop 13. In Oakland, the failure and dropout rates were among the worst in the state. Jerry pushed through a charter change that added three mayoral appointees to the seven-member elected Oakland school board. But he grew frustrated when the board passed over his preferred candidate for superintendent. The state took over the financially troubled district. Jerry turned his attention to founding two charter schools that would eventually include grades six through twelve, a military institute and an arts academy.

  He modeled the Oakland Military Institute as a secular version of St. Ignatius, with strict discipline, structure, and academic requirements. He asked the local bishop to recommend his best principal and hired her as a consultant. In addition to the expected opposition to charter schools from labor unions and local school administrators who would lose state aid, OMI was denounced by some of the mayor’s liberal supporters who objected to the military emphasis, personnel, and funding. Turned down by the local and county school boards, OMI was approved only after the intervention of Governor Davis, the first charter to be approved by the State Board of Education. Jerry immersed himself in the details, from the school flag to the funding, $2 million from the U.S. Defense Department and $1.3 million from the California National Guard. He chose as its motto the Jesuit saying he had learned at the novitiate—Age quod agis. Do what you are doing. The first class of 166 seventh graders entered in August 2001, spending ten-hour days on a campus of portable trailers named for traits they were to master, Fort Justice and Fort Cooperation. Eighty percent of the students were black, most came from poor families, and all were way behind in school. The mission was to produce graduates who would go on to four-year colleges.

  “I think public schools are not instilling the kind of strong character that we need and I don’t think there’s the discipline nor do I think there’s the inspiration to learn,”44 Jerry said. Criticized for walking away from the public schools, he argued that the charters would pressure the whole district to improve. Successful charter schools would “make the superintendent and board come together and work through the incredible byzantine set of rules and regulations and relationships that have made it dysfunctional for over two decades.”

  For someone who hated rules and being told what to do, a military academy might seem an odd choice. Jerry’s explanation shed light on his passion for the school and his own upbringing. He compared the military academy to the seminary he had attended: “I had the experience of being in a framework where right was right,45 wrong was wrong, the people in charge are in charge, and you do what they tell you. Very structured. And if you have somewhat of a chaotic mind, structure is actually kind of pleasant. You can fight against it. But it’s very comforting to know there’s all sorts of boundaries that you can push against, but they’re still there. And I think some of these kids in very chaotic neighborhoods, they need real structure. So that was the idea of the military school.”

  OMI was followed a year later by the Oakland School for the Arts, opened with far less controversy. “I don’t think a mayor in California has ever done that,” Jerry said about his two charter schools. “I consider that a major achievement. I think it will probably be my most lasting achievement.”46 He often stopped by classrooms unannounced and grilled the students on what they were learning. He handed out diplomas at graduation. Before he left office, he would sell the Harrison Street property and use the proceeds to donate more than half a million dollars47 to each school.

  Jerry was easily reelected to a second term, and by his inauguration in January 2003, attention had shifted to the state’s collapsing economy. Oakland, facing the loss of millions of dollars in state aid, planned to cut police overtime and close libraries and recreation centers. But the city’s turmoil paled in comparison with the impending upheaval in the state’s political landscape.

  In Sacramento, Jerry’s former chief of staff, Gray Davis, was in trouble. During Davis’s first term, the dot-com boom had swelled state revenues, and the governor and legislators spent freely. They restored money
that had been cut from budgets during the past sixteen years under Republican governors. Prop 13 and the state’s progressive tax structure made California’s budget heavily dependent on the income of the top 1 percent of earners and subject to big, sudden, volatile swings in capital gains. When the recession hit California in 2000 and the dot-com boom collapsed, revenues that had poured in a few years earlier dried up just as fast. By then, the state had committed billions of dollars to ongoing programs. The budget deficit grew to $38 billion. At the same time, California faced an energy crisis that drove a utility into bankruptcy, caused rolling blackouts, and all but paralyzed a state that depended on massive amounts of energy to power lights and move water. Eventually, investigators would unravel what became known as the Enron scandal, energy companies’ blatant and illegal manipulation of the complicated, flawed energy grid California had adopted under Pete Wilson. But that would come too late to salvage Gray Davis’s career or his reputation as a weak, indecisive leader.

  Jerry Brown designed the logo for the charter school he founded, using the Jesuit motto he learned in the seminary: Do what you are doing.

  In July 2003, the state’s bond rating dropped to near junk status, the lowest in the nation. To plug the budget hole, Davis tripled the vehicle licensing fee, an unpopular move in a state with 28 million cars and trucks. Popular AM talk radio hosts fired up voters to boot Davis out of office just months into his second term. Congressman Darrell Issa funded a petition-signing drive: “Mad about the car tax? Sign here to recall Gov. Gray Davis.”

  The recall was the third piece of the changes ushered in by Hiram Johnson and the Progressives in 1911 to provide direct democracy, along with the initiative and referendum. Only three petitions to recall state officials had reached the ballot since then, all aimed at state senators. Unlike most of the eighteen states with similar provisions, California required no specific grounds for a gubernatorial recall, just a petition signed by 12 percent of the people who had voted in the last statewide election, the lowest threshold of any state. On the same ballot, voters would decide whether to recall the governor and choose among candidates who would take office if the recall passed. Anyone could run for governor; all it took was ten thousand signatures, or sixty-five signatures and a $3,500 fee. Once the Recall Davis petition qualified, dozens of people jumped into the free-for-all. One hundred thirty-five names appeared on the October 2003 ballot, including Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, commentator Arianna Huffington, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, and Angelyne, a billboard diva who cruised Los Angeles in a pink Corvette. Only one hopeful, however, announced his candidacy on the Tonight Show.