By Tim Redmond
Hillary Clinton never did this!
I think it’s pretty clear now that Jerry Brown’s press office made a huge mistake in secretly recording conversations with reporters. (For starters, why do it in secret? I’ve done plenty of interviews where I turned on the tape recorder and the politician’s press secretary said, hey, I’m going to record this, too, just so we have a copy and we can be sure you’re report is accurate. Which is always fine with me, and I’m sure would have been fine with the reporters in this case.)
But one good thing came out of it: We have the full transcripts of some fascinating interviews.
Joe Matthews at Foxandhoundsdaily has posted the full 93-page pdf here.
I agree with Matthews — the best interview is the one with AP reporter Beth Fouhy. It shows the good and the bad side of Jerry Brown in full glory, more than any summary or even detailed profile could. It also shows why the progressives need to be prepared to really push Brown on some critical issues — because whatever he was in the 1970s, he’s not acting like a progressive today.
Some of the remarkable details from the interview:
Fouhy: I think you make a really good point. Hillary [Clinton] had never been a candidate.
JB: She doesn’t have the scope. She didn’t work with Mother Theresa. She didn’t spend six months working in a Zen Buddhism. She didn’t take Linda Ronstadt to Africa. She didn’t have her own astronaut. I had Rusty Triker (sic), an astronaut. I put him on the state energy commission. There is a certain texture to who I am, and it’s unique, so I don’t know how you compare it.
JB: I’d like to do something about the prisons. They’re very expensive and have a gross inefficiency, the recidivism rate in California prisons is the highest in the country. What that means is that they’re not working. They keep people off the street, but when they return them, they’re as bad as when they went in, if not worse.
JB: The last time there was real creativity in the state was when I was governor. We created the California Conservation Corp., made the state the leader in wind energy, that was the time when these new innovations in Silicon Valley came along. I brought people into government. We protected the wild and scenic rivers. In fact, people stigmatized, they said there were too many new ideas.
JB: Is the past yesterday? Or ten years from today?
Fouhy: Do you think that Prop. 13 needs to go away?
JB: The real estate taxes have grown since Prop. 13 dramatically. Because property has shifted. Property shits, the tax rate goes up to the current assessed value. …. 13 has centralized decision making in state government and it may be that local government needs more authority to make decisions and I think that’s worth looking at.
So Brown at least gets the point on the state prisons — but he pulls a world-class duck on Prop. 13. He talks about creativity in government, and it’s true — back in his first term, the state did all sorts of cool stuff. But that was when Brown was willing to take risks. Now he’s sounding too much like a grump who doesn’t think anything can really change — witness his battle with John Burton, in which he proclaimed that single-payer “is never going to happen.”
The old Jerry Brown would never have used that term.
So he’s got his old weird (sometimes lovable) spacy-ness, but not so much of the bold vision. Not a great combo.