Jerry Brown's Puzzling 'Process'

...Why should the government subsidize one of the most wealthy segments of the society...

...Although Brown's self-labeled "no nonsense" budget made note of an expected 8.7 per cent increase in state revenues, the governor said his wariness over the uncertain economy forced him to hold down expenditures...

...The "process," which is as close to an ideology as Brown comes, is itself a mixture of populism and elitism...

...By the time the next budget reaches the governor's desk for review, the state should have a good idea what Brown means by a "vigorous" challenge...

...While the reforms that Brown will demand are still unspecified, he has outlined the areas he thinks are ready for change...

...Jerry Brown ran an aggressive campaign to be California's thirty-fourth governor...

...When he defeated the former state controller whom he had accused of offering nothing more than "recycled Reaganism," California liberals were ready for a long honeymoon...

...But he is also covering himself in advance and preparing a rationale for what might turn out to be a failure...

...To Brown, political honesty is more than just campaign finance disclosure and conflict of interest laws...

...It was not until after the 1966 election that Jerry Brown showed strong indications that he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps...

...Last spring Northern California anesthesiologists went on strike, refusing to attend to anything but emergency surgery, to protest an increase of 300 per cent or more in their malpractice insurance premiums...

...But Brown, anxious to become governor, found responsibilities and ways to attract public notice that were, until then, unknown...

...And it is equally clear that the elitist arrogance and rebuff to traditional liberal dogma inherent in the "process" have turned off many of the state's liberals who did support Brown's candidacy...

...The best thing about Jerry Brown is that he doesn't fit into any neat box," said Allard K. Lowenstein, the former New York Congressman who worked for Brown last summer...

...to midnight...

...Brown has not put any limits on this skepticism, cynicism, scrutiny, and contempt...

...the secretary of state was the keeper of public records and little else...

...But beyond its appeal to the public there are more serious questions to be raised about Brown's "process...

...Now Quinn is running the Air Resources Board for the man he helped elect governor...

...He has turned down some, but not all, invitations from television stations to appear as the featured guest...

...It is clear Brown expects Quinn to be as good at this job as he was at his last...

...It is clear, however, that the populist overtones of the "process" have a wide appeal to voters—even those who voted against Brown...

...In his first year, Brown has already given the bureaucrats, the so-called experts, the special interests, and the electorate an indication that he will demand results and reforms in exchange for state support...

...One of the governor's major complaints is that the frills of the classroom have been substituted for a strong emphasis on what he calls the "survival skills" of reading, writing, arithmetic, and analysis...

...What makes Brown appealing to people of widespread ideologies is simply that he has no ideology of his own...

...The post had been a sinecure of general obscurity...

...But Brown seems sincere in his protestations that he is not interested in the Presidency or any other national office now...

...During his last year as secretary of state, Brown, along with representatives of Common Cause and People's Lobby, a California citizens' action group, wrote a successful ballot initiative that enacted the nation's toughest law regulating campaign disclosure, conflict of interest for both elected and appointed officials, and lobbyists' activities...

...If you look at the reading scores, look at the achievement scores, talk to kids, talk to teachers, there is something wrong in the classroom...

...And when Brown says he may spend his term asking questions which haven't been asked before and waiting for the right time to push for answers, he is being honest to his political instincts...

...Brown does not want Quinn to think that his job is finished because the Air Resources Board recently laid down the nation's toughest emission control standards for automobiles...

...Whether Brown's "process" will be any more successful in handling these problems than the traditional responses it is supposed to replace and whether it will result in any new solutions is not at all certain...

...But the compromise measure was not without its costs to those who most desperately wanted it...

...So, when Brown publicly says that he has "a high degree of tolerance for ambiguity," he is honestly revealing his conviction that there are no perfect solutions...

...At the least, they looked for the second coming of his father's open-handed approach to spending for schools, the university system, and social problems...

...And he has already shown that he is not interested in whether the results and reforms are labeled liberal or conservative so long as they do what they are supposed to do: solve the particular problem at hand...

...What's more, the question tells much about how this thirty-seven-year-old governor, a Democrat who is already regarded as a politician with a national future, is attacking his job...

...These programs, he says, not only fall short of their goals but they inflate the public's expectations of government to the point that confidence in government is shattered when the programs fail to work...

...After what they regarded as eight stifling years of unsuccessful battling against Reagan's tightfisted "cut, squeeze, and trim" philosophy of government, the liberals expected a purging of Reagan's last vestiges...

...The legislature passed a law affording temporary relief and began deliberations on more sweeping reforms...

...asks Brown's health and welfare aide, Robert Gnaizda...

...So far, statewide polls show, Brown's work habits, spartan lifestyle, and challenging of the bureaucracy have made him more popular with the electorate than either his father or Reagan were at their peaks...

...What this means is that Brown will routinely ask government programs— all of them—to justify their existences each year at budget writing time by producing evidence that the money they spent last year did some amount of good for the taxpayers...

...As Brown ends the first year of his four-year term, his contribution to California politics increasingly appears to be an intellectual and political honesty which, while popular for its freshness, has had no particular effect on the problems of mid-1970 America...

...He knows what problems he wants solved, but he has offered no solutions...

...One of Reagan's last acts as governor was to veto a bill giving local school districts more state money, largely so they could increase teachers' pay...

...If Brown succeeds in California, he will almost certainly join the scramble for higher office.' Within«a week after taking office, Brown produced a "budget for difficult times," a budget he personally wrote to reflect the recession's impact on state revenues and the hard look he was taking at state expenditures...

...Unlike Reagan, who scrutinized budgets and demanded fiscal responsibility from the university, welfare programs, and other liberal bastions, Brown is not limiting his demands for political honesty to programs on either side of the conservative-liberal line...

...Although Brown agreed to give the schools more money in 1975, he put the school districts and teachers on notice that reforms will be extracted in exchange for dollars in the future...

...ing traditional knee-jerk government reactions to problems...

...In a year of double-digit inflation, Brown's budget proposed spending only about 6 per cent more than the year before—a percentage increase lower than any that had been proposed by Reagan...

...In the meantime, he will keep badgering Tom Quinn about smog in Los Angeles...

...When he left the seminary he enrolled at the University of California's Berkeley campus, where he studied Greek and Latin...

...It started soon after 1966, the year his father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, a liberal Democrat in the traditional mold, was overwhelmingly defeated for re-election as governor by Republican Ronald Reagan...

...Called "The Process" by administration insiders, this system is based on a skepticism of what government has done, a cynicism for what government can do, a scrutiny of what government is doing, and a contempt for what so-called experts say government should do...

...In fact, this honesty, albeit refreshing, contains a certain quality of gimmickry which allows for a lack of results...

...Brown said he was prepared to "challenge vigorously all programs which do not show results or indicate only marginal performance" or "ignore better alternatives...

...Brown labeled applications processed by state bureaucrats for Federal crime-fighting funds "mishmash, confusion, and utter gibberish" and proceeded to cut the state's participation in the program...

...He is just as tough on public schools and the state judicial system as he is on programs to curb welfare chiseling or reduce crime...

...received his early political education by watching his father, his political style reflects little of Brown Sr.'s robust gregariousness and openness...

...In the meantime, the administration has been working on a plan offering to underwrite a physician's malpractice insurance in exchange for his agreement to offer free medical services to the needy—a proposal linking the malpractice issue with the maldistribution of medical services in ghetto areas and the high costs the state is now paying to provide health care for welfare recipients...

...In 1974 Quinn was running Jerry Brown's campaign to be governor of California...

...His immersion in his work, however, has fueled speculation that it is just his unorthodox way of attracting attention, a carefully designed ruse to put him in the national limelight...

...What distinguishes Edmund G. Brown Jr...

...Jerry Brown hasn't succumbed and probably never will...

...Johnny can't learn to read, Brown once noted, but his mother is learning macrame...

...Brown has been shaking up others with his calls for sacrifice, his demands for honesty, his penchant for detail, and his unorthodox style...

...It hardly upset many liberals when Brown invoked the new spirit to shun the million-dollar governor's mansion Reagan built for a $250-a-month apartment, or when he traded in the governor's limousine for a 1974 Plymouth, or even when he cut the salaries of his aides and eliminated pay raises for top state officials...

...Later he earned a law degree from Yale University and joined a Los Angeles law firm...

...He is especially disdainful of adult education programs and recreational night school classes which consume state funds he says might otherwise go to elementary and secondary schools...

...But he is also side-stepping the hard job of picking an imperfect solution and living with its consequences...

...California's governor tries an unusual mix of populism and elitism Jerry Brown's Puzzling 'Process' CARLA LAZZARESCHI Tom Quinn leaned across his conference table, lit up another in a chain of cigarettes, and talked about California's seemingly unsolvable smog problem...

...Beans and rice have gone up in price more than malpractice insurance, and we haven't suggested a subsidy for beans and rice...

...So far there has been nothing new in Brown's education program, only the threat that if something is not done soon there will be little or no new money for the schools...

...So in place of the usual reform package of a newly-elected governor, Brown has offered only a method of inquiry to determine what the necessary solutions should be...

...Brown is asking questions, poking holes in conventional wisdom—both liberal and conservative—and debunkCarla Lazzareschi is a free-lance writer based in Sacramento...

...Perhaps the most important is whether or not it will be his sole contribution to California's governance...

...He usually works from 9 a.m...

...he will be a full-time candidate and we will all know it...

...After another meeting he said the regents "should raise their energy level" and work harder...

...from the vast majority of elected officials who want results, what makes him the object of no small amount of national speculation, and what, in fact, makes him more interesting than most of his predecessors and political contemporaries is how he is going about getting results...

...Immediately after Brown was inaugurated, the teachers who in 1974 had poured close to half a million dollars into election campaign coffers (including Brown's) began pushing again for increased state aid...

...They thought they knew what Brown meant when he talked about political honesty and a new political spirit...

...Instead, some of the more bitterly disenchanted say, they got "son of cut, squeeze, and trim...

...Two of the most telling examples of this are the administration's positions on increased aid for the public schools and the malpractice insurance squeeze facing California doctors...

...Its elitism comes from its "Best and Brightest" approach: that good men of good will, who have only questions and no answers, can run a government...

...Some of the records that were filed with the secretary of state were campaign statements, and even before Watergate jumped into the nation's political conscience, Brown was promoting full campaign disclosure and talking about political honesty...

...If people want their problems solved, they have to be ready to sacrifice...

...If Brown's stance on education has provoked some liberals, his administration has hardly endeared itself to conservatives by its proposed solution to the doctors' malpractice insurance problem...

...Good government," he said in his budget message, "does not always require more spending...

...But the political pressure was not to do this and the politician succumbed to it...

...But when Southern California physicians are forced to renew their premiums this winter at equally high rates, administration officials say no existing law or legislative proposal will be sufficient to calm the expected outcry...

...But Brown, claiming that the school year would be almost over by the time any funds could be appropriated and that no one would suffer unduly without more money, opposed the teachers' efforts...

...After his freshman year of college, he entered a Jesuit seminary and spent four year studying for the priesthood...

...In a letter sent in July to all department heads, Brown outlined how next year's budget would "reflect in dollars and cents" the philosophy of his administration...

...In fact, he views ideology as an unnecessary encumbrance...

...Its populism stems from its skepticism of government and contempt for experts...

...He is questioning everything from such liberal doctrine as state support for public schools and criminal rehabilitation programs to such usual liberal targets as business tax loopholes...

...He is proud that his office worked until nearly midnight last New Year's Eve and that on Saturday nights he can find a half dozen aides in their offices...

...He showed up unannounced at a meeting of university regents and blasted their staff for writing a growth plan using the "squid process," which he defined as spewing ink across a page in unintelligible academic double talk...

...While the governor's style is unorthodox, it is far from flamboyant...

...Quite obviously he does not yet know, however, what solutions he will offer: He does not want to fall into the trap of promising, as did his liberal predecessors of the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society, that America's ills can be cured by massive bureaucracies spending massive amounts of money...

...It is a rather tautological approach, a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition...

...He has even raised questions about the usefulness of dumping fluoride into public drinking water to prevent tooth decay and rebuilding elementary schools to protect children from earthquakes...

...When Lowenstein, the man who helped unmake former President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, came to California, some people thought he had come to make Jerry Brown President...

...Sometimes the governor calls up," Quinn said, "and says, 'Quinn, I flew into Los Angeles yesterday and there's still smog...

...So far he has spent virtually all his time in his office, rarely leaving the capital city...

...But Brown has provoked more than just a few of those who counted the days until Reagan's retirement with his demands that the university, schools, courts, and law enforcement programs start being honest with the public by doing the job they were designed to do or facing the consequences of his spirited scrutiny...

...In 1969, Brown Jr., running entirely and unabashedly on the strength of his father's name, made his first try for political office and won a seat on the governing board of a Los Angeles junior college district...

...And when the teachers started pushing for more money for the next school year, Brown first opposed them and then agreed to a compromise appropriation of about half of what the teachers wanted...

...This spartan approach, reminiscent of Brown's own private school education, is no small surprise to liberals who saw Brown as a potential supporter of innovative education...

...He visited the state health department, one of the offices he routinely calls "pretzel palaces," and started leafing through the director's mail...

...Brown also complains that state bureaucrats exercise control over school curriculum that rightfully belongs to parents and teachers in each community...

...It's a problem for those in government and those in a position of responsibility to make the changes...

...To some Californians, however, this particular call for sacrifice smacks of socialized medicine...

...I'm going to be very reluctant to approve spending which does not require basic fundamental structural reforms wherever possible," he told a press conference, "because just pumping more money into the machine is not going to turn around the very difficult situation that we face in the schools...

...He eliminated the state's tradition of giving away briefcases to its employes to curb "the paperwork blizzard...

...It could easily mean that Brown is introducing a performance contract philosophy to the process of state budgeting...

...He refused to attend the National Governor's Conference in New Orleans a few months ago...

...He doesn't fit any of the traditional orthodoxies, but that's all right because these orthodoxies aren't working anymore...

...In the past the problem has always been that to be intellectually honest you had to admit that you had no answers...

...is all business...

...Brown wants to see the results...

...The following year, he used his father's name to win election as California's secretary of state...

...Although Brown Jr...

...When and if he is ready, he will not be a coy candidate...

...What are you doing about it?' " The question, Quinn said, is not a facetious one...

...Brown and his "process" come at a time when California is suffering from an unemployment rate higher than the national average, a decline in real income and a corresponding decline in the purchasing power of the state's tax dollars, an uncertainty over how to reconcile the need to preserve the environment and still build the power plants and pump the oil that powers the economy, and a realization that government —even if it is free of scandal—may not be able to solve all our problems...

...His detractors, who became more vocal when Brown fired, and then engaged in a public war of words in August with his first employment director, claim Brown's constant invocation of the process allows him to sidestep tough issues while he and his aides engage in intellectual, but nonetheless largely unproductive, verbal sparring...

...What Brown has to offer is intellectual honesty and real leadership...

...And the "new spirit" to which he referred does not provide for free-handed spending...

...The personal habits of this bachelor are as conservative as his pinstripe suits, and he is not openly seeking all the national attention he is receiving...

...He listened to complaints that his slow pace in appointing new judges to nearly seventy-five vacancies was creating courtroom jams and then wondered why judges could not work more than an average of six-and-one-half hours a day...

...In their protest during the month-long strike, they lobbied the legislature and the governor to intervene in their behalf...

...But if Brown succeeds in California, he will almost certainly join the scramble for higher office...

...A slightly built, intense, and reserved man, Brown Jr...

...He has said being governor of California is enough of a "pain in the ass" and he does not have time to campaign...

...Brown used his identification with the political honesty issue in the year of the Watergate backlash and the promise of bringing a "New Spirit" to state politics to propel himself into the governor's chair Ronald Reagan had occupied for eight years...

...Later, he disgustedly told reporters that he had learned that the state had a "Pet Bird Advisory Committee...