Jerry Brown.

• Author: Kupfer, David
• Position: Radio talk-show host and former presidential candidate - Interview

Jerry Brown has been called everything from an ascetic anti-politican to a New Age Huey Long. He remains a maverick in the political world today. Still anti-establishment, still full of genuine rage, he's now revamped his focus and is concentrating on becoming a positive force for community development in his own neighborhood. As a radio talk-show host, Brown has gone noncommercial. He stopped broadcasting his national show, which over eighteen months grew to span fifty stations and twenty-five states, and, on August 1, he began broadcasting on Pacifica's KPFA from his warehouse complex in Oakland.

Son of two-term California Governor Pat Brown, Edmund G. Brown Jr. has been in the public eye as a politician since 1970, when he was elected as California's secretary of state. A former Jesuit seminary student, he graduated from the University of California-Berkeley, was twice elected governor of California, and was a three-time Presidential candidate, challenging Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, and Bill Clinton in 1992.

While governor of California, he railed against nuclear power, started a cancer registry linking pollution to its consequences, and bolstered farmworkers' rights. He appointed more women than any other governor during his time in office. He took pilgrimages to Zen centers and passed up use of the official limousine for a plain, blue Plymouth for eight years.

He left politics in 1993 and went on a spiritual journey, which took him to a Zen center in Japan and to India, where he worked with Mother Teresa and the dying in Calcutta.

He returned, he says, energized and determined to build a grassroots Democratic Party for California. He got himself elected as chair of the California Democratic Party, but, he says, "I had to promise to do fundraising to get all the incumbents reelected," so he quit in frustration.

Turning his back on traditional party politics, he denounced the Democrats for relying on special interests. His 1992 Presidential campaign focused on bashing incumbents. He pilloried Congressional pay raises and demanded term limits. He ran the most daring and provocative campaign of any of the candidates, only accepting campaign contributions of $100 or less.

Brown is no longer running for office, but he is jogging to keep fit. After one of his final national radio broadcasts, we toured at a good pace through the industrial district of West Oakland where he now lives. At the end, Jerry sped up and sprinted.

I interviewed him in the shaded courtyard of his newly completed building in West Oakland. Brown moved to Oakland from San Francisco last year in order to be closer to the site of his radio broadcast and his community-development efforts. The complex that he helped design is located across the street from an Amtrak train station and right next to the Oakland harbor. It is austere on the outside and generous on the inside, with a radio studio, offices, a conference room (currently used as a meditation space), auditorium, apartments, and guest rooms for residents and volunteers. It is both his home and the headquarters of "We the People," the nonprofit organization that grew out of his 1992 Presidential campaign.

Brown had just finished a bowl of rice when we spoke. He looked fit and rested, and was clad in denim and cowboy boots. He admitted he was down from ten cups to three ounces of coffee a day, and was three days into a rice-only diet for physical and mental cleansing.

Q: How did you become a reformed politician?

Brown: I'm becoming one.

Q: Tell me about the path.

Brown: By becoming chair of the Democratic Party, I became the custodian of the machine. And, to quote Ross Perot, "when you lift the hood, it ain't pretty in there."

So it becomes painfully obvious that money and taking credit and looking good is all there is. As the party chairman, I could experience more clearly the unreality of contemporary politics. So that got me started. From that I went to the $100 limit on campaign contributions.

Q: You've said that President Clinton is indictable.

Brown: And so are all politicians.

Q: Because?

Brown: Because it's all based on bribery. And I want to be very clear that I don't exempt myself from the process. You must obtain money to buy media. And without the money, you don't exist. To get the money, you must commit common-law bribery, which is defined as "a receipt of anything of value where the intent is to influence you in your official capacity." And I can say categorically that campaign contributions are meant to influence public officials in their public capacity. That is bribery, per se. As we become more enlightened, we're going to have to outlaw the bribe. And outlawing the bribe means fundamentally restructuring the American political system.

Q: Do you feel that the millions of people who voted for you in the 1992 Presidential primary have been cheated, considering the fact that the agenda that you put forth has been barely scratched by the Clinton Administration?

Brown: No. Clinton won. And Clinton never responded to the Platform in Progress. He didn't respond to my appeal to support a $100 limit in the Democratic platform. Nor did he respond to my personal appeal that I made in a meeting with him in the Mayflower Hotel before the convention to raise the minimum wage $1 and index it. He still hasn't come to that, three years later: $4.25 is less now than when...