Jerry Brown | Interview 13 | June 11, 2019

MEEKER: Today is June 11, 2019. This is Martin Meeker, with Todd Holmes and Scott Shafer, interviewing Governor Jerry Brown. This is interview session number thirteen. Let's pick up with what we've titled on our outline, "Jerry Brown's return to public life." And I'm not entirely sure that's an accurate statement or not, but Miriam Pawel, in her book, reports on a top secret survey that you conducted in advance of 1988, exploring--

BROWN: Top secret?

MEEKER: Well, that's actually the word she used.

BROWN: Well, that's if you don't pull it out as a press release. [laughter]

MEEKER: Yeah, well, this is what journalists do, right? They use words like top 00:01:00secret [laughs].

SHAFER: I've never written those words, top secret--

BROWN: We don't have top secrets in the state government.

MEEKER: So, there was a survey that you commissioned: can you tell me about the survey?

BROWN: I can't remember. Tell me what it says. I can't remember.

MEEKER: Well, my understanding the survey was in anticipation of a possible presidential run in 1988.

BROWN: No, I don't think so. Who said that?

MEEKER: That would've been Miriam Pawel.

SHAFER: Well, I think it looks like it was a question sort of testing your public image, you know, six years after you left office.

BROWN: Uh--'88? I don't remember that. I mean, I've put questions on surveys from time to time. And I've had a lot of surveys. It's not like you commission a big thing--somebody's doing a survey, you say, "Hey, will you put a question on for me?"

MEEKER: How does that work?

BROWN: I said it precisely. [laughter]

Meeker So, like, you know a pollster and they're--

BROWN: Well, you know everybody--I mean, it's all, well, yeah. Yeah, we know a lot of pollsters. Richard Maullin was in the polling business. We had a number 00:02:00of them, [Patrick H.] "Pat" Caddell, different people. So I don't remember that. I don't think in '88--you're saying in '88?

MEEKER: Mm-hmm.

BROWN: Well, I don't know--what's the source of that? Eighty-eight--now when would that have been? That was the [Michael] Dukakis campaign.

SHAFER: It was before you became party chair.

BROWN: Yeah, that was after Dukakis. I think I ran for party chair. I wasn't taking a survey then. I don't believe that. I'll have to go find that. I mean there's so damn many little pieces she asked me to look for. So many little factoids that--I just didn't have the energy.

SHAFER: When you said earlier that you assumed, or you thought, that you would always get back into public life--?

BROWN: Yeah, I thought the party, because I knew it was--well, I don't know how I looked at it. The position was opening, because it revolved north/south. And 00:03:00so the leader, I think, was Peter [D.] Kelly [III], and he was the southern guy who was going to go to the north. I said well, I'm about ready to move back north so, I'll move back north and sell my house and become party chairman. So, I don't think you do a survey, unless I did a survey of the party. Maybe it was a party survey.

SHAFER: I seem to remember that you thought about getting into the senate race in '92.

BROWN: No, that was '92. Now, we're in '88, before--that was before. I think I took a survey about whether--how--what would I do if I ran as an independent? That's after the president--and I think that's later. And the answer, of course, does not come out very high. Lacking the party label is not a pathway.

I've read the stuff about [August] Schuckman. I'm interested in not what my life is, but how the guys lived out here without air-conditioning and without a well. That to me, as a human moral challenge--that's impressive. Especially when you hear all this safe space, you know, marginalized whatever. You know, some German that came out here, didn't speak English. That says something, that human beings are individual in their capacities. I think that's a very important lesson that we have to keep in mind.

SHAFER: Given that you always felt like you'd get back into public office--

BROWN: Yeah, I did. I did, that was clear. You know that LA Times story said I will return, as my--

SHAFER: So, did you feel, during that decade of the eighties, and maybe early nineties, that to some extent you had to repair your image?

BROWN: Well, I don't know what that means. You have to win. I mean, image sounds like, you're like, I've got to fix this cup of coffee because it's broken or something. You take a survey. Yeah, you guys talk a funny language that I don't talk or think.

SHAFER: Well, how would you put it?

BROWN: Well, I wouldn't put it that way. I did see, in some of the public surveys--you know they take surveys, you know the Field Poll and different polls. Or other people take them, and they share them with you. But I was a little surprised. I knew my popularity had declined. I thought after I was away for a couple years it would improve, but it actually got worse. I think, now, whatever you say about survey data that's thirty years old, you have to be careful. Because unless you've got it in front of you, you know, but I tend to remember that. I tend to think that was the case. So that surprised me--it's not 00:06:00that easy.

SHAFER: To come back?

BROWN: Yeah because, well one thing, when you leave, and the next guy is [George] Deukmejian, a Republican, he's going to say, "Oh, that's Brown. His judges, the--"--you know, they're blaming. So blaming is a very important part of politics, very important. And it's shifting blame from yourself. If you don't master that art, you become the scapegoat. And whether you like it or not, whether it appeals to your Berkeley sensibilities, that's an important, management tool that every politician either consciously, or unconsciously, masters. But in this case, I don't know how much Deukmejian--but I think they talked about the gigantic deficit, which turned out to be about a billion dollars, after a few years, when you look back at it.

But yeah, I think I decided that elective office was going to be difficult. And 00:07:00that's where I think I got the idea of the party chairman. That's one I think I could win, because they're Democrats, and I would be, you know, the more prominent in doing that. And I had some money left over from the senate campaign. So that's why I chose that one.

SHAFER: So it sounds like something you felt was doable, as opposed to something you really wanted to do?

BROWN: Well, you see, most people don't want to hit their head against the wall. Some do, you know, if they're a little crazy. So, because you asked like, you want to achieve something? You want to have a successful set of interviews; everybody likes to succeed. So, same thing running for office; you don't run to lose. So therefore, you want to know: is it possible? Now some of these guys 00:08:00running for president, they seem to be operating on some other criteria. And there are other criteria. You can advance your name. If you're a lawyer, you might get some more business. You might meet people. It might be a good warm-up for something else.

But I did not see an office--I was feeling that Laurel Canyon kind of reminded me of Forest Lawn [Cemetery]. It was very pretty up on the canyon, but I only knew my neighbor--I think the time I encountered him is when he shot a squirrel, or something, near my backyard. And the ones on the other side of me, I didn't know. There was one couple that I knew at, down my driveway across the street, and they were very nice. I spent time with them. But it wasn't like here. You notice that guy who just walked in? I met him at Granzella's a few weeks ago, 00:09:00and he invited me to a lamb feast. And I went there, and then he came because they want to build a house, and they want to see what mine looks like. So they show up. That didn't happen in Laurel Canyon. People don't show up; it's just not done.

So, but it's not just showing up--it seemed very dead to me. It was very quiet, and I didn't notice that probably when I moved there, because I was secretary of state. I was spending time in Sacramento; I was running for governor; then I was governor. Every Monday, I'd take off for Sacramento. So, and then there were activities, and going out with Linda Ronstadt, being out at her house. Okay, now when all that quiets down, it gets pretty quiet. I didn't see running for mayor of Los Angeles, so I decided to move. And the party chair struck me as a very good idea. I had no idea of what the party entails, that you don't really 00:10:00control the party. The party is itself, with all of the different individuals who've been going there for years, and you don't dislodge them. So, anyway, you serve them more than they serve you, for sure. [laughing]

SHAFER: Yeah. Well, I expect you're not going to like this question, but when you did the other things that we talked about earlier--

BROWN: What?

SHAFER: Going to Calcutta, doing the Zen, all those things.

BROWN: Yeah, right, right. Yeah.

SHAFER: Did you see that, in any way, as part of helping the public see you in a different way?

BROWN: I'm sure I was--that could be, that's an aspect. Everything I do, you know, that's just the way. If you're a political animal you know what things have what ramifications and implications. If you don't know that, then you're very dependent on political consultants and you're a very anxious and vulnerable 00:11:00human being, because you're in a business which depends totally on what other people think of you--namely, the voters. So, you have to know that. Now, whether people get married and have children--it's because it looks good. Or whether they have that in the back of their mind, or whether they climb Mt. Everest or do different things--

But, I certainly didn't go--I went to Japan as part of my general quest to understand--same reason I went into the Jesuits, not a particularly different reason. I also, in the kind of clean, kind of simple, pure environment of sitting in a very nice, clean Japanese zen-dō with rice paper windows, with a 00:12:00nice tatami mat and the black cushion, it all seems--that path to enlightenment, okay, that's one thing. Now, what about Calcutta? [laughing] What about the streets of Calcutta? Okay, I wanted to see how enlightenment works in another venue, so that's part of the reason I went. Also, Mother Teresa was this saintly kind of figure, and I'm interested in that. You know, what is holiness? What is sanctity? Does it exist? What should it look like? So, I wanted, because certainly, I spent a good part of my life chasing after that, so if there's somebody who says that person has it, I want to go talk to them. I went to see Yamada Roshi. He's this guy who supposedly has some enlightenment, so--

SHAFER: So, I think you did some interviews, some media interviews, when you were in Calcutta?

BROWN: No, well I did, Ken Rich ran me down--he was there with Deukmejian, and 00:13:00he tracked me down in Kamakura.

SHAFER: Yeah, but I remember it was in the news that you were there, I mean--

BROWN: Yeah, a Life magazine guy just--wasn't, until a guy from Life came around. No one else knew about it, I don't think.

HOLMES: But you also did a telephone interview with the LA Times.

BROWN: Uh, maybe. I don't remember. Seems that--it could be. Who was it with?

HOLMES: That, I don't know. But I know it was in the LA Times, that's all.

BROWN: What was it? Did you read it?

HOLMES: Yes. Well, it was a lot of the same material that you would write about later. You were discussing your experiences--

BROWN: Maybe toward the end I talked about it. Well, yeah, I talk about things. I talk about my ranch. Life is public/private, it's all kind of an interconnected thread here.

SHAFER: What I'm trying to figure out is so you earlier, a moment ago, you said 00:14:00that you were aware of the ramifications of, you know, going to a place like Calcutta is--

BROWN: I'm aware of what I'm saying to you, and what someone might use it for and what would be the impact, if any. I am aware of that. I've already thought about it, even as I answer your questions, of what I say and what I don't say.

SHAFER: [laughs] So what did you think would--?

BROWN: So if we are a conscious political personality, I mean, that's the business we're in.

SHAFER: So was there a way in which you thought your visit to Calcutta could affect your image in some way, did you think?

BROWN: Yeah, well, I think if--well or my life experience. I don't separate--

SHAFER: Those are two different things?

BROWN: Well, not for me. You are what you are. I mean, unless you shut the door and become something else, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or something. Somebody used to say, I used to like that phrase: "Everything you do is a full presentation of the self." Just the way you lean on your elbows, just the way you scratch 00:15:00yourself. [laughing] If you look clearly at that, that will say volumes about who you are. So, if that's true about the smallest little gesture--yes, everything you do, to the discerning eye, is revelatory. Now, to the not-so-discerning eye, it still reveals something. So that's the world we live in. We have appearances. In fact, some people think there are only appearances. You know, there are schools of philosophy that some people believe in the, I think--content, something called the ding an sich, or something, the thing-in-itself. And the phenomenon, or the outside--and is there an inside? Now people today, a lot of people say, "Well, there's no inside. It's just a lot of onion peels that we can pull back endlessly." So yes, I had many reasons to go to Calcutta.

SHAFER: What do you think your going there revealed about you to the public?

BROWN: I don't know what it revealed--revealed an aspect of myself. This is a true--I'm interested in every aspect of Calcutta, India. I also went to Bo--not Bodhigara, that's where Buddha has his enlightenment. I went to Benares, on the Ganges, and we knew a fellow who was a Brahmin who had a temple there. And some friends had met him before, and he'd come to California. So I also took an air-conditioned, second-class train for fourteen hours and went up to Benares, spent a few days there, from Calcutta. It's all part of--that's one of the holy 00:17:00cities of Hinduism. So yeah, I think, it says what it says. I think I wrote in that article in the Sacramento Bee--I think I answered that question.

MEEKER: It's a slightly different but similar question. About this same time, when you start appearing more regularly in the public again, you present yourself, sartorially, in a slightly different way.

BROWN: Right, well it kind of looks like this, doesn't it?

MEEKER: A little bit, yeah.

BROWN: This is what I wore last night, because I didn't want to wear a suit. My wife doesn't like me wearing my suit, because it hasn't been to the cleaners in several months. [laughter]

MEEKER: Well, is that how you got to the turtleneck and the double-breasted suit, like where did those come from? Were those thought-through decisions, or did they just happen?

BROWN: Well, certainly, in the presidential campaign, I was against the whole system, telling them they've got to change it, throw them all out. That was not a totally thought-out idea, by the way. But it was part of the whole insurgency that I was leading at that time, or promoting.

MEEKER: So you recognized the power of--?

BROWN: Well, I don't know how much power there is.

MEEKER: Right, or symbolic power of a personal presentation.

BROWN: Well, everything is symbolic. You want to drive a limousine? Want to sit in the back with a couple of CHP [California Highway Patrol] guys in the chase car, and a few in front, with machine guns, or whatever they--AK-47s? [laughing] That communicates things. Flying around in a jet plane? Ronald Reagan was doing 00:19:00that. That's an upgrade from the old Grizzly Bear that my father had. So we speak not just in our words, but we speak in what we wear, and where we show up, who follows us, who precedes us. That's called context, and today there's no word more used than providing context. So yeah, I did provide context.

MEEKER: Or who painted your portrait, and how that turned out?

BROWN: Well, that was another one of these kind of random things.

SHAFER: How'd it come about?

BROWN: It came about because, first of all, you've got to have a portrait. I wasn't that excited about it. In fact, I was going to see Andy Warhol, but I thought that was a little too far out. The California Arts Council, Marcia Weisman I think the chair of that, said you ought to do [Don] Bachardy. And 00:20:00another lady who's a friend of mine, Ulrike Kantor, who ran an art gallery, between Marcia and Ulrike, they said, "Pick him," so I said fine. Yeah, that's what the Arts Council thinks? I'll go along with it. I had no idea, I never saw his works before.

MEEKER: Oh, you had never met him before?

BROWN: No, never met him. Was very surprised and a bit shocked when I saw what the result was. I know you guys always think formulaic, get the plan, have your advisors set up the meeting. I don't work that way.

SHAFER: So did you, when you saw it, did you think, oh my God, this--

BROWN: Yeah, I thought it was a little too far out. My father said you can never run for office again. He said that.

MEEKER: Really?

SHAFER: Because of the--?

BROWN: Because of that painting. He said, "You've got to get another one." If you look at his painting, it's not very distinguished. He wouldn't sit for it, and they just painted his photograph--and it wasn't good. I thought when you put it [the portrait by Bachardy] in the right light, it looked pretty good. With 00:21:00the right lighting, it adds a lot of color, it's interesting.

SHAFER: Did it capture your first governorship, do you think?

BROWN: Well, I don't know, did it capture--it's a painting, it's art. You have to decide that. It's interesting, that if you look at the way they are, they haven't been able to deviate. They have to take photographic-like paintings.

SHAFER: What are you going to do--?

BROWN: I've thought about that. I have to get to that.

SHAFER: Do you think you'll go back to the more traditional?

BROWN: No, I'm going to look for a good artist--if Andy Warhol was alive, I'd ask him. [laughter]

SHAFER: Why didn't you--why did you think Andy--?

BROWN: I thought he was too far out.

SHAFER: Too far out?

BROWN: There are limits. I probably should have. But, I do have a photograph that he took of me, in Interview magazine. But he didn't see it--didn't think it worthy of a painting.

SHAFER: He might have taken you to a photo booth and liked--have you been, there's a great Warhol exhibit at the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art].

BROWN: No, no, he was actually at a fundraiser. At [Diane von Furstenberg's] house, near Central Park. That was 1976. And there's an interview in Interview magazine, which I'm sure you can find. I haven't seen it. [Allard K.] "Al" Lowenstein brought him. You ever heard of Al Lowenstein? [sounds of assent] He was the guy who brought him.

SHAFER: Allard?

BROWN: Allard Lowenstein was another one of the characters that have come through my--there are many, including Michael Harrington. Ever heard of Michael Harrington?

SHAFER: Yeah, he's that antinuclear guy.

BROWN: He's a socialist Democrat.

SHAFER: Socialist, yeah.

MEEKER: I'm trying to think of his big book that he wrote.

BROWN: Ah yeah, that very big book, called The Other America [1962].

MEEKER: The Other America, that's right.

BROWN: It began the whole focus on poverty. And the last time I saw him, he was getting out of a cab. We took a ride uptown toward his apartment, and he got out, and I said, "Michael, what do we do with all these unemployed people? They 00:23:00need jobs. What's your answer?" And he said "Build trains. Build trains." That's exactly what he said, as he walked onto the curb. So, I have many influences that flow through my mind, because I ask a lot of people, a lot of things. I ask people, you know, what's going on?

SHAFER: Yeah. Well, that's actually a good point for me to ask about Jacques Barzaghi. How did you meet him and--?

BROWN: I met him through a sister of an old girlfriend of mine, and they worked on a movie where she was with one guy and this guy, Jacques, was the assistant director. The movie producer was a man named Stanton Kaye, who I'd been introduced to by Tony Kline--and who is still a friend of mine. And Linda said, "Can you help this guy?" In fact, she wrote me a letter right after I was sworn 00:24:00in as secretary of state, so I met him, found him interesting, said ok. That's how it happened.

SHAFER: She wanted you to help him get his foot in politics?

BROWN: No, just get a job. Just--yeah, kind of the basics.

SHAFER: But he stuck around for a long time.

BROWN: He did. Well, he was in and out. He came and--go on.

SHAFER: What influence did he--what was his, like, portfolio, would you say?

BROWN: So, but influence, of course, is that strange word. You know, people were looking to my father's influence. I think maybe my grandmother had influence. I was thinking about that. See, I had a variety of contentious advisors that did not agree. Richard Maullin would have a view, and Tom Quinn would have a view--and then Jacques would have a view. I found it very helpful when these very insistent people--they came pushing, you know, it's tiring to have to push 00:25:00back. So I would like the group around me to fight among themselves, to push, and then I could rest a little bit, and observe or decide for myself. So, often Jacques provided a different perspective, whether it's on a TV commercial or a different strategy of one kind or another. So, he provided a, I would say, somewhat creative view. Not totally literal, and not to be taken, you know, 100 percent, but it was a catalytic--he provided a catalyst for a lot of things.

SHAFER: Can you think of one or two things that--where he had a really big impact?

BROWN: A really big impact?

SHAFER: Or an idea that he had that you embraced?

BROWN: I'm trying to think of what that idea is. He had the idea of this 00:26:00building in Oakland, and a building that, as a center--his idea was a beehive of nonprofits, which I thought was interesting, because I was always interested in different experiments. I'd met [Charles E. "Chuck"] Dederich at Synanon; I'd been to La Paz with [César] Chávez, whose goal was really cooperatives, and we talked a lot about that. And I was impressed with old Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which I first became acquainted with through the Catholic Worker Movement. Well, I met Dorothy Day once, and she gave a talk. She was kind of a Mother Teresa figure too. Different, but a strong Catholic. I think a pro-life Catholic at that, but antiwar, more pacifist. But, I said to 00:27:00her, "Well, where can I find out more about what you're talking about?" And she said, "Read Paths in Utopia," which was a book by Martin Buber, I think it was written in 1945 and published later. And so I got that book, and I've read that book twice. And in fact, I've been looking for it. I don't have it currently in my possession.

But that was a book of the utopian socialists, [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon, [Joseph] de Maistre, three or four of the intentional communities, and he felt that the good life, the best life, was the cooperative life. And, he ends his book Paths of Utopia, after studying these different social thinkers, these 00:28:00utopian thinkers--there's four or five of them. I'm sure you've heard of them before. They're pretty well known. He ends up, between talking about the kibbutz as the model for, basically, human existence. The total communal/cooperative effort, like the kibbutz, that's what he was promoting in 1945. And he said, really the choice is between Moscow and Jerusalem. Jerusalem represented the kibbutz; Moscow represented the centralized, institutional state, which, obviously, he did not like at all.

So, I was always interested in: can you create a cooperative society? And, certainly in the sixties, that became quite--something that has faded away in many respects. So I thought this building where I was thinking of having first a 00:29:00public-interest law firm, then we got the idea of a sustainable roof garden. We also had a reading. We read Martin Buber I [and] Thou, and there was a guy who came for that group. And I hadn't talked to him in twenty years. But I met someone who came to the We The People building, and she gave me his number, called him and he said that, "Of all the things that have influenced my life, the reading of I [and] Thou has been one of the important aspects of my life." So at that point, I said I'm going to take it off my shelf and read I [and] Thou again. So, that was the idea.

Now, what I learned, of course, when I went down to see César Chávez in La 00:30:00Paz, about six months before he died, he was there. There weren't too many people. He had the, what he called the tortilla priest, who said Mass, and we had breakfast. And César was lamenting that the different people that lived in La Paz, they all wanted to have their own refrigerator. They wouldn't live with the common kitchen and common table. Now that struck a chord with me but, because of course in the seminary we had a common table. And at Santa Clara we ate in a dining room, and at the International House we did. And at Yale, I lived there. So, I've always liked the common dormitory living situation, with a common table, and you see the same people over and over again, and the continuing conversation. So it's kind of like one conversation after another 00:31:00going on many years. And as a matter of fact, just here a month ago, I had two guys from the Jesuits, and Michael Murphy, who founded Esalen. And they came up and we spent several hours talking, continuing the conversation from the fifties, so I have many conversations that continue.

And so that was the idea of We The People, and that this would be, kind of mobilizing the progressive--we didn't call it progressive, but kind of a reform kind of culture, political, and demonstrating it in the life that we were there. We had an auditorium. I had a least a hundred speakers: Ivan Illich, he came for the Oakland Table, which is a very interesting concept. Also, the Buddhist scholar from New York, Robert Thurman. I don't know if you know who Robert 00:32:00Thurman is. He came, and we had a number of people on organic gardening. We had that fellow from The Farm, Ina May Gaskin, who is a midwife. She's delivered over twenty-five hundred kids, and it was The Farm; they all moved out to Tennessee and lived on The Farm. And so, we had dozens of people come in and talk. I think [Theodore B.] "Ted" Taylor, I think, one of the nuclear scientists came.

So that was the idea. We had the common table, that table that I have in the barn. Those were my two dinner tables, and we could seat fourteen people [at each], and that would be twenty-eight people. And so we had the auditorium, we had some people for dinner, we would talk, I had the library. And, so that was the idea, and Jacques helped conceptualize that, or at least promoted--I 00:33:00wouldn't even say conceptualize it. I did most of that. But then of course, it didn't quite work out the way--it's not that easy. People do want refrigerators. [laughing] People do rebel from say--okay, here's the dinner. Are we going to drink at the table, are we not going to drink? What time is dinner? So, this idea of adults living together is quite challenging, and it normally requires some orthodox hierarchy. I think the orthodox kibbutzes lasted longer than the liberal kibbutzes, because this idea of okay, what do you think? This is what I think. What does Harry think? That is not a way you build a coherent, functioning, sustainable group in society.

And so, I have always been interested in--not interested, I've been attracted to those kinds of approaches. And it's a practical, because I've lived it, 00:34:00certainly, that way in the seminary. It's a very collective kind of life. And I've also studied it. Ivan Illich gave me a book: From Maindeville to Marx: [The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology], by a French anthropologist called [Louis] Dumont. And Dumont, he also wrote a book called Homo Hierarchicus: [The Caste System and Its Implications], and he also wrote several essays on individualism. And I, so I took an interest in this, because Dumont says that the modern society is essentially about individualism. But that's a radical break, because all human societies before that have always been socially oriented, holistic, you might even say tribal. And people had their whole identity in the group in which they found themselves, in which they grew up. And 00:35:00those socially shaped and determined societies, holistic societies, always had hierarchy. There was always hierarchy. And then when you go to individualism, hierarchy is verboten. What is emphasized is equality. And so we want to have a kind of a horizontal authority structure. And of course, he's questioning the viability of this, because of course, we don't have hierarchy, but we have class stratification, so we didn't really escape the hierarchy. It was reconstituted in a very atomistic, individualistic world. So that was Dumont, and Illich was the one that put me onto that.

So I have ideas, and then I have lived activities, and I try to go between the idea and the reality. And there's not a lot of people--well, there are a lot of 00:36:00people doing that. And I found things from like, Gary Snyder, who built his house. He had twenty-five of his people, who like Gary Snyder's poetry. They built his house out there on the ridge, and I ultimately bought a place near him. And I've gone to stay, visited the Catholic Worker when I have been in Philadelphia, when I was running for president--also when I was in Los Angeles and also when I was in Oakland. So this, to me, was a very romantic idea. Friday night, Dorothy Day on Chrystie Street, the Catholic Worker in New York in the Bowery, they'd have--Friday night was clarification of thought. And so people would come, and [Thomas] Merton had showed up there in the early forties, and intellectuals and workers and poor people, alcoholics and drug addicts. So they 00:37:00were all there, and that sounded pretty interesting. So I wanted kind of a milder version of something like that. That's what the [We the People] building was. Now, and we achieved some of that, but ultimately, the personalities conflict.

SHAFER: [to Meeker] Do you want to talk about the party chair a little bit?

MEEKER: Yeah, I mean, I think we want to get back to some of these issues later on in the narrative, but--

BROWN: The party is not a communal exercise.

MEEKER: [laughing] Right.

BROWN: There's a high degree of individualism and assertion of individual claims.

MEEKER: Did you know, when you were preparing to run for party chair, that it was going to involve a great deal of fundraising? Did you know that was part of the job?

BROWN: Yes. I thought that. I figured that, yeah. I didn't know it was going to be as difficult. I did not know. I just thought it was like fundraising. All the fundraising I did, you're running for secretary of state, governor, president, senate--okay. When you're running for the party, it's a different ball of wax.

MEEKER: How did it differ?

BROWN: Well, because it's a party institution. Who's going to give to that? Now, as it turns out, they have gotten a lot of money because of the link with the legislature--and I raised some money. I had [Mario] Cuomo out one time in LA; I had [Lloyd] Bentsen out in San Francisco. But what I didn't understand is the party is very much connected to the legislative leadership. And so, they want to raise the money for their legislative campaigns. So what the function of the party is at that time wasn't that clear. The laws have changed a little bit to give the party an advantage in fundraising. [John] Burton took care of that. So the party can make unlimited donations to a candidate. It can only raise a maximum of $27,000, or whatever it is today, for the candidate fund. But if they build that fund up--and they did it with telemarketing to get what we call small 00:39:00dollars--and they build that thing up, and with that fund they can give $100,000 to a candidate or they can spend it for a candidate. So, it has a function very much tied into the legislature, at that time. But I wasn't part of that.

So I'd come in, and usually they were a figure that was very much a dependent on the legislature. But I was running this insurgent campaign, now the head of the established party. That, in itself, was not a good fit. Even though the party talked about a lot of--right now, it's a lot of progressive talk. But it's essentially the organization supporting the status quo, the incumbents. So, they're in tension. The people who want to shake up the world, and the people who want to stay in office. And the job of the party is to keep the ins in, and the outs out, which is not the idea of a lot of the people who come to the conventions.

And it's a totally different party now. When my father was there, the party consisted of the appointees of all the Democratic office holders, and the unsuccessful seekers after the state legislature or the state office holders. So it was only a few hundred people, three-or four hundred, and they only met once a year--and they couldn't endorse in the primary. I don't want to go through the whole history of the party, because it has changed. But then Leo McCarthy, as part of his, I believe, campaign to be a US senator--that never happened--he broadened the party. So, pretty soon, from a party of 400, it goes to a party of 2,400. And that's where we are today. And it's quite an expensive management task, even though it is very disconnected to the essential work of parties, 00:41:00which is money and media and the candidates giving speeches. So, we're in a very candidate-centric kind of politics, and the party is more of an institution.

Now, when I was there, with Burton, we became pretty good friends, and they helped me very much when I was running for governor. But when I was there, Feinstein was running against Wilson, and she was not successful. I had Marshall Ganz, who had helped me in some of my presidential campaigns. And we were going to register--the registration gap was 11.4 percent, if I can remember, between Democrats and Republicans, and, so we're going to close that gap. That was our idea, and so we hired twelve people. Now, as it turned out, by the time we got to May of the November election year, the budget was looking like it was going 00:42:00to be a million dollars a month. I could not raise that. And the legislators weren't going to channel their money into my registration campaign, because they have their own--and again, this was another one of these somewhat utopian ideas.

Marshall is a theorist of organization. He was the organizer of the boycott, and he's a professor now at Harvard. And he helped [Barack] Obama do the caucuses, and he's teaching this at Harvard. So, he wanted--not the typical registration. The typical registration is what you might call day labor. You get people who, for two dollars a card, or three, they register people, and they bring in their cards and you pay them. But, what I found is--I had no idea about these things. The people who do this are not party people; they're like the people who 00:43:00circulate petitions, are cowboys, who travel around, and they can stand on the street corner with an ironing board and get people to sign petitions or register to vote.

Well, Marshall had the idea that we were going to build leadership in every part of the state, and that's what the party would be. We would build up a leadership cadre of the Democratic Party, and they would register people. But they would be a permanent staff, and this would really be the basis of rejuvenating the party. I'm sure Marshall may have a different interpretation, but he'd worked with Chávez and they had all of these organizers. But Chávez paid $5 a week, plus living in a dormitory. Now, when we come over to the party, people want a normal salary, they have to have a car. This gets very expensive. And the organization of just the people-resource expenses, it's not sustainable. And then, you have 00:44:00to go to the same characters, you know--who provides the money? The companies, the trade groups and the unions, and rich people who like to do things in politics. And the party is not a hot ticket. Marshall's dream excited me, but it didn't excite the funding base, at least not to the extent that I could do it.

I raised, I think, more money than is normal. Normally the party is there, and the legislators have bills. They have life and death on a lot of things, so that power then, through various legerdemain, is translated into donations into the party, and then streamed back into the elections. That's the way our wonderful system works. But it's very legislative bill-oriented, even though there's never, you know, a complete tie-in. It has to be sufficiently diffuse that it 00:45:00passes the rules of campaign raising and spending.

And it didn't fit the idea of the Marshall Ganz, the old César Chávez--we're going to have true believers out into the neighborhoods and public square organizing this new, value-directed party. That's a wonderful idea. [laughing] Just like We the People is a wonderful idea, and living together and doing good is a wonderful idea. But then human nature sinks in, and I want and you want, and it's all different and it's difficult. And it tends to converge back to the market--and what are you selling and who's buying, and so it's a little more practical. That's why, because I have seen a very large range, I have a very clear eye as to what's possible and what's not possible.

SHAFER: Was there a way in which being party chair colored the way you looked at money in politics?

BROWN: Well, I started out with the Political Reform Act, even when I was secretary of state. I had two experiences. Maybe I talked about them. When I ran for the junior college board, I went to my father's accountant, and I said, "Let me get the campaign report." I want to go ask the people who gave him money. So he showed me the report, and it was a circle of names, an initial and last names, with an aggregate amount at the bottom. I said, "Well, that's a funny way to report these names. I want to know who gave more, and who gave less, because I want to call the ones who gave serious money." That's the way we do it. Didn't I explain this to you at an earlier date? So then, and it turned out that that's the practice in California. So that's the thing I cleaned up as secretary of state, and then I put it into the Political Reform Act.

So, I saw the problem of money, but I also know what money did. That's why I 00:47:00didn't want limitations, because I knew that Gene McCarthy was financed by a man named [Arnold] Hiatt, and a few other people--Blair Clark. These were very wealthy men. They were able to keep him going. When it came to McGovern--Max Palevsky; he was writing out big, huge checks that kept Carter going. So I knew this idea that we're all going to raise little amounts of money--it doesn't work, because you need the money fast, and you don't have time to build it up. So, that's why I didn't put a limit, but I saw the inherent problem.

And then as I got to look at it, and particularly as party chairman, I got to understand, maybe once again, the problem. I did talk about the bane--I didn't use the word, but the bad influence of money in politics. And I said we're going 00:48:00to clean it up by making it all discoverable, making it all known. Of course, the trouble in making it transparent--then everybody sees the money flowing, and it makes you feel worse. So the press loves transparency, because you get clicks out of it and you get to sell papers. But of course it doesn't--they always say do it to restore public confidence, but it has the exact opposite effect, because it reveals all the [laughing] foibles and flaws and warts of the system, and it just undermines confidence all the more. So, that's a paradox.

So the system did seem, to me, definitely in need of repair. And so I based that campaign in '92 on cleaning up the system, and the symbol of that was to only take $100 [donations]. That was really a way of telegraphing the idea that big money was destroying the country, and we the people would have to take back the 00:49:00country. That was the idea. Others have tried that, [Ross] Perot, in some way; Trump in different ways. Pat Caddell was always looking for a candidate to do all that, to be a reformer. Gary Hart was that, so everybody's been looking for the, as I called it once, the man on the white horse, to come in and fix things. But, we now know that men on white horses are not to be trusted too naively.

SHAFER: How did you settle on the $100 limit? We interviewed--is it Jodie Hicks?

BROWN: Jodie Evans.

SHAFER: Evans, rather, who said originally you wanted it to be $250, and she talked you down just to a hundred.

BROWN: Well, another guy did too, Joe Costello. Costello was a guy there. It was in her house; I can't remember who it was. It seemed impractical, but it was more memorable. So you could remember $100. That's the reason why.

SHAFER: That was the main thing?

BROWN: Well, communication is the main thing, right? And you've got to keep it 00:50:00simple. Even Pepsi, now Pepsi beats the others cold, right? Join the Pepsi generation. That's not a convoluted--of what the ingredients are. No, I mean you have to communicate, as I like to say, when I try to get people to write more clearly: subject, verb, object. See Spot run. That's the basic paradigm, and you can elaborate that, but don't get too far away. It's like Hemingway. [laughing] The old man got up, walked down to the shore, picked up his fishing line, got into the boat and started paddling. It's that simple. I read Old Man and the Sea with that idea. I read it as an exercise in rhetoric and how you communicate.

MEEKER: And write vigorous prose.

BROWN: Vigorous but brief. Now, when I studied Latin, of course, you studied Cicero and the grand flourishes of Ciceronic prose. That's something different, 00:51:00so there are differences. And when they prefer one to the other, it's part of the shift, and something I very much focus on, that there are fads and what's current. And right now I think simple, muscular prose is what we need, and there are people who make it too complicated. I fight against that. But there are some very eloquent people. If you read Cardinal Newman or [Thomas Babington] Macaulay--these guys write grand sentences. But to write grand sentences, you've got to be very smart and you have to be good at it. And most people aren't, because they haven't been educated.

SHAFER: A lot of people felt George Bush was not vulnerable. I mean at one point I think, in 1991, his approval rating was like 90 percent after the Gulf War.

BROWN: I said he was more popular than George Washington--and then he wasn't. So that was certainly a lesson in political volatility.

SHAFER: What goes up can come down.

BROWN: Well, Kissinger was Super K. He had a picture in a Superman cape on the front of Time magazine [means Newsweek magazine]. I remember that. And then it was a few years later the Republicans--he was now the Lone Ranger. No one wanted to talk to him. Of course he's still around, and he's still giving advice, because he has a very profound sense of things. So, things come and go. That's what you get the longer you're around. When you start, you think this is the way it is. Well, after you wait ten years, you might know it's another way. And if you wait another ten years, it'll be yet again something different. Then you have to understand how to, how do you function in a world that is ever-changing? 00:53:00And I understood that even when I was on the debate team. I had a closing which I think has been written about. And my closing, whether I was arguing for the affirmative of a proposition or the negative, I'd always close and say, "What we need is a flexible plan for an ever-changing world." And that was my formula on the debate team. [laughing] And I found that was pretty useful all the way along the line.

SHAFER: Before we get into the '92 race, I just want to ask one more thing about the party chair. Which was after Feinstein lost to Pete Wilson in 1990, I think John Burton wanted you to step down as--?

BROWN: Right, well, John Burton did not like the idea that there was an independent political personality in charge of the party. He did not like that at all. Subsequently, when I ran for governor, he was extremely friendly--so as people get older, they know there's not much time left, so they start-- And the 00:54:00Burtons were, of course, close to my brother-in-law, Joe Kelly. They were friends; I think they played basketball together.

SHAFER: Did he feel like you were, like having someone well known was a distraction from the candidates?

BROWN: No, no. It's a threat to power. The legislature has their dark arts, and do you want a reformer sitting in charge of the treasury? I think that caused anxiety. Now, he might have had other ideas, felt I wasted money--he probably thought Marshall Ganz was a big waste--that idea. And as it turned out, it was wasteful. [laughing] Like everything else in politics, you look at it, and you've got a point there. And then when you turn it over, there's another point. But some points are more sustainable than others, and Burton had some good ideas on that.

SHAFER: Did he think you were partly to blame for Feinstein losing?

BROWN: Well, that's part of blame management. And that's very important. I say that humorously, but I'm dead serious. If you can't figure out who to blame when 00:55:00something goes wrong, you're going to be blamed. And a lot of times you can't solve the problem, but you can certainly unload it on somebody else. [laughing] And so they had that view, which I thought was ridiculous.

And they said I spent too much money, which was an ideal--it was this idea that [Alan] Cranston had hired Marshall, and they had this nonprofit, and they were hiring people, you know, registering Latino voters and all the rest of this stuff, through nonprofits and through political action committees. But then that guy in Arizona, the savings and loan, Lincoln Savings, got--that one, then Cranston--but he was building a political operation with Marshall as the architect, and so I picked that up. In fact, Cranston, when I was running for party chair, really made that a condition of him endorsing me, that I would hire 00:56:00Marshall. So once you hire Marshall, now you're spending millions of dollars, and that's not going to make Burton happy and the legislative group.

I knew there was going to be a deficit, and I didn't want it hanging around me. So I actually had a contract written, that Larry Tramutola and the others--that they were solely responsible for the fundraising between the primary and November, and Anne [Gust-Brown] helped me write that contract. So it was her first job. No, not her first, that was her second job. She also helped me defend against somebody who said that I unfairly kicked him off the stage because I kept him to the one-minute standard, and he was a Latino and said that I had discriminated against him. So we went to court, and we prevailed. It was dismissed. [laughter in background]

But the business of Feinstein and Wilson: First of all, the mood--it was still that conservative Deukmejian, President Bush. And as I recall, now, you have to look at, you don't really know about these things unless you really get polling data, really analyze it, and have somebody who has really good judgment. Those are almost impossible conditions, and this many years later, it is virtually impossible. It can be done to an approximation. [laughing] And so doing that, I would say that somehow Feinstein said something about a sales tax. And Wilson really hung that around her neck, that she wanted to raise taxes. So that was the, I thought--the tax. He said she was a taxer, and that thing worked. That 00:58:00was the mood then. Although she did the capital punishment--and you could look back at that, and she gave a speech and got booed and had it filmed. That's pretty intentional, isn't it? Do you think she realized what she was doing?

SHAFER: Of course she did.

BROWN: Okay. Is that good or is that bad?

SHAFER: Clever.

BROWN: Well, it worked better than [John] Van de Kamp, who was a little more straight and kind of moving in a world that doesn't exist.

So I think they blamed it on the turnout registration. But I always find, just for what it's worth, registration--and now the Democrats and Republicans have sunk [money into it]. And I think these are the enthusiasm--what ignites, what gets people to vote. Trump, they say, got more turnout at this recent election 00:59:00in Orange County. Can we build a political grouping where you pay a decent salary, and give people a car and have them drive around the districts to bump up registration? Some shaggy kid saying, "Will you sign up with the Democratic Party?" That's very ineffective, just like door to door--they say the field operation. Well, I remember Assemblyman Tom Bane once, smiled--strange bird--and he said, "Yeah, my field operation is the US Post Office." So, by mail, you know it's there. It doesn't have any other flaws. It gets there.

So that's the problem with registration. You can do it in a small district for a limited period of time, but it's not even clear that the people will then vote. What you need is excitement, anger. You had the Trump voters who turned out. You 01:00:00have the anti-Trump voters who turned out. Then you had Wilson and [Proposition] 187, and then the backlash from that. That mobilized more people than all our registration drives combined, because that is a message coming across the media, reaching into homes and minds and hearts, and touching people, and now they react. That's a lot different than just knocking on the door and, "Hi. I see you're not registered to vote." And you have a little--some character. I don't know what they're going to look like. They're not usually in a tie, and looking like they're--they're from the Jehovah's Witnesses. They look a little more scruffy--usually. [laughter in background] And so, I think that's a hard business to succeed at. That's my view.

HOLMES: Governor, speaking of the 1990 election, outside of Feinstein there were other Democratic losses, and one of--

BROWN: Well, there was a Democratic win too. [Sal] Cannella. We won the Cannella 01:01:00race, in the Valley. That was a big deal.

HOLMES: One of the critiques was also the lack of TV advertising by the Democratic Party.

BROWN: Up to that point, I don't think the--are you aware of any TV ad that the party ever bought? I'm not. And they may be there, but I'm just not aware of it. That was never viewed as the party's job. The party was essentially on registration, and when you run for governor, what the party always says, "Now, how much money is your campaign going to give to the registration drive." And we always say, "We don't want to give you any money. We want to put it on TV." And so the party was more the registration mechanism.

HOLMES: Because I know some people were trying to at least--

BROWN: Who?

HOLMES: In the stories I read from the 1990 election.

BROWN: A lot of these stories are advocacy pieces. But go ahead, what did they--?

HOLMES: Well, in the sense that they were saying that you were not convinced 01:02:00that TV ads were going to be effective with the voters.

BROWN: No, that is cuckoo. I'm totally impressed with TV ads. TV ads make a big--when I showed up in Maryland, and massive crowds and adulation and excitement--those were TV ads that paved the way. No TV ads? But who said that? There's a story behind here, but it's distorted, and you've got it half-baked.

HOLMES: It's not, well, half-baked. It was a biographer. Actually, it was the biographer, Chuck McFadden--

BROWN: And what did he say? What did it say--who said it though? I've got a pretty good memory on this stuff.

HOLMES: Well, that's fine. I can show you the page and you could read it.

BROWN: Yeah, so they were saying the party would take out a TV ad. What would the TV ad say?

HOLMES: They were saying as chairman of the party that you scorned TV ads for candidates during the 1990 election.

BROWN: With what kind of money?

HOLMES: Maybe that was the issue. I don't know. Not to spend money on TV ads, but to put the money into something else.

BROWN: I can tell you when I ran for governor, the party did not take out a single TV ad. And besides, the party only did what the candidates wanted. The party is not an--that was really the problem of my chairmanship, that I was somewhat autonomous. Only somewhat, because I very much was constrained by the party, the people in it, and what they want and don't want. And then the legislators and the other forces that make up the Democrats. Whatever this is has me very curious.

HOLMES: It's right here. [reading] "Brown proved adept at bringing more money into the party, expanding get-out-the-vote drives and improved grassroots organizing, but he scorned heavy campaign television advertising, just as he had in his 1974 gubernatorial race against Houston Flournoy. Oddly, for a political practitioner of his acumen, and one who had mastered the art of simple-minded political symbolism, Brown had difficulty believing that elemental, 01:04:00broad-brushed television spots could really influence voters, whom he thought were much too judicious, informed, and thoughtful to be swayed by television commercials."

BROWN: Okay, that's a very confused statement. [laughter] First of all, I did take out TV ads. And if you read the history of the '74 campaign, particularly the Mary Ellen Leary piece--it's not how I avoided news, but we were buying TV ads. That was critical. That may have something to do with--there's probably some statements that he picked up, probably related to Marshall Ganz, that we had to build the grassroots. We had to build the organization through the party building; generic ads for the party wouldn't do much. But when you're talking about a candidate, the TV is--so there's two points there. TV or what--mail? Or TV or paying bodies to go knock on doors? But is that for the party 01:05:00registration, or is that for a candidate election? What do we call that, you've mixed all that together, and it's not--

HOLMES: I didn't write it, Sir. [laughing]

BROWN: You'd have to unpack it into its constituent elements, and then I could tell you, as I just have, what the elements are.

MEEKER: I think one last question about your term as party chair, you've mentioned a few times the interaction you had with John Burton. What about Willie Brown?

BROWN: Uh--a little bit.

MEEKER: It's interesting, his name has hardly come up in this interview.

BROWN: Well, he's around. He called me last week. Yeah, I can't remember. The party is its own thing. I was in the party, and I went around and I was all enthusiastic. And we had these E-Board meetings, which I'd never heard of 01:06:00before. And you had to put them on and they cost money, and every time you spend money, you've got to raise money. The party had some money to do telemarketing, so that helped create a base of funds. But I think the Burton thing was only a limited--I talked to him a couple of times. I don't know whether it related to Feinstein--well, Willie Brown came in, because Feinstein listened to Willie for some reason. Because he didn't grow up in San Francisco. And I think she probably viewed me as more distant, a little more, you know, just not as, not as--I don't think I created as much comfort. And maybe Willie--he was around, and she thought Willie really knew stuff. I thought, myself, that I understood statewide campaigns better, and I think I would have been a better counselor, 01:07:00but I didn't have that credibility at that point--in her mind. And because I'd been in LA and, also, I was the son of the person who gave her her first political job--and Willie was active on that. But Willie, I think--was he the speaker in that--?

MEEKER: Mm-hmm.

BROWN: So Willie, of course, you know there's the--

SHAFER: He was sort of the poster child for the term limits at that point.

BROWN: Right, but you know that there's an inherent conflict between legislative elections and gubernatorial elections. You know what that is?

SHAFER: Money.

BROWN: No. That's only one part of it. Money is always a conflict. The gubernatorial candidate wants to get out base voters, like African Americans--hardcore, really strong Democrats. Now, the way it works, there are a lot of those hardcore Democrats, who are grouped in one assembly district, 01:08:00that's going to vote overwhelmingly for their local assemblyperson. So from the point of view of the legislature, putting one penny into that district is a total waste. They need to put money in a marginal district, where the registration is critical to winning by a few points in a more marginal district. The trouble with a marginal district--those are less-reliable Democrats. They may vote for the other guy! They might vote for Wilson, okay? I don't know whether that was perceived by people. It was totally perceived by me, because I knew, when I was running for governor, I want to get as many African-American voters, as many hardcore Latinos--not a lot of Latinos were Republicans. But the black vote, particularly, was so vital. And for the legislators, they might want to get votes, you know, in eastern Yolo County. Well, those votes are chancy for a Democrat, for the statewide--but crucial, because the legislator can run on a 01:09:00more conservative platform, and each of these different districts run on different--one might be anti-tax, one might be pro-tax.

I remember I was very shocked and scandalized, when I saw an assembly candidate in the '68 Democratic primary, in the black neighborhoods, running with the assemblyman's name and Bobby Kennedy's name. But when they got into the Upper West Side, they had the assemblyman's name and then they had Gene McCarthy's name. I said, well, how can you do that? Well, that's the way the mail game works. [laughter] So that's an illustration that legislative races are different, because they're so different--like in Orange County. You want to get out certain votes, but if you're running for governor, you want to get out the votes in South Central LA, you want to get out the votes in Oakland and 01:10:00Richmond, and things like that. So those are just some of the nuances that I thought were relevant.

But I think the campaign--first of all, it's hard to get people out to vote. So who knows what that election was, but there was a little blame. And again, I think it was this idea of Marshall. It's a little bit of this utopian, let's build a political party. But the old hands, "No, what are you doing? This is about registration, the money, getting it done, getting in the elections, and you're off on some toot that is not real." So I think that was a fair difference, that I understand better now than I did then.

MEEKER: Well, so 1990, you're kind of running this insurgent campaign, realizing that you're hitting your head against the wall. Then in '92, you decide to run an insurgent campaign for president.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah. Well, because I thought it might be interesting. I mean I 01:11:00thought it was possible, because there wasn't a candidate. I thought Bush--I don't know whether he was losing popularity, but I thought he was vulnerable. There were a lot of Democrats running--

MEEKER: First you had considered the senate.

BROWN: I considered the senate. But paradoxically, I thought it would be easier to run for president, because if you can win in New Hampshire, then that propels you to the next state. The trouble with the senate, you've got to to win the first election, which is the only election.

SHAFER: The primary.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And you were looking at Cranston--the Cranston seat, as opposed to the [John] Seymour seat? Yeah.

BROWN: Maybe.

SHAFER: Yeah, so did [Barbara] Boxer's entry into that--?

BROWN: Well, she was already in there.

SHAFER: Oh, so you were thinking of jumping in even though she was a--

BROWN: Well, I think I thought that before her--I can't remember. But I think that's when I polled about running as an independent, and I found that did not work.

SHAFER: For senate.

BROWN: Yeah. And then I didn't have enough of the connections to the money, to 01:12:00the institutional money. And I thought that senate could work, and I didn't think the $100 could work because it only works if you've got publicity. It only works if you get on TV and say, "Call 800-426-1112." But you can't do that in a state race because you don't get the same coverage. A presidential--there's more coverage, you've got to start in a smaller place. So the idea was correct, but the execution did not succeed.

SHAFER: In terms of the senate race, did you have any hesitation about jumping in given that it was the Year of the Woman?

BROWN: Well, see, you think in these clichés--the Year of the Woman. I thought more in terms of what are the chances? And I thought my chances were not sufficiently good that I would want to do it. So I just look at the situation. I'm not advocating a cause, my cause is my candidacy, and what are the other 01:13:00candidacies? And just looking at what's the strength and what's the weakness? And I judged: there was more strength in other people than there was in me. That simple. I thought about running for mayor of Los Angeles. I sat around with a bunch of liberals, talking about it, and every one of them had a different idea. I said my God, this is four million people--I think Oakland would be easier. It's only 400,000 people, and it's a more liberal city. That's what I thought then, so I did. That's how that worked, but that was a few years later.

So the task at hand has to be appraised, and I did not have a lot of sources of money. If I'd spent more time cultivating the moneyed interests, instead of going to the Zen Center or talking to Ivan Illich or those kind of 01:14:00things--there's a price to be paid for that. You know, so that happened.

SHAFER: Do you think that was sort of similar to what you were saying earlier, that Dianne Feinstein felt more comfortable with Willie Brown?

BROWN: I think so. I mean she feels very comfortable with me. She performed our marriage, so she's gotten quite friendly in recent years. But we're all getting older, so we feel we have more in common now.

MEEKER: What were your impressions of George H.W. Bush? Why did you think he was possibly vulnerable and you could defeat him?

BROWN: It's hard for me to remember. I met him at a football game once, I think in Michigan at the Super Bowl. He seemed like a nice fellow. He dropped into the suite where I was. I guess it depends where on the trajectory he was. I think we 01:15:00were in a recession by then. The Gulf War was not going so well.

SHAFER: No, the Gulf War went well. It ended--

BROWN: But at that point, at some point his popularity started going down.

SHAFER: Yeah. I think it was the economy.

BROWN: The economy really was tanking. People were really upset in '92.

MEEKER: Well, they also stopped by not taking--what's his name out, from Iraq, like they pushed the Iraqis--

SHAFER: Oh, Saddam Hussein?

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: Yeah, right, they left Saddam Hussein in power, and I think that--

BROWN: I don't think that had much--

SHAFER: [crosstalk] I think there was a sense he was out of touch with--that he more focused on foreign policy.

BROWN: Oh, because he didn't know how to go through the checker? You know, that checker's not that easy. [laughter] I've had a few problems going through. Yeah, getting my credit card in, and now they have that different kind of marker on the credit. So if you don't do that too often, it's very understandable, because 01:16:00I put my credit card in the wrong way and the guy said, "No, you put it in this way." [laughing] That would be very embarrassing if there was a photographer there.

MEEKER: In this campaign there's Bush, who would, of course, be the general election opponent. But there's a field--not a field like we see today, but certainly a field of Democratic candidates. And when you entered, was it apparent that Bill Clinton was going to be the front runner?

BROWN: No, no. Not at all.

MEEKER: Okay. Who were you looking at?

BROWN: I didn't know. I don't know. It's hard to tell. Maybe [Paul] Tsongas, because he was from Massachusetts. And Dukakis--he was following Dukakis, I guess, because he was right next door, and that gives you name ID. So that might have been--we didn't operate on precise data or analysis, and we started out on a shoe string and started slowly--and then we built up.

MEEKER: Did you start out with the We the People theme? Did you already have, fleshed out--

BROWN: Yes, that was an insurgent campaign. Take back America. And that was a good theme, because it's been picked up by more than one candidate.

SHAFER: What were you--taking it back from whom?

BROWN: From the special interests, the confederacy. Corruption--campaign consulting and campaign donations, or something. I had a great line there. Actually, it was Caddell's line.

MEEKER: What was his line?

BROWN: Confederacy of campaign consulting--I have it. It's written down. I put out a tweet the other day. You didn't see it?

MARZORATI: [in the background] A confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting.

BROWN: That's pretty good! It's just as good today.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: And campaign consulting. [laughs] Yeah, that's a good line. The campaign consultants don't like that, by the way. Do you know how many people that 01:18:00touches in the political establishment? I think we advanced by stepping over everybody who was running the show, so that was exciting. And a lot of people didn't like that. I did put that out in a tweet. It was a minute of my speech.

MEEKER: I'll look it up. The thing about the 19[92]--

BROWN: You're not following me on Twitter, which is a mistake, because I'm putting out something that--on Thursday.

MEEKER: The thing about the 1992 campaign that I find so interesting is this is really the first time, in a long time, that there's really a populist insurgence on a national scale. And you know, in preparation for today I went online, and I was looking at New Perspectives Quarterly. It's still being published, and a very interesting publication, and Nathan Gardels has what I think is a pretty useful definition of populism, so I'm going to read it. He says, populism comes 01:19:00"when an unresponsive elite forsakes average citizens in a system legitimated by popular sovereignty. Demagogues who fashion themselves as tribunes of the people ride the rage to power. They inevitably end up wrecking what has been painstakingly built. This is an old story going back to the collapse of the Roman republic." You know, in 1992, not only is there you, with the We the People campaign, that to me is populist--maybe not exactly in that definition, but in some manifestation. You also have George H.W. Bush, with his primary challenger Pat Buchanan. Also riding a populist wave.

BROWN: Yes.

MEEKER: And then you have the outside candidacy of--

BROWN: Perot, yeah.

MEEKER: --Ross Perot. Were you divining the sort of populist sensibility? Or was 01:20:00this something that you were--like the zeitgeist that you were tapping into?

BROWN: Well, that's what I was talking about in '74 in a milder version. The new spirit.

MEEKER: Yeah, it seems a lot different to me, the 1974 approach and rhetoric.

BROWN: Well, what--certainly the legislators thought it was directed against them. They took personal umbrage. But it was different, because the system had grown worse. You know, the money, the inequality, and then the recession. Of course all of that's been compounded. If you go back, it hasn't gotten better. It's gotten much worse. But what is your question? Did I divine--I'm not in the divination business. [laughter]

MEEKER: Okay.

BROWN: I had a water diviner who found a well out here, but it was very salty and we had to move on to another spot. I don't know how the divination--I saw the little rods, but no, I'm not a diviner.

MEEKER: Well, I guess there's different ways in which populism can manifest.

BROWN: But some people think that I do see with some clarity, what's going on.

MEEKER: Can you perhaps provide a summary of some of the things that you found in 1992 to be key issues of paramount importance?

BROWN: Well, we had this careerism, campaign consulting--and what was the third one?

MARZORATI: [in the background] Corruption--

BROWN: [laughing] Yeah, and I could throw in cronyism too. [laughter] I mean, it's just inherent in the state of, in what we might call--I don't want to use a Marxist term, but late-stage democracy. That's a nice term. I can put on my academic hat. Yeah, it's just where we are. You've got a lot of money, you've got a market that--well, now I'm reading what happened later. But there was a 01:22:00lot of people hurting, and Bush seemed to be above all that. And you had Reagan, who was certainly attacking labor unions. He's the guy who wanted to take away food stamps, wanted to take away food stamps at Christmas, or something like that. I mean the same way Truman and Dewey had a certain populist aspect. But I think there had been a heightened sense of a need for reform. Gary Hart had a lot of that. And so what I'm trying to get what the question there is, that--I mean the system, it's yeah, on the national level, it's always open. If you're 01:23:00an out and you want in, you have to just have to prove the ins should be thrown out. So then you look around and see well, what are the flaws here and what it affects. And that's it.

MEEKER: What was your strategy for actually doing that, given that you were going up against such entrenched interests?

BROWN: The strategy was to get into New Hampshire, Iowa, and start trying to--what was my strategy in Maryland? It was just--all of a sudden I was there, and I started winning. Well, I thought: why, that could work again. Well, it didn't work as well. It worked to a point, and it caught on a little bit. But the amount of resources that you need is far more enormous than I thought you needed. Well, look at Jimmy Carter. He just was running. You know, he put up a 01:24:00picture of Martin Luther King when he was governor, and he was out of money, and he had the Allman Brothers do a couple of concerts--and he kept going. And then he was the alternative to [George] Wallace, and Max Palevsky sent him some real money. So there are these things that happen that you can't foresee with some strategic meeting in an office somewhere. You have to get out on the field and take advantage of what happens, so that was the spirit in which I was running.

MEEKER: Well, a lot of commentators thought that you were, you know, a non-candidate, a non-story. Then you have this full hour on Phil Donahue the day before Connecticut. You win Connecticut, and then the next day Sam Donaldson brings you in for an interview.

BROWN: Yeah, what are you saying? Are you lamenting, or are you--?

MEEKER: No! I'm curious. So what, tell me about the--

BROWN: Curious about what? About how this--about reality?

MEEKER: I guess so. [laughing] That's not a bad thing to be curious about.

BROWN: Well, there it is. It speaks for itself. If you're not a winner, you don't get covered. And you don't get into the debate unless you have certain poll numbers.

MEEKER: Well, so tell me, tell me about the--

BROWN: How do you get poll numbers? Money or interest.

MEEKER: Right. Tell me about the Phil Donahue interview.

BROWN: I can't possibly remember the Phil Donahue [interview]. There's a tape of it. You can go read it.

MEEKER: I watched it.

BROWN: I can't remember it.

MEEKER: [laughing] Okay.

BROWN: Recently, or--

MEEKER: Last night, yeah.

BROWN: Well, it was in Sacramento. I do remember it was in Sacramento. We walked around. I can remember those two things. And I like Phil Donahue. What was interesting about it?

MEEKER: It was that it was so highly unscripted, and that you were there for an hour, and so there was a lot of opportunity for a whole wide variety of questions for you to really be tested. And it would be hard for me to imagine, in this day and age, a presidential candidate exposing themselves to that kind 01:26:00of unfettered questioning process.

BROWN: Well, that's what people did. First of all, before, there was no live television. There was no TV. And then there was TV, and there was long-form TV and long shows. And then there's just thirty-second commercials. And now there's controlled candidates. So it had kind of an evolution, and I've been around for the whole thing, as a rather young child, but now as an older person. I've seen it develop. I mean I've seen my father do a radio show running for--yeah, I guess I did see him. Well, I heard it--a live show on KFRC. You know, you buy time. You take out an ad in the papers. Yeah, "Listen to--Edmund G. "Pat" Brown is going to talk about the office of the district attorney." And then they turn the damn thing on, and you talk. Now, I guess they write something down, but it's live, so there was a lot of that.

SHAFER: When you think of your three runs for president: '76, '80, and '92, what do you think distinguishes 1992?

BROWN: More of an attack on the status quo--clearly. And not raising the money. That's huge. Most candidates are spending a huge amount of their time talking to people with money--either rich people, groups which are another form of rich people, or unions. Or if you're a Republican, you're talking to the Koch brothers, you're talking to [Sheldon] Adelson. I mean there's just a relatively small subset of individuals who control the flow of campaign money, and you're in their living rooms, you're in their offices, and that's what you're doing. So when you really perceive that, and you realize this is a subset of probably less than 1 percent--1 percent was something I used in the campaign. It became more 01:28:00popular later in the Occupy movement. But then when you don't do that, and all you do is do $100, and you do it with an 800 number, or you do it in grassroots meetings that is a totally different method and experience.

SHAFER: And is that by necessity or was that actually a strategy?

BROWN: Both strategy and necessity.

SHAFER: How--how well did it work?

BROWN: Well, you saw how it worked.

SHAFER: I mean how much did you raise, do you remember?

BROWN: $5 million or so, which they matched, so it turned out to be $8 [million] or $9 million. It was plenty of money. We could have used a little more, but I think that was not the missing ingredient. The other ones, I'm surprised, that fell by the wayside. But Clinton had contacts and resources. I attribute a lot to that he had more staying power.

MEEKER: Because of Walter Shorenstein and those sorts of people? Is that what you're talking about?

BROWN: Well, I haven't analyzed it enough to know. But I was the outsider, and so there was a whole swath of people who were not in my corner.

SHAFER: You made a lot of enemies in that campaign, do you think?

BROWN: I don't think--actually, not that many, given I was attacking everybody, I have an awful lot of friends. [laughter]

MEEKER: Maybe two enemies? Bill and Hillary Clinton?

BROWN: Well, I don't know if they're an enemy. I had a nice talk with Hillary before I endorsed her. I don't know. They may be more emotional--I don't see politics as one where you get all personally aggrieved about people who are your competitors. Yeah, I find that very strange. I find it even more strange when presidents say, "I've got a personal relationship." Well, it's nice. I mean Churchill lived in the White House for six months. That was very unique. So whether it's the competitors--I mean it's a business, it's a sport, or it's an 01:30:00action. And you want to be effective, and you can't be effective if you get all emotional about it, and all of a sudden you're all ego bound. That's a distorted lens from which to enter the fray.

SHAFER: There was that moment in the debate with you and Clinton that--it's probably one thing most people remember from that.

BROWN: Well, I don't know if--I don't think anybody remembers '92, but since they play that clip, they can see it, and then it's easier to remember.

SHAFER: What do you remember, you know, about that moment?

BROWN: I thought Clinton was pretty clever, because he shifted it from him to his wife, and attacking a woman is not a nice thing. So I thought he must have practiced that. He probably had more practice--he did have more practice than I did. And he was good. He was smart, even though my essential charge was correct. The Rose Law Firm did have representation, through corporate commissioners who were appointed by Bill Clinton. But that all of a sudden got--

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: I was surprised that he was forceful, and I was just as forceful as I 01:31:00could back to him. But it could be done better. Probably needed more practice. I would say practice makes perfect.

SHAFER: Do you think he had a--he was clued into it, that you were going to ask it?

BROWN: Maybe. I don't know how, but he might have been. Why, do you think there are spies in my campaign?

MARZORATI: That was Jodie Evans's theory.

SHAFER: Yeah. [laughs]

BROWN: Okay, well, Jodie--well, if there are, I mean there's a lot of dirty tricks in politics, and I'd say I find it very curious that everybody's blaming Putin, when every one of those characters have people working for them that have done similar activities--or at least analogous activities.

SHAFER: Yeah. Did you talk to Clinton after the debate?

BROWN: No, I don't think so.

MEEKER: On the Phil Donahue show, one of the things that I found to be notable was he--

BROWN: This was way before, wasn't it? This was just with me, or it was with Clinton?

MEEKER: It was just with you, and it was just before the Connecticut primary.

BROWN: Boy, I don't remember that.

MEEKER: You know, so a bit before the California primary, probably a couple months before that. And you know, he didn't pull any punches. I mean he certainly asked some hard questions and really forced you to explain, for instance, a flat tax. You appeared to actually relish these hard questions.

BROWN: I don't know if I did or not. I'd rather have easier questions.

MEEKER: Yeah. Tell me about the flat tax. Where did that come from, and--?

BROWN: That came from a simple idea that taxes were an issue, and I wanted to say something about taxes. But it's so damn complicated that it's not something you can do in politics. I knew how complex taxes are, and they've only gotten more complex. So just put it on a postcard, and you'd eliminate so much--so many lawyers and accountants and complexity. And also, the idea that law is so complicated that only the experts understand it. That I find always offensive. 01:33:00And today, I find the same thing with the criminal law, that nobody can understand it except the DAs, the district attorneys. So I thought the flat tax would be good, and since it would lower taxes on the rich, I, in some of my speeches I'd combine it with a wealth tax. So if you put the two together, you could create progressivity--at least that's what I said. I'd say today you'd have to have a flatter tax, but it's very hard when somebody's paying 36 percent, and so everybody's going to do 13 [percent], while the guys at the top--it's quite a windfall. So you have to somehow--because of the inequality, it makes it difficult to avoid a progressive tax and get the job done.

MEEKER: Well, also because today, you know, those on the lower rung effectively pay no taxes or get a refund, with the earned income tax credit.

BROWN: Right, so--yeah, and it's worse today than it was then. I think the stratification is more obvious today than it was in '92.

MEEKER: Would you think it would be worth exploring something like a flatter tax than we have today?

BROWN: Well, I certainly think we should have a simpler tax. How you deal with the fact that the top 1, the top 10 percent have gotten much, have increased their share of national wealth and national annual income? That has to be dealt with. In fact, I just wrote a blurb to a book called, The Meritocracy Trap: [How America's Foundational Myth Breeds Inequality], where I briefly, in a blurb, opined on this topic. And you'll see that book--it'll be out in a few months, by a professor from Yale, who talks about how the rich are able to give their kids such enormous advantages that they get into the best colleges, and then they get the best jobs. And the best jobs are eliminating the middle-level jobs that supported the middle class. And he says that negative-feedback system has to be broken.

MEEKER: It seems like in '92 you were opposed to the tax code being used as a method for redistribution of wealth in the United States.

BROWN: Well there are so many other factors. I was against NAFTA, because I saw what was going to happen. The American businesses move to Mexico, pays two bucks an hour instead of $25 an hour--and that's what happened. If you notice the latest worry--and now everyone is quite upset at Trump's 5 percent tariff, because that's a tax on American business. Because General Motors makes a million cars in Mexico and sells 800,000 of them up in the United States. So it really wasn't a trade treaty as much as a framework that allowed American 01:36:00employers to rent Mexican workers by firing American workers. That's what Perot talked about and Trump talked about, and I talked about. I opposed that. So that's another element of the inequality, the global economy and the meritocracy that emphasizes degrees and skills that are only held by the few.

And the taxes--once things are earned, it's hard to take them away through taxes. But the question is are they really earned? Is the president of a major bank worth $20 million or $40 million? By what he did, and then all the people working for him? And so the gap between the CEO used to be twenty to one or thirty to one; now, it's 300 to one. So that has to be attacked, and that's 01:37:00enormously difficult, enormously difficult. So I don't think you can put the whole burden on taxes. So you run a society where people really think that the president, the CEO of this company is worth a hundred million a year--or $20 million. And then you're going to take it back through the taxes? I think you have to start earlier, and say how do we allow these disproportionate salaries to be given to the very few, when the whole enterprise depends on government? For example, in these companies that depend on intellectual property--intellectual property is worthless if you can't defend it. And you can only defend it with government, with law, with the FBI, with the courts.

And so if it's a publicly protected and therefore constituted good, the public ought to make sure that it is a good. And I would assert it's not a good--it's a 01:38:00bad, and it's creating more and more dissension. And so yes, I think taxation is where you ought to look, but you've got to start earlier. And you've got to start also, as this book on meritocracy says, you can't require four points to get into all these fancy schools. You should make sure that a significant percentage of the admittees are ordinary people. Otherwise, you get this vicious circle, where from the earliest moments--maybe even before conception--the rich are pouring massive training and cultural efforts into their children, and they prime them right up till graduate school, then they go over to Goldman Sachs or Google, or wherever they go.

And then, the example given in this meritocracy book would be, okay, if Wall Street can create mortgage securitization, and then when you have your bank, you 01:39:00don't need as much of a middle manager. You can automate it. And then you're not going to hold on to it anyway--you sell it. And I'm not quite sure whether that's the best example, but there is the sense in which the wizards of Wall Street are creating this enormous wealth, and that wealth is created by eliminating functionality that has provided the basis of middle-class living. For example, Lordstown, Ohio was a very important auto plant. Well, they closed it, because they can make it in Mexico. The same is true of banks. Now you can do it online, and it can be done with various forms of computerized programs, software. But who invents that? Well, obviously the guy who invents software that can replace ten thousand middle-level bank managers. Well, he ought to make 01:40:00a million dollars a year, while the bank managers maybe made $70,000 a year or $80,000. Those are gone. So now we only get the ones at the bottom, we get few at the top, and we have this mass discontented group that is fueling populism.

Now, that's the task, to get at that, and you have to hit it at many levels. The school mania, where they're testing and they're putting people through their paces in a way that the more affluent can do much better. And then when they do much better, that's validated by the jobs they get. And then by the jobs they get, they're viewed as being worth more, and they have to pay them enormous sums. Whereas fifty years ago the top man, and the second to the top, made a wage closer to what the middle-level guys were making, the online people, and we didn't have all this stock options and a lot of stuff that allows people--and 01:41:00people didn't have the pathology, like the tax break basically fed an enormous buyback of stock. Well, who owns the stock? The very wealthiest people. They were given tax breaks, and then on top of the tax breaks the corporation--and they bought their stock back, and who did they buy it back from? The stockholders, which represent the top few in the country. So the problem of inequality is in part taxes, but it's embedded in a much larger structure of compensation, perceived merit, education, trade, and all the rest of it.

SHAFER: We're almost out of time.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: But a couple more things about the 1992 campaign? At one point you talked about maybe having Jesse Jackson as a running mate for vice president. Yeah, how did that come about and why--?

BROWN: That was a bad idea.

SHAFER: How did it come about?

BROWN: Well, because we're on the margins, and that's a long ball that I threw out there, and we thought, you know, it was a chance to try to create some difference and win some votes. It had a very marginal effect in--obviously, in New York, it was a disaster.

SHAFER: And why him?

BROWN: Well, I knew Jesse Jackson, and I thought he did very well in his own run for president. I knew there was a risk, but it didn't seem, at that point--you know, when you're that far out, you feel you can take more risks than when you're getting close to victory.

SHAFER: Like Sarah Palin.

BROWN: Oh, maybe so. Yeah, people make judgments that are not so well thought out.

SHAFER: You--that year you lost the California primary to Bill Clinton.

BROWN: Yeah. Not by too many points--like four.

SHAFER: Yeah, it was like forty-six, forty-one, or something. What did you make of that?

BROWN: I made that he's on a roll. He's the winner. I thought I did pretty darn good for having no television ads, and having no chance to win.

SHAFER: At that point you were out of money? Or--

BROWN: No, we had money. I don't think we took any ads--I finished with a million-dollar surplus.

SHAFER: And did you see it as a--you know, I mean it was your home turf. You know, there was the whole--

BROWN: No, that's not the way it works. In presidential campaigns, when you're not--now, if you're not a winner, you're not going to win even your home state. I did that against Jimmy Carter, but it was a little earlier. I did beat Jimmy Carter, and that was kind of a phenomenon. Why was I winning, when I wasn't a perceived winner? That was earlier. I was a new phenomenon on the block. But that was a longer campaign year. You had negative ads, but it was mostly that 01:44:00Clinton had sealed the nomination, and that gives you legitimacy. One of the things that one pollster told me in the seventies, he said, "One of the best predictors of whether you're going to win or not is a poll that asks people, 'Who do you think is going to win?'" And the person who they think is going to win is often the--I don't know how often, but this person said that's your best indicator of how you're doing, whether they think you're going to win. So the obverse of that is if they know you're not going to win, they're probably not going to vote for you unless you have a very strong ideological hold. People would vote just as a statement.

SHAFER: So you went to the convention in New York with 596 delegates--a pretty good haul.

BROWN: Well, not too many second candidates have had that many since then, have they?

SHAFER: Yeah, so what did you--going into it what did you think you might use that for, those chips?

BROWN: No, there's nothing to use other than to make points, say what I said, lay out the issues. By the way, I'll find that speech, but it's still pretty solid. Oh, '92--I put it on the, that's the one I tweeted out, a piece of that. So no, it was just the idea--I thought we'd get some things in the platform.

SHAFER: What was the most important to you?

BROWN: Well, I wanted to put a limit on campaign spending, raise the minimum wage and index it, and oppose NAFTA. Those were some of the things but the Clinton people, they didn't have to deal--they had all the votes. So I thought that maybe that we would get some, they'd have to make some, that--

SHAFER: Concession.

BROWN: Some arrangement, that we could at least win something, and that would be positive, I guess.

MEEKER: Was an endorsement a bargaining chip in this, in terms of getting some things on the--?

BROWN: Well, we didn't talk about the endorsement. I wanted those issues more than my--I wasn't, I was in a more insurgent stage at that point, so I wanted some issues that I tried to get on the platform, like no NAFTA unless working standards, labor standards, and also environmental standards. Well, they're still talking about that. That was a good idea. but they didn't want to do that.

HOLMES: What about eliminating the Department of Education? So--we see this, I believe it was in a 2016--

BROWN: I opposed that in 1980, I think.

HOLMES: But you called for the elimination of the Department of Education in 1992.

BROWN: Um, well--maybe I did, okay. Well, I fought Arne Duncan on Race to the Top [federal education grant], so I'm pretty consistent on that. What are you asking?

HOLMES: I'm asking what was the motive behind calling for the elimination of the department?

BROWN: What's the purpose of the Department of Education? I mean the state Department of Education--all it is is a pass-through for the federal department. Then you get down to the classroom, and you get down to these gaps between the richer neighborhoods and the poorer neighborhoods. So what is the federal government--yeah, we like some of their money, but what can they do? What can the federal government do in the Department of Education? Honor teachers, a few hundred teachers? Can it--what? Issue regulations? But who's going to issue the regulations for sixty million students and three million teachers?

And I went back there to meet with Arne Duncan. I walked down a long hallway, and I looked to my left, I looked to my right, and when the doors were open I saw these people on their computers. I said, "Yeah, that's who the Department of 01:48:00Education is: young people sitting at the computer sending emails: 'Do this, or don't do that. Oh--audit exception. You missed this rule.'" So it's a regulatory framework from afar, or as I say, "Issuing commands from the bunker out to the classroom, where the teacher shuts the door and has to face twenty-five kids." That's the issue, so they build up this imperial court, where they go through their gestures, and I'm dubious of it--and I'm dubious of it now.

And that's one of the reasons we tried to eliminate some of the state programming, categorical programs. I'm suspicious of distant authority micromanaging human relations, which seems like an obvious to me. But people think, "Oh, education is important! So let's do something." Well, where are we 01:49:00standing? Are we in the classroom? Are we down the hall in the principal's office? Are we at the local board of education office? Are we talking to the elected representatives? Are we talking to the appointed superintendent? Oh no? Then are we in Sacramento? Are we talking about the state board? Are we talking about the state department? Are we talking about the education committee of the assembly? The education committee of the senate? On the state legislature? Or the governor? Oh! Are we talking about Congress, or the Department of Education, or the committees in Congress, or the president? That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and they're very far from that classroom.

And being in Oakland, having these two charter schools, here we are. What are we going to do about it? And how do we recruit the teachers? How do we work with them? How do we get the kids motivated? You know, all of that. What do we do with problems? What do we do with dope on campus? What do we do with sexual 01:50:00activities, harassment or bullying--whatever. How do we do all that? Then the parents come in, and you know, it's one thing after another. So that reality is so present to me that I find it totally delusional to sit in a department with thousands of people working on their computers, purporting to control. Now, there's only one way they can control, and that's to standardize and turn kids into little widgets, and you can prescribe widget behavior from three thousand miles away.