(Photo: AP/McLendon)
When Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo-the Democratic governors of America's two biggest and most important blue states-signed bills hiking their respective states' minimum wage to $15 on Monday, the press noted that there seemed to be a bit of a race between the two to see who could sign the landmark legislation first. (Thanks to the time difference between New York and California, Cuomo put pen to paper a couple of hours before Brown.) What the press didn't note, then or ever, were the odd similarities, both political and biographical, between the nation's two most consequential Democratic governors.
So, let's note them: Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo both govern states previously governed by their fathers. Both of their fathers were iconic liberals. The sons, by contrast, have made a point of distancing themselves from their fathers' liberalism. And now, in qualified fashion, both are returning to it.
Jerry's father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, who governed California from 1959 through 1966, is widely, and rightly, regarded as the Golden State's greatest governor. Both a product and a champion of California's postwar liberalism, Pat Brown signed pioneering civil-rights legislation into law. He devised the first master plan for public education in any state, and built most of the campuses of the University of California and of the California State University, as well as the aqueducts that enabled Southern California to grow. To pay for all this, he pushed a highly progressive income tax through the legislature. In essence, he promoted and enacted a state-sized version of the Great Society, several years before Lyndon Johnson leaned on Congress to enact the national version.
More of an avuncular than a charismatic figure, Brown was regarded by some as a genial second-rater. (In Theodore White's Making of the President 1960, White's reconstruction of John F. Kennedy's thought processes in selecting a vice president contains the following paraphrase-I quote it in full-of Kennedy's thoughts on Brown as a possible running mate: "Brown? No, not Brown.") Like Johnson, Brown paid a political price for the uprisings of the sixties-though, unlike Johnson, Brown could hardly be held culpable for the Vietnam War. Seeking a third term in 1966, Brown was unseated by Republican Ronald Reagan, who excoriated Brown for both the Watts riots and the student unrest at Berkeley, and also attacked Brown for opposing the death penalty.
Within a decade of Brown's defeat, however, a glow seemed to settle over his time and performance as governor. No one, it was clear, had done more to build the state, to make California modern, open, and competitive. In his later years, when Brown would enter a room-something I saw a good deal of in the 1980s, when, in my pre-journalistic, campaign-consultant mode, I worked with him on a campaign to retain several state Supreme Court justices-the warmth and appreciation with which he was welcomed was palpable.
"Warmth" is not a word anyone has associated with Pat's son, at least until very recently. In manner, Pat had been a natural pol-in good humor, at ease in any setting, something of a non-ethnic Tip O'Neill in his dealings with all manner of people. Schlepped onto the public stage as an unwilling child of an elected official, by contrast, young Jerry cringed at crowds, and retreated into a Jesuit seminary for part of his twenties. Elected California's secretary of state in 1970 and governor in 1974,
Jerry was cool where Pat was warm; somewhat counter-cultural; vaguely Buddhist; stridently single (batting down ill-founded rumors that he was gay by vacationing in Africa with Linda Ronstadt); sleeping on a mattress on the floor of an apartment-clearly, a pol who'd come out of the sixties.
Pat smiled. Jerry was stern.
Where Pat had been a paleo-liberal (only it wasn't paleo when he governed; it was just plain liberal), Jerry was a neo-lib avant la lettre. The era of big government projects and programs, he said-20 years before Bill Clinton-was over. We were living in an "era of limits," he proclaimed. Small, he insisted, was beautiful. He put activist environmentalists in charge of major agencies; he had little rapport with old-line union leaders, though he established collective-bargaining rights for farmworkers (no other state had done that); he appointed death-penalty opponents to the state Supreme Court. (It was on the 1986 campaign to ensure their retention that I met and worked with Pat. We lost.) Jerry opposed Proposition 13, a right-wing measure to cut property taxes and defund a chunk of public services, when it came before voters in 1978. But after it passed, he became its staunchest defender, and even advocated a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A liberal in social policy, he was, by the time he left office in 1982, a fiscal conservative.
MARIO CUOMO WAS CLOSER in age to Jerry Brown's generation than he was to Pat's-Pat was born in 1906; Mario in 1932; Jerry in 1938-but Mario was more a liberal in Pat's mode than a neo-lib in Jerry's. More precisely, he was the most eloquent liberal at the height of the Reagan Revolution. As governor of New York from 1983 through 1994-he entered the governor's office in Albany on the same day that Jerry left his in Sacramento (though Jerry was later to return)-Mario's legislative accomplishments fell short of epochal. New York had already had its Pat Brown master builder; that had been liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, who, like Pat, became his state's governor in 1959. Mario also faced, as Pat Brown did not, a Republican-controlled state senate, which blocked some of his more progressive initiatives.
But Mario won the hearts of liberals everywhere with his keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, an attack on Reaganomics in which he painted a picture of two Americas: Reagan's city on a hill, but also vast plains and valleys in which many Americans were compelled to live at some considerable distance from prosperity or even civic equality. The economy had not yet become so polarized that Cuomo could point to the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but he documented and described an America en route to that terminus, explained how Reaganomics was pushing it there, and staunchly defended the necessity of government, big government, to arrest the rise in inequality. Indeed, it was to combat just such a vision that the Democratic Leadership Council was formed, and when former DLC chairman Bill Clinton entered the Democratic presidential primaries in 1992, he fully expected to wage an ideological battle against Cuomo, who disappointed his supporters by choosing not to run.
(Photo: AP/Kathy Willens)
If Jerry Brown was the temperamental opposite of his father, Andrew Cuomo was the exaggeration of his own father's combativeness and testiness. Fierce and cold, nursing grudges that dimmed even the brightest days, Andrew also made clear, as Jerry had, that he was not his father's son in matters of ideology. He feuded with New York City's liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio. He took socially liberal positions on issues like gay marriage but drew the line on expanding social services or raising taxes on America's wealthiest potential taxpayers, the bankers and traders of Wall Street. And to make sure the legislature wouldn't present him with bills that did just that, he didn't lift a finger at election time to flip control of the State Senate from the Republicans (who had gerrymandered themselves a narrow Senate majority in what was an overwhelmingly Democratic state) to his own Democrats.
The year Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York (2010) was also the year that Jerry Brown-in one of the most remarkable second, or possibly third, acts in American political history-was elected governor of California yet again. While age hadn't exactly mellowed him (Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine of the website Calbuzz called him "Krusty the Governor"), he had become less confrontational and even more social.
Still a fiscal conservative, serving as a brake on a generally liberal legislature, Brown has socked away revenue in a rainy day fund that Democratic assembly members and senators would prefer to spend on services for the poor, which were cut during the recession and have yet to be fully restored. In other ways, however, Brown seems to have become more of a liberal in his father's mode. Like Pat, he has raised taxes on the rich, backing a successful ballot measure that ended the chronic shortfalls in the state budget and restored some, though not all, spending on schools and social welfare. While still among the most environmentally oriented of American pols, Brown also had become, like his father, a master builder. His main ambition has been to build a high-speed railroad from Sacramento and San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego-an environmentally friendly and hugely expensive endeavor whose full funding he has yet to secure.
Brown has famously said that the art of governing is that of balancing left and right, and he balanced left enough in his first (or third) term-particularly in contrast to his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger-that he had no liberal opposition when he sought and won re-election in 2014. Indeed, liberals were grateful for Brown's leadership in raising taxes.
Andrew Cuomo, by contrast, had infuriated New York liberals by 2014, so much so that an all-but-unknown law professor, Zephyr Teachout, won 34 percent of the vote running a progressive campaign against him in the Democratic primary.
(Teachout is now running for Congress in New York's 19th Congressional District.)
In his first term, Cuomo seemed to be positioning himself as the centrists' choice for president if Hillary Clinton didn't run-or if she did, then in a future election. But as the base of the Democratic Party showed a steadily growing distaste for Wall Street (Cuomo's chief financial base of support), and as Teachout came from nowhere to wage a credible campaign against him, Cuomo has moved left. He has imposed a statewide moratorium on fracking. He has successfully championed a $15 minimum wage. The real test of his ideological about-face awaits this year's elections: It's still not clear whether Cuomo will bestir himself to help elect a Democratic State Senate. But as of now, his movement toward his father's politics is measurable, if still a work in progress.
The California that Jerry Brown governs today bears scant demographic resemblance to the state he governed in the 1970s. On a host of economic issues, the emergence of a vast Latino and immigrant working class in state politics has pushed the state well to the left of where it was during Brown's first go-round as governor. Brown fully understands this shift, and rather than seeking to diminish its full expression, as he sometimes has by reining in progressives in the legislature, he embraced it last week when he announced he'd sign a $15 minimum-wage bill. His announcement preceded Cuomo's by several days, just as Cuomo's signature on the legislation preceded Brown's by several hours.
Pat and Mario would have been pleased.
