Jerry Brown, New York City 1992

Dissent makes for 'bad TV,' according to the man who wasn't allowed to take the stage until supporters chanted a demand to let him speak.

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 19, 2008 at 12:32 a.m.

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Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky

Jerry Brown

Photo by Cynthia Johnson © Time & Life Pictures-Getty Image

SILENT MESSAGE: A supporter of Jerry Brown at the 1992 convention joins with others who covered their mouths with tape to symbolize their feeling that he was being muzzled.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A mercurial figure swoops through the crowded lobby of the Beverly Hilton, tugged this way and that by well-heeled conference-goers who've arrived by chauffeured Bentleys and run-of-the-mill Maseratis.

It's a strange place to find a self-styled man of the people who once worked at Mother Teresa's hospice in Calcutta, India. But then, the wealthy attendees of the Milken Institute's Global Conference are people, too.

Besides, former California Gov. Jerry Brown is back in the saddle, a VIP again. His latest reincarnation, after having served as mayor of Oakland, is as the Golden State's attorney general, and he has been dropping strong hints about maybe, just maybe, trying to get his old job back.

Brown could be the once and also future "Governor Moonbeam." So folks hang on his every word.

They want to hear him talk about energy policy and infrastructure. The news crews sit him down and listen for clues. People in the lobby stop to bend his ear. And some guy in a fancy suit coaxes him into the coffee bar to hear what's on his mind.

On this hot spring day in "La La Land," everybody, it seems, wants to hear Jerry speak.

It's a far cry from New York, 1992, at the Democratic National Convention.

Back then, when Brown was the quixotic runner-up to Bill Clinton in the presidential contest, he was left off the scheduled speakers list.

It took the distracting spectacle of people chanting "Let Jerry speak! Let Jerry speak!" inside Madison Square Garden before Brown finally got a few minutes at the lectern.

Even then, the speaking slot wasn't quite handed to him. He had to take the lectern to second his own nomination for president.

"It's kind of a pathetic way of doing things, but I did make the talk," he recalls, taking a breather from his elbow-rubbing at the conference.

Dissent wasn't exactly part of the script at the '92 convention. In modern conventions, it never is.

"That's bad TV. It doesn't look good," Brown says. "And when you're in a tight race, you want to present your candidate as a well-packaged, well-controlled image that has been constructed based on careful poll-taking and focus groups. Now, that's just the way it is. If you don't play that game, maybe you don't win."

Back in the summer of 1992, then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton entered his convention still trailing in the polls behind independent Ross Perot and President George H.W. Bush.

During the convention, he got some good fortune when the billionaire Perot, founder of Electronic Data Systems, abruptly dropped out of the contest, only to re-emerge later with just enough appeal to eat into Bush's power base.

Meanwhile, the convention also gave Clinton's ticket a boost, as he and running mate Al Gore gave off a unified impression that a new generation of leadership had arrived.

Looking back, that 1992 convention sometimes is cited as a model of modern message control.

Brown wasn't the only one left off the invited speakers list. The late Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a vocal opponent of the Democratic Party's abortion-rights plank, also was snubbed.

Would Casey's appearance, or a more prominent, prime-time speaking slot for Brown, have destroyed the polished patina of party unity and affected the outcome at the election?

Nobody knows. Will this summer's Democratic National Convention in Denver - or the Republican National Convention in Minnesota - be any less scripted? Perhaps not.

Either way, the 1992 convention brings up a question neither party has wanted to face much since those rough-and-tumble conventions of the past.

What's the harm with just a little dissent?

"At the very least there could be a debate about something," Brown says, "because the Democratic Party is not a unified organization."

*

Brown proved that point in the 1992 presidential race.

He had run twice previously, in 1976 and 1980, as a progressive, famously quirky governor from the left coast.

In a speech earlier this year, he alluded to the ways he earned his nickname: Shunning the California governor's mansion in favor of a small, rented apartment; dating rock star Linda Ronstadt; driving around in a battered blue Plymouth.

"They didn't call me 'Moonbeam' for nothing. I worked hard to get that," he told a state Democratic convention, according to an account in the San Francisco Chronicle.

After two terms as governor and those two unsuccessful runs for president, he lost a 1982 U.S. Senate race. Brown fell off the national radar. He went globe-trotting. He studied Spanish in Mexico and Buddhism in Japan. He traveled to China and the former Soviet Union. He joined Mother Teresa working with the poor people of Calcutta and was a CARE ambassador after the Bangladesh floods of 1988.

He re-entered California politics in 1989, serving as chairman of the state Democratic Party. But he resigned in 1991, saying he had grown disgusted by the influence of money in politics.

And that became the populist undercurrent of his next comeback tour: An uphill run for the White House in 1992.

*

The 1992 contest was no cakewalk for the eventual winner, Clinton.

Before the race began, Bush had sky-high approval ratings based primarily on his successful leadership of the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Many would-be challengers decided to stay on the sidelines, including New York's Mario Cuomo, before economic conditions made it a much better environment for challengers.

Clinton, an energetic young Southerner who came from the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council, emerged as an early favorite to win the Democratic nomination. But before the New Hampshire primary, he had to weather scrutiny over reports that he had an extramarital affair and questions over his draft status during the Vietnam War.

Clinton went on to finish a surprisingly close second to Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts in New Hampshire. He claimed the "Comeback Kid" title and was on his way to reclaiming the front-runner's mantle.

But first, there was a big surprise waiting here in Colorado.

The state was holding its first-ever presidential primary. Beforehand, a poll showed Tsongas at 32 percent, Clinton at 25 percent and Brown barely in double digits at 12 percent.

Still, Brown predicted a surprise by his underfunded "We the People" campaign. He swore off campaign contributions larger than $100, instead cobbling together a shoestring budget by blurting out his toll-free telephone number in speeches, debates and television interviews.

He accused Clinton in particular of "taking money from the very forces that will make it impossible to carry through programs."

Still, Brown was considered more of a populist nuisance than a true contender. As Denver political consultant Jim Monaghan quipped: "He's like the dinner guest you wished you never invited."

And then, the shocker on primary night: Brown eked out a narrow win in Colorado, with Clinton second and Tsongas third.

On CNN from Arizona that night, he declared: "I want everyone to know this campaign is about real change. We're not here to get along and go along."

The triumph was short-lived. In coming weeks, Clinton scored big wins in his native South. He planted himself in the driver's seat to take the nomination.

Tsongas and other contenders fell by the wayside. But not Jerry Brown.

As he told the Rocky Mountain News before that Colorado stunner, he considered Clinton "an obscure governor with a lot of insider contacts who has been propelled by money."

To this day, Brown says money in politics severely undermines democracy. In Brown's view, part of the problem evolved as an unintended consequence of reforms enacted after the tumultuous 1968 convention. The reforms gave more weight to state primaries and caucuses.

But the result, Brown says, is a system dominated by candidates who can raise the most money from special interests.

"So this reform, which started out as, 'Oh, these bad party bosses,' now actually goes to the financial leadership," he says. "Those with money and the organizations that can spend money, they dominate. . . . So it's becoming dysfunctional based on the reform going to excess."

Brown's call for wholesale campaign finance reform was the centerpiece of his populist bid. Meanwhile, with the party on its way to nominating a centrist "New Democrat," he stood up for the party's more traditional base - and forcefully. At one point, he called Clinton a "union-busting, wage-depressing, scab-inviting environmental disaster of a governor."

As the race went on and on, Brown picked up a handful of wins. But after the delegate math made Clinton the obvious winner, Brown still refused to bow out.

Ironically, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton persisted against daunting delegate math in the spring of 2008, some bloggers suggested that she was employing the same denial strategy that Brown had used against her husband in 1992.

*

As the convention approached, there was no drama about who would be the nominee. Clinton would.

But the enigmatic Brown still hadn't offered words of surrender. He wasn't ready to shut up and join the party. Not until he got his turn at the microphone.

"The way these conventions and primary nomination processes work, very early on the leading candidate wants to put it to bed. Over. And everything else becomes scripted," Brown says, talking rat-a-tat-tat in a hotel banquet room. "And I felt that I had a message, a message of reform. And I wanted to speak at the convention. But before doing that you had to pledge your fealty, your loyalty to the winner. I didn't feel like doing that."

And so, he disappeared in New York City, as chronicled by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times' "Garden Diary" from the convention.

"The irritated Clinton camp is barely able to find Mr. Brown, much less negotiate the terms of his surrender," Dowd and Rich wrote. "On Saturday night Mr. Brown phoned Mr. Clinton but immediately put him on hold while answering another call. After five minutes on hold, even the eager-to-please Mr. Clinton hung up, only to discover that neither his staff nor the party chief, Ron Brown, knew how to reach the elusive Mr. Brown."

Turned out, he was spending the night at homeless shelters without phones, they reported.

When the convention began, jaded political reporters got a rare treat: a semblance of actual news. Brown's supporters took to the floor to begin those chants: "Let Jerry speak! Let Jerry speak!" Some delegates wore tape covering their mouths in sympathy with his perceived muzzling.

Meanwhile, television commentators linked the controversy to the grousing that Casey was being denied a speaking spot, reportedly because he would not agree to muffle his anti-abortion stand (as other "pro-life" Democrats had agreed to do from the lectern).

"I was told that Casey was not to be on the platform, was not to give a speech, and that was the end of it," said Mike Berman, the longtime convention scheduler who controlled access to the lectern.

As for Brown, he finally negotiated with the Clinton camp, and then he took the route to the lectern he could have taken without them. He seconded his own nomination.

Berman, who has had a role in every convention since 1968, says tight message control is an obvious objective in the television age, when both parties have worked hard to keep their platform fights and other controversies out of the camera's view.

Every speech, "everything is reviewed by a team of people who are sitting in the bowels of the convention center. Speechwriters," Berman says. "And they review every speech before it goes up on the Tele PrompTer. They also write some speeches for people."

Consistency of message is a goal, he says. For example, at the convention that nominated Sen. John Kerry in 2004, there was a conscious decision that speakers could talk about Bush administration policy, but that they could not attack President George W. Bush personally, Berman says.

"So every speech was reviewed toward that end," he says.

Berman, who retired as convention scheduler last year, says controversy only invites news coverage that leaves people saying, "Oh, the Democrats or Republicans don't know what they're doing. They've got this fight going on."

"It just doesn't happen anymore," Berman says. "Everybody understands that conventions are theater."

That's why convention planners hire theater producers, he said, "because we're putting on a show."

Theatrics have always been a part of politics. But if conventions are nothing but pageantry, something is missing, Brown says.

"But the convention itself is more of a show," he says. "And it's a show that you don't want too much disruption, because that looks a little unruly, and we want our candidates controlled. And if there's any unruliness, it's supposed to be packaged, not spontaneous or unpredicted or unscripted. So there we are. It's a great American tradition, but it sure isn't what it was a few years ago."

sprengelmeyerm@shns.com

• August 19, 2008

  9:11 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  KING writes:

  So I guess that RMN is content on showing its liberal basis once again by outlining every single dumocrat convention since the inception of time. This is just poor grandstanding, as no one is interested in what happened 16 years ago at a convention in another city.

• August 19, 2008

  9:20 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  jay045 writes:

  The profile on Democratic conventions and candidates at those conventions just might possibly be related to an event that's happening next week in Denver. Just sayin'.

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