The 39th, and 34th, governor of California was making his first trip to Los Angeles since being sworn in, for an evening speech in February to the city’s Chamber of Commerce, and a swarm of reporters was waiting at Terminal A of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. Edmund G. Brown Jr. — he has always preferred Jerry — arrived from Sacramento not on a state aircraft (and certainly not a private jet, as was the preference of his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger) but aboard Flight 896 on Southwest Airlines. As Brown walked off the plane and into the terminal, he was essentially alone, save for a few police guards who hung off to the side. There were no press aides, no advance staff, no speechwriters, no policy mavens; in short, nothing like the bustling entourage of self-importance that typically buffers a chief executive.
Brown instantly found himself swimming in a sea of chaotic attention — “Governor, please come forward a little bit!” “Governor, could you look over here at the cameras?” — so he took charge: the governor staffing the governor. “O.K., O.K., can everybody now see?” Brown asked, as he wrangled a tangle of photographers, television cameras, radio correspondents and reporters into position. He settled a who-can-shout-louder face-off between two reporters by promising that each would get their turn, choosing the TV correspondent, John North of KABC, over a print reporter “because he’s older than you.” North shot back: “Thanks a lot — younger than you, though.”
Brown proceeded to answer the reporters’ questions with a display of self-confident humor and a command of facts, history and language that befits a man in the eighth decade of his life, as he likes to describe himself. The news conference ended, 22 minutes after it began, only when a reporter signaled the close with a clipped, “Thank you, governor.” Brown wandered down the terminal, trailed by two television reporters who wanted to book him for studio interviews. One handed him a business card, which Brown slipped into his shirt pocket. When the governor arrived at his waiting car, he laid a garment bag straight and neat in the trunk and climbed into the passenger seat.
Jerry Brown was already something of an oddity when he first was elected governor in 1974, succeeding Ronald Reagan, who, like Schwarzenegger, was an actor who became governor. Brown was, at 36, a symbol of the glamour and the restless adventurousness of California, as well as its quirkiness. But California and Brown have changed in the 28 years since he left the governor’s office, and now they are relearning each other. Government has new rules, new problems, new politics and new players. It has grown, particularly in California, more ossified and divided. Term limits, the new governor suggested to me a few weeks after taking office in January, have turned out to be a force for bad, feeding the paralysis in Sacramento. Over late-night glasses of pinot grigio and plates of brussels sprouts at a restaurant near the State Capitol, he talked about lawmakers who now spend so much time worrying about getting elected to another, higher office that they have little time to consider the staggeringly complicated legislation that lands on their desks or to build working relationships with other lawmakers.
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