Ready for the Small Time

OAKLAND â€”  Twenty years ago, when his promise burned bright and the future seemed boundless, Jerry Brown preached lowered expectations to a captivated California and famously forecast an era of limits. For Brown, at least, that prophesy may have finally come to pass.

From a glassed-in booth here in Oakland, the ex-governor has continued the exhortatory mission of his flame-throwing 1992 presidential campaign, railing against the venal, shortsighted and stupid--as he sees them--five days a week through the megaphone of talk-radio.

Now, in a lifetime full of unexpected turns, Brown is contemplating a move almost as startling as any in his idiosyncratic career: a run for Oakland mayor. The election is more than a year off and the former governor stubbornly refuses to discuss his intentions. “There is no campaign,� he insists. “It’s all a media invention.�

But political pros see all the stirrings, from Brown’s heightened profile on city issues to his stepped-up appearances before community groups to the “green plan for Oakland� now being drafted by acolytes of his political group based here, We the People.

“He’s walking like a duck and talking like a duck. Whether he’s a duck or not, I don’t know,� said one civic leader. “But he’s certainly showing all the signs of duckdom.�

And so Brown has come to live the words he once spoke, having failed in three increasingly feeble tries for the White House. Today, he jousts with the macro-problems of the world while contemplating power at the micro-level. Save the city, save the planet, says We the People’s recruitment manifesto.

“From Jerry Brown’s point of view it makes perfect sense,� said J. Anthony Kline, a longtime friend and confidant who has discussed the race with Brown. “For the last several years he’s been advancing the . . . idea that all politics is local. Oakland provides the ideal vehicle to address what are really the most important domestic issues of our time.�

Fueling talk of a potential candidacy, Brown has injected himself into battles over the city’s campaign finance law--with the candidate of $100 limits favoring tougher restrictions--opposed plans to ship hospital patients to neighboring Emeryville and protested a newspaper’s firing of its Asian American columnist.

To fight a proposed bay-front development, Brown used his radio pulpit to summon followers to City Hall. He has also lobbied for a seat on the Port Commission, a move rejected by Mayor Elihu Harris because of the possible political overtones. Harris, who is serving his second term, is widely expected to create an opening by stepping aside next year.

Brown, 59, who grew up in San Francisco, entrenched himself in Oakland not long after his failed 1992 presidential bid. He sold his home in San Francisco’s ritzy Pacific Heights and moved decidedly down market to Oakland’s Jack London Square.

There, amid the thrum of the city’s working waterfront, Brown constructed a sort of live-in town hall, combining communal eating-and-sleeping quarters with a broadcast studio and 500-seat auditorium. A regular We the People lecture series has covered topics from midwifery to monasticism, and the center hosts regular sessions of Zen and tai chi.

Where Brown portrays all this as an effort to “strengthen the bonds of community and friendship,� others see a ready-made political operation. The question is whether Brown will risk his last shred of credibility on a small-time contest that presents no certainty of success. “He knows he can’t lose another race,� said one old friend. “I don’t think there’s any more embarrassment that Jerry’s going to endure.�

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Oakland, to the everlasting frustration of boosters, is a city largely defined by what it is not. This other city by the bay is more way station than destination, a transshipment point for upwardly mobile people and oversized egos, for outward bound products and grandiose schemes.

Neither pretentious nor prettified, it is no smug civic boutique. Rather, Oakland is a striving and struggling urban core, with a booming port, affluent hillside enclaves, and vast stretches of impoverished lowlands aching and isolated amid the Bay Area’s sea of plenty.

Contrasting the two neighbors, campaign strategist Larry Tramutola offers what could be Oakland’s unofficial civic motto: “San Francisco tends to attract people who think of themselves or the city as bigger than what it is. Oakland just is what it is.�

And yet humble Oakland succeeds in a way other, more elegant places might envy. It is one of the most thoroughly integrated cities in America, according to census data, and a place where people of different races and cultures get along remarkably well.

The city experienced its white flight decades ago, and the large number of whites who stayed remain precisely because they cherish Oakland’s diversity, a word enshrined in the idealized mission statement hanging at City Hall.

With about 40% of the population, African Americans constitute the biggest chunk of Oakland’s roughly 400,000 residents. About a quarter of the city is Anglo. Asian Americans and Latinos, the two fastest-growing groups, each constitute about 15% of the population.

While an all-white business and political establishment ran the city up until the 1960s, Oakland has long boasted a stable and widely dispersed black middle class, going back to the days of the Pullman rail cars. Here, where the transcontinental railway ended, a porter’s salary could buy a decent home amid the gentle hills and a stake in the community.

Oakland has never exploded with the violence visited upon Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark or Washington. The tensions, where they exist, amount to a tug between skilled professionals--black and white--who want city resources spent to preserve the tidy, yuppified neighborhoods they share and Oakland’s stagnant underclass, which relies heavily on government help just to get by.

Given that backdrop, the election of successive African American mayors starting with Lionel Wilson in 1977--while undeniably a breakthrough--has proved disheartening for many here. Along with incumbent Harris, Oakland has an African American city manager, assistant city manager, police chief, city attorney, city clerk, head of economic development and head of personnel.

Still, many in the city’s poorest neighborhoods believe that two decades of black rule at City Hall have done little more than benefit a group of African American elites, who now prosper alongside the old establishment of white elites.

“When Lionel ran, we felt that getting a black person in office was a breakthrough,� said Frank Gilbert, a longtime neighborhood activist in hard-pressed East Oakland. “But after getting so many blacks elected, we found out we don’t need someone just because of color. We need someone in there who can produce. And a lot of people I talk to feel Jerry Brown would produce.�

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Symbiosis, Brown might call it. Here’s the notion: Brown becomes Oakland mayor and the Great Thinker applies his estimable brain power to the city. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff--which has always been his downfall--because he doesn’t have to. With a professional city manager to actually run the place, Brown is free to cogitate and perorate, the two things he arguably does best.

He brings celebrity and excitement to City Hall. He draws worldwide attention to Oakland and attracts brilliant minds from all over the globe, high-achievers who flock here to join his great mission in urban revitalization. Together, they prove all that think-globally-act-locally talk wasn’t just warmed-over ‘70s drivel.

(Take that, San Francisco, and your razzle-dazzle Mayor Willie Brown.)

Kline, a Jerry Brown associate since their days at Yale Law School, subscribes to this good-for-Oakland, good-for-Jerry theory.

“Oakland’s perennial problem is that it lives in the shadow of San Francisco. One of the things it does is diminish its ability to attract capital investment and talented people,� said Kline, who fought on the side of poor neighborhoods in Oakland’s seminal redevelopment battle more than 25 years ago. “Jerry Brown is not going to be in Willie Brown’s shadow. Nor is he going to permit Oakland to remain in San Francisco’s shadow.�

And if there’s some measure of vindication for Jerry Brown--who hasn’t run successfully for public office since being reelected governor in 1978--what’s the harm?

“Wherever Jerry Brown puts his mind to will be the most fascinating place in the universe at that time. That you can bet on,� said Bill Press, who helped direct the state’s urban policy as then-Gov. Brown’s head of research and planning.

Press knows firsthand of Brown’s flickering attention span and history of half-finished initiatives. As governor, Brown trotted off twice to seek the White House. In his last political comeback attempt, he quit as state Democratic Party chairman in 1991 less than halfway through his term to run a third time for president.

Still, Press--himself a former state Democratic chairman--believes the pluses of a Brown mayoralty could outweigh the assorted detriments.

“Yes, he can be flighty. Yes, he can be weird. But he’s still the brightest and most interesting person on the American political scene today,� Press said. Even if Brown stayed engaged at City Hall for just a couple years, “What you get during that short period of time is the full focus of a brilliant mind.�

And yet Oakland, perhaps the closest thing in California to a Rust Belt shot-and-beer kind of town, has never been big on dilettantes and dabblers.

“We’re not interested in great theorists,� gibed Ces Butner, head of the city Chamber of Commerce. “We’re interested in people who roll up their sleeves. We’re interested in practitioners here in Oakland.�

Indeed, many in town wonder how Brown, the avatar of ideas, would function as a minister of minutiae--which they see as the mayor’s inevitable role in a city filled with hyperactive homeowner groups and clamoring neighborhood activists.

Said Councilman Larry Reid, “I think Jerry will be very frustrated when people walk up and say, ‘Mayor Brown, my garbage didn’t get picked up.’ Or, ‘Mayor Brown, I need this pothole fixed.’ �

Which explains the beauty of Brown’s present political limbo. The tease is what’s tantalizing. In making the rounds of political clubs, touring black churches, heaving himself into local controversies, Brown keeps speculation at a boil. Blowing rhetorical smoke rings, he holds the city in his thrall.

One of those watching is Ed Blakely, the head of urban studies at USC and an Oakland resident planning his own run for mayor. While largely dismissive of Brown, he credits him with raising the profile of the contest, thus conferring a small measure of status on a city that could badly use a shot of self-esteem.

“It’s great to have this kind of attention being paid to the mayor’s race in Oakland,� said Blakely, his forbearance reflecting a certain resignation endemic to the city. “If a Jerry Brown is interested in the job, it says to people it must be something of value.�