Running mate

Oakland — For Jerry Brown, times are changing.

His wedding is just around the corner. The thought of it brings out a young man’s grin on the old bachelor’s steely face.

At the same time, he is raising his eyes, as he can, from the daily pleasure of trying to redevelop and manage the city of Oakland. “Pleasure,” yes, that’s the mayor’s word. There’s another campaign looming into sight, a fresh set of possibilities, more excitement, old cages to rattle in that other town that once was his domain, Sacramento.

As for a honeymoon with his bride?

Why naturally, the mayor of Oakland, who is running for attorney general of California, will honeymoon on the campaign stump.

His marriage proposal to fellow lawyer and former Gap Inc. executive Anne Gust included some Brown-esque version of the standard line, will you be my wife? It also included a not-so-everyday understanding that husband and wife would also be candidate and campaign manager. The two of them think alike, you see.

The wedding will be held June 18 in the rotunda of a restored building facing City Hall, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) presiding.

Meanwhile, Brown has a few surplus pounds to run off along the shore of Oakland’s Lake Merritt so he can fit into a new wedding suit. Invitations need to be sent out. Dharma, the tirelessly friendly Labrador, is asking for attention. The Palm Treo in Brown’s pocket is beeping persistently with calls and e-mails and schedule reminders. Also, he’s got the new Jerry Brown interactive blog to feed. His reading list is topped by “Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition.” And before everyone gets carried away with things upcoming, he would like to show you around Oakland to see what he’s been up to, so get your walking shoes on, you’ll be staying up late.

No wonder: When Edmund G. Brown Jr. finally got around to signing up for Medicare last year, he was already 12 months beyond the standard age of 65.

For Jerry Brown, former governor, former California secretary of state, former Los Angeles Community College board member, former chairman of the state Democratic Party, former three-time candidate for president of the United States, former volunteer at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying and Destitute in Calcutta, these are the best of times.

‘She is very alive’

California has welcomed any number of celebrities into politics; Jerry Brown is the only bona fide celebrity produced from within the state’s political process.

For that reason, and no other really, the pathways of his life and the workings of his vigorous intellect have been public fascinations for more than three decades.

So let’s begin with the personal:

He proposed marriage on the evening of March 15. It was Anne Gust’s 47th birthday. She has never married; neither has Brown.

“Geniuses think alike,” says the 67-year-old politician with a smile resembling a sophomore’s after catching the eye of the homecoming queen. “It doesn’t take long to come to the same conclusion.”

That is, provided you think that being together for 15 years isn’t very long for preliminaries.

“It was her birthday. I thought this would be a good time.”

“Not every woman would be willing to live at 27th and Telegraph in the hardware department of Sears,” he continues -- his downtown apartment being a loft conversion in a once-abandoned Sears building, located in a neighborhood that has not forgotten its grimy and dangerous past.

For that matter, not every woman would be willing to live with Jerry Brown.

“That’s another story.” Again, he grins.

“She has a quick and agile mind. She is a voracious reader. She is very alive -- aliveness, it’s a quality.”

Plainly, this is not a case of opposites attracting.

Gust, who left her job on Friday as executive vice president and chief administrative officer of Gap, met Brown through an acquaintance in 1990 when they both lived in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

From the start, their partnership became practical as well as romantic. She was the attorney who defended him in a lawsuit as state party chairman. In the case, Brown claimed the right to limit party members to speaking for no longer than one minute at meetings. Brevity, as Brown followers may remember, is thought of as a virtue. He was sued by a man who claimed a right to talk longer.

Gust and Brown prevailed.

She is relaxing in the couple’s loft now -- an airy and bright corner apartment that looks straight into the rough core of downtown. “People want to know, did he get on his knee?

“No.”

But don’t entirely count him out in the romance department, either. For about the third time in their relationship, Brown set the mood by cooking dinner: chicken and peas. “The fact that he cooked was a miracle.”

She flashes a girlish grin to match his. Even apart, they seem to light each other up.

There are other changes too.

Upon reaching “retirement age,” many men get brittle, less open, more reserved. Naturally, Brown is a contrarian on the matter. After 36 years in public life, he has mellowed, his close friends say. He is looser, quicker to smile, less uptight about himself.

By his own reckoning, he has grown more focused too. “I’ve had to,” he says.

His great tug of war, between big ideas and everyday responsibilities, is more easily resolved. Brown evokes the peripatetic, battle-scarred founder of the Jesuits to explain:

“St. Ignatius called it in actione contemplativus, a contemplative in action.... Politics is about the conventional, about cliches, about polls. To the extent you master that process, you have to forfeit spontaneity, your own idiosyncratic bent, your sensibility. It’s not the way you see yourself; it’s the way people see you.”

This is the surface tension that keeps Brown afloat.

But in this encounter, he speaks of abstractions because he is asked to. He inevitably leads his replies back to the tangible. Theory some time ago met its match in experience.

“I like to think in terms of action,” he says.

The design of an ordinary municipal bridge in Oakland is a case in point. A bridge has a transportation function, but is that all? “It’s hard to inject a level of creativity into the political process,” he says. Viewing public works projects for their aesthetic potential “is an idea that doesn’t fit in the dynamic.” Brown called for a juried design competition by way of raising the question: “Can art fit into government?”

He is always pushing. That hasn’t changed.

No bucolic suburb

Nine years ago, the couple got a black Lab puppy. Brown resisted. “He doesn’t know he wants a dog,” Gust recalls thinking.

Brown is back at his loft now, sprawled on a long L-shaped couch in a sand-colored suit, tieless. Dharma is making the rounds from her master to a wicker laundry basket full of stuffed dog toys, her tail thumping nonstop like that of all good Labs.

It is not a large apartment, but it is spaciously arranged without a clutter of things. A painted and varnished concrete floor casts umber tones through the living area. Corner windows peer out over Oakland. Brown moves onto a rooftop patio to narrate the scene.

A block away is a boarded-up three-story clapboard that served as a hideout for junkies. “I personally had the cops shut it down. And the one behind it. Next door, well, that’s being fixed too.”

He is the headmaster of this neighborhood, only a dozen blocks from City Hall. He points out the metal plating shop, the check-cashing store, the Korean barbecue restaurant. A billboard looks into their living room -- a woman whose cleavage is supposed to assist with the selling of something. It is more pleasing than the giant face of talk show host Michael Savage, who used to confront them from the sign.

Brown is on a crusade. He wants 10,000 people to homestead the city center. He calls it the 10K initiative. He figures he is about 80% toward the goal, including whole blocks of new condos and apartment buildings near the waterfront. His vision: the flats of Oakland as an affordable urban bedroom community.

“Development has its critics,” he acknowledges. “But blight is worse.”

There is no vast public treasury in Oakland, or in Sacramento, from which to draw redevelopment capital. Brown finds himself caught between East Bay liberals who want to encumber developers with social responsibilities and developers who are quick to go elsewhere. Frequently, liberals end up complaining loudest about Brown’s priorities.

He fired the city’s planning director who demanded a setback on additions to the Sears’ building loft conversion -- including the very apartment he ended up living in. “If it’s their property, they ought to be able to do it the way they think best.” Then he adds, “As long as it’s not ugly.”

Later, he remarks that he shouldn’t say fired. “Sounds harsh.”

It is evening, and he is on the move again, first taking Dharma for a quick walk in back of the Sears building.

People in downtown Oakland know their mayor and are accustomed to seeing him on the streets. There is no mistaking his pride about living on the urban frontier rather than in the estates of the Oakland hills. In this age of paranoia and mega-security, Brown travels his city unencumbered. No mistaking his pride about that, either. The down-and-outers of the city center wave, smile, extend a hand, even giggle -- and most of them seem to cheer him on. He has nicknames for some. Others he views intolerantly. He fought for a controversial curfew to ban serious felony probationers from the city streets between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

To judges who threaten to stand in the way of some of his initiatives, he complains: “Most judges don’t live in neighborhoods where people sell dope. I do.”

Two elderly women sitting on a bench wave him over and want to hear about the wedding plans.

“You gonna have a reception with food?” asks Ethel Christie. By that she means, will all Oakland be invited to the party? She suggests Belize for a honeymoon.

Next, he is off to a country club charity dinner in nearby Pleasanton -- a chance to rub shoulders with the well-to-do, who will hear a fundraising pitch from him later. Although he is a politician on the stump, he’s not beyond showing a flash of temper when an Oakland school choir takes the stage to perform. These are his kids, and some of the guests around him prefer talking over listening. Brown gives them the stinkeye and tells them to shush.

“My dream was to create a school in Oakland where people from the suburbs would want to send their kids,” he says.

The charter school he founded, Oakland School for the Arts, now pulls 40% of its enrollment from neighboring communities and is about to relocate to a campus inside a long-shuttered 1928 movie palace downtown. He also established the Oakland Military Institute, a high school where students wear uniforms and answer drill-instructor orders from supervising California National Guardsmen. Together, these schools are his proudest achievements as mayor.

“Crime, education, redevelopment -- they are all the same thing,” he says. Making, and keeping, cities livable.

Arriving back home, Brown tells Gust to drive beyond their condo -- his tour of Oakland is not quite finished.

Down the street, he throws open the car door and leads into a wildly decorated urban art bar called Van Kleff. He is welcomed by the doorman, the bartender and sundry patrons. Splitting a cosmopolitan cocktail with Gust and nibbling on a one-teaspoon quota of bar nuts, Brown savors the scene. This nightspot, with its young, hip clientele, is irrefutable evidence of redevelopment taking hold.

“There has been nothing on this block for 20 years. Nothing.”

Mr. Mayor

“Edmund G. -- I’ve made an executive decision,” says Gust out of the blue. “That’s what we’re going to put on the invitations. Edmund G., not Jerry.”

The next morning Brown, whose environmental crusades and sensibilities in the 1970s renewed, for a time, California’s reputation for future-think, is making rounds in his environmentally unfashionable city-issue Lincoln Town Car. “I thought about getting a Prius.... (But) when I pull in front of a hotel, this looks like the mayor arriving. So there.”

As always, a free-flowing charge of energy accompanies Brown, and even if you’ve seen it before, it’s startling to find him conducting two conversations simultaneously while probing his Treo for e-mail. He is talking to an aide about the day’s schedule and trying to read the screen on his hand-held without glasses. In the backseat of the car, a question is directed at Gust: How would she describe her style?

“I have no idea,” answers Brown without even turning around. “I’ve never given it any thought.”

Gust, 5 feet, 4 inches and lean enough to show muscle in her arms, is not particularly voluble on the subject, either. “Casual ... Banana Republic,” she finally says. “We [at the Gap] owned Banana Republic, and I wore a lot of their stuff.”

She is also affectionate, unselfconsciously so. She squeezes his hand. She scratches his back. She nuzzles his shoulder. Her entry into the public eye of politics has been “evolutionary” but is not without foundation: Rockwell T. Gust Jr., her father, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Michigan in 1962.

For his part, Brown favors suits with a boxy silhouette and plenty of drape. When he addresses a crowd, he shoves a hand, sometimes two, into his coat pocket. With only a ring of gray fuzz remaining on his head, his silver-bristled, hawkish eyebrows stand out like calligraphy on top of unblinking eyes.

His day begins sadly. At the police station, he addresses children whose fathers were killed in the line of duty.

“It’s not just living, it’s what you live for,” he tells this annual memorial service for slain officers. The list of names goes back to 1867. “The people on that wall lived for us, and we’re not going to forget.”

In the span of 24 hours, he will also meet with a lawyer leading a lawsuit that blames Midwestern power companies for contributing to global warming. He will sit down with the Oakland city attorney to try and agree upon tactics to counter troublemaking youths who disrupt neighborhoods with reckless, tire-burning antics in their cars. Brown wants to confiscate the offending autos, and civil rights activists object. He will sit for a TV interview about a local man who crusaded against crime -- a cause that turned out violent. He will travel to San Francisco for a memorial dinner for one of his former Cabinet secretaries.

Moonbeam who?

“When I am attorney general ... “

Sometimes he speaks in the future tense, and it’s probably not a slip. The election will be in 2006. His likely opponent in the Democratic primary will be Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo. Two law-and-order Democrats separated by geography, and by a generation.

Brown is keenly aware that he is no longer so well known in Southern California. For many under-30 voters outside the Bay Area he is a stranger. Or perhaps, he is just a man to whom a few cast-iron buzzwords have become attached. Like “Gov. Moonbeam.” Sometime back, critics meant that as a churlish epithet. Whether it remains so, whether a willingness to dream of the future is a political liability, will perhaps be a subtext of the forthcoming campaign.

For now, the work of the candidate is straightforward. “Raising money, not making mistakes, getting as many endorsements as possible.

“This is not the same as running for governor, or president,” he adds. But why run at all?

Oh, Brown is ready for that one. He pounces.

With near photographic recall, he recites veto messages, newspaper articles, bills signed, speeches made -- the days in Sacramento when he challenged conventions. Back then, he demanded school reform in terms that foreshadowed contemporary debates. He instituted the first statewide high school graduation standards 30 years ago. He has a whole list of where he rocked the boat yesterday, and, sure enough, the ripples come back to today.

“It’s been a rather unique preparation,” he says. “I think I’m the only governor who has run for attorney general. It’s an office that calls for wisdom and common sense. I know, I’ve been there.”

Now he adds two terms as a mayor to the resume. And perhaps this has led to the biggest change of all: In his lifetime, the political tables have turned. Republicans have become a party seen by many as championing central authority. Democrats like Brown have grown skeptical.

“The trend is toward more and more centralized power, and Republicans are leading the charge. There have been 25,000 or so new laws enacted since I left Sacramento. What I’ve learned as mayor is to be careful at invoking the power of state government, or federal government.”

Of course, there is another dimension to the argument. There always is.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to run for a second term in 2006. The attorney general elected with him will have a dual role: as an independent voice in government and as the administration’s chief lawyer.

“The attorney general is a very independent office, it has a long tradition of that.... I think I will be more independent than most,” Brown says. “That’s not to say that I’m going to run around without deep reflection. I’ve seen too many things.”

First, though, comes that Saturday in June. And then the yearlong honeymoon down the rough roads of California’s partisan politics.

Some things haven’t changed.

“I enjoy it,” says Brown. “This is what I do.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

From Jerry Brown’s point of view

Jerry Brown joined the world of bloggers two months ago. His intermitted entries at https://jerrybrown.typepad.com/ invite comments from supporters and opponents alike. Here’s a sampler:

On the “moral values” debate

Morals represent tradition and custom. In this brave new century, tradition and custom are replaced by fashion and hype. The past is for reactionaries, we are told. Science, technology and the ever-expanding GDP will solve our problems. Yet, no society can hang together without a proper balance between stability, respect for the old ways and openness to the new. In our time -- 2005 -- we are way out of balance.

On his campaign for attorney general

Now more than ever, what is needed is balance and life experience in the face of government running amok, making minute and invasive laws about everything. Isn’t it curious that the same solutions continue to chase the same problems?

On conservation

Recently, several well-publicized books have made the claim that environmentalism is dead. Not so. The laws of nature don’t change to accommodate right-wing politicians or “junk scientists.”