Jerry Brown’s Revenge
MARCH 6, 2014
Timothy Egan
SANTA BARBARA, Ca. — Let’s review. Just a few years ago California was a punching bag for conservative scolds — a failed state, profligate with its spending and promiscuous with its ambition. Ungovernable. And everybody’s leaving.
Mitt Romney compared California to bankrupt Greece. Texas Governor Rick Perry said it was anti-business. (Howdy, Google and Facebook, say hello to Amarillo.) And Fox News, well, take the above and add a series of bluster blasts that will not withstand fact checking.
Now some recent headlines: “California Projects $4.6 Billion Surplus.” “California Among the National Leaders in Job Creation.” And “San Francisco Wins Super Bowl.” O.K., I threw in the last one as a dig at the Niners, but you get the point.
It’s unfair to give all credit for the Golden State revival to Jerry Brown. But the man, who will be 76 next month and was both the youngest and oldest governor of California, and who just announced a plan to run for a fourth term with an approval rating approaching 60 percent, deserves the lion’s share.
He’s not waiting for his apology. Nor will he take shots at the wrongheaded political class, though he said in an interview that there is “poetic justice” in proving them wrong. By nature, this former Jesuit seminarian is a misfit in the culture of partisan conceit that produced the current crop of Beltway lightweights.
He gave boasting his best try in his State of the State speech in January: “What a comeback it is: a million new jobs since 2010, a budgetary surplus in the billions and a minimum wage rising to $10 an hour!”
Of late, even the weather has cooperated, with a dose of much-needed rain to help with a desperation drought, the worst in state history.
Without doubt, California has serious structural problems, well beyond the byzantine hydraulic system that allows the state to flourish. For all the job growth, the unemployment rate is one of the highest in the nation. It has unsustainable pension obligations, a bloated public-employee sector led by the prison guard union. And it is so expensive to live here that clashes over the class divide are threatening to get nasty.
But the California turnaround does prove some things, and disprove others — offering a look beyond the binary bind of our politics.
First, raising taxes does not kill job creation, but it does annoy job creators. At Brown’s urging, voters in 2012 approved, by a healthy margin, a plan to raise taxes on the high end. This new money is the biggest reason why the state went from a $25 billion budget deficit to a projected surplus of almost $5 billion. Instead of building more prisons, California has restored the funding flow to its once-vaunted public university system.
At the same time, job growth has been robust. Trying to poach payrolls in this state, Governor Perry said, “I hear building a business in California is next to impossible.” Maybe a traditional business. But not the new-century kind. California leads the nation in new high-tech, bio-tech and manufacturing jobs, a result in part that Brown attributes to the “yeasty and innovative” nature of the state. Perry can’t duplicate that, no matter how many corporate subsidies he passes around.
More important to the inequality debate, a recent study on upward mobility found that poor children from San Francisco or Los Angeles are far more likely to rise to the upper-income bracket than those in Dallas or San Antonio.
Second, one-party Democratic rule does not have to mean freewheeling spending. Brown is tightfisted; always has been. Democrats own this state. And if, through Brown, they can raise taxes and curb public-employee excess — as Brown is attempting to do — they present a serious rethinking of the D brand.The spoiler to this narrative could be the proposed $68 billion bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Costs have ballooned, legal challenges are continuing and the public has soured on it, after having voted for the initial bonds to get the project underway. Brown is sticking with his choo-choo. He cites Abraham Lincoln’s decision to push ahead with the transcontinental railroad despite the Civil War.
“We have to think three or four generations down the road,” he said when asked about the train last month. “In medieval France they could commit to building a cathedral that’d take 200 years.”
Third, the great exodus never happened. Since the dawn of the recession, the state has added about 1.5 million people — almost three Wyomings. And yes, 67,702 people moved from California to Texas in 2012. But 43,005 people moved from Texas to California. (Population growth is not necessarily a good thing, especially in this overstuffed state, but that’s another topic).
Age has its benefits. Brown, for one, no longer sweats the small stuff. “It’s not only that I know more, but I’ve been at this thing for most of my life,” he said. As a little kid, studying at the knee of his father, Governor Edmund G. Brown, the younger picked up a few tips that he’s only now putting to good use.
I asked Brown what advice he would have for that beleaguered fellow Democrat on the other coast, President Obama.
“I’m hesitant as a provincial governor sending messages of advice from out here on the West Coast.” Oh, please — do.
“O.K., I would say focus on a limited number of subjects that are ripe for decisions,” he said. “And I would minimize the fanfare and speechifying. Speaking a lot doesn’t produce a lot.” Ever the Zen of the Pacific.
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