One of my friends sent me this article from
The American Conservative magazine that suggested that Jerry Brown was fiscally conservative, in contrast with those Meg Whitman ads.
Brown served two four-year terms as California’s governor, and during that time he ran twice for the presidency. As his fame grew, he developed a bizarre public reputation in much of the country, but in his home state at least he was a successful politician. Widely remembered as a flamboyant liberal, he in fact mixed ideas from Left and Right, attracting support from Californians who ordinarily despised Democrats. When he ran for re-election in 1978, he managed to carry even the famously Republican Orange County.
And of course we know the story about how Jerry Brown was frugal and chose not to live in the mansion or ride in the limo.
Regarding Brown's fiscal policy...
...Governor Brown was much more of a fiscal conservative than Governor Reagan, even if he made arguments for austerity that the Republican would never use. (At one point, to get across the idea that a lean organization could outperform a bloated bureaucracy, he offered the example of the Viet Cong.) Reagan had raised taxes several times and boosted spending by an average of 12.2 percent a year. In his first year as governor, by contrast, Brown increased spending by just 4.6 percent, less than the rate of inflation. He wasn’t always so restrained in the rest of his reign, but he was thriftier than his predecessor, accumulating one of the biggest budget surpluses in California history. In Brown’s first gubernatorial campaign, he had denounced “recycled Reaganism.” In Brown’s first year in office, Reagan’s director of programs and policies joked that his old boss “thinks Jerry Brown has gone too far to the right.”
Brown also favored a balanced budget amendment and, though he opposed the tax-cutting Proposition 13 while it was on the ballot, he slashed spending merrily to meet its requirements once the initiative became law. Sometimes his rhetoric seemed to question the very premises of the welfare state. “The income supplement is never going to be enough if people are estranged from society,” he told Time in 1975. “But if you have children to take care of you, friends, a nice community, it’s a winner.”
At the same time, he liberalized the state’s marijuana law, decriminalized homosexuality, and strongly opposed the death penalty. This combination of fiscal austerity and social tolerance might seem libertarian.
Then comes the 1992 Democratic presidential primary:
He seemed to be the most left-wing and right-wing man in the field. In an early debate, when moderator Cokie Roberts asked the candidates if they would have paroled an ex-con who had recently raped a child, Brown declared the query manipulative and delivered an extemporaneous speech about the ways fear of crime feeds a loss of civil liberties. The same candidate called for term limits, a flat tax, and the abolition of the Department of Education. His willingness to break with liberal orthodoxy on taxes led to denunciations from the party regulars, but by the end of the race he had been embraced by much of the Left.
As Mayor of Oakland:
As mayor, Brown allied himself with cops and developers. He shooed away citizens who fretted that a new condo would disturb some ducks, aggravated labor activists by courting investment from The Gap, allowed the Marines to conduct urban-warfare training maneuvers in the city, and pushed through public funding for the Oakland Military Institute, a prep school for members of the California Cadet Corps. Now he was being denounced by his former allies on the Left and praised in places like the neoconservative City Journal. During the California recall election of 2003, he became a regular on right-wing radio stations, bashing Democratic Gov. Gray Davis with glee.
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