Big Daddy

Hey Big Daddy,
Did you read about Jerry Brown recording all those reporters’ conversations? Seems pretty Nixonian to me. Could this keep him out of the governor’s office?

Hey Hoping,
This is perhaps my favorite story of the year, and just reinforces a couple of things that I’ve always known to be undeniable truths. Number one is that reporters are the biggest bunch of crybabies on the planet. And the second is that the only thing that can stop the Moonbeam Juggernaut is some kind of Gingrich-esque national tidal wave of Republican dominance.

Let’s not forget one thing: This entire story came to light because a reporter at the Chronicle blew the story. Brown’s spokesman may have been a lot of things, but the great unmentioned detail in all of this is that he was also right about the way his boss’s comments were characterized.

Did the Chronicle admit that? If they did, I must have blinked and missed it. Instead, the paper along with all of the other monkeys in the Capitol press corps immediately started belly aching about how horrible it was that those on the record conversations were being surreptitiously recorded.

The feigned indignity to the press at this trivial detail says more about the mental midgets that make a living tweaking other people’s thoughts, motivations and words. This is not the illegal bugging of the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate, or even the Patriot Act, for crying out loud. This is simple cover-your-butt tactics that don’t really hurt anybody (except for Scott Gerber’s career).
But let’s put all of that aside for uno momento, por favor. Did anybody actually read these transcripts? They are the true art, and offer a simultaneous look at our past and our future.

The truth is, nobody can match Jerry Brown – not any marketing executive from a dot-com company, and not any so-called member of the Capitol press corps. Say what you will about him, but the guy’s like a cyclone – full of hot air and perhaps destructive, but sure to be one hell of a ride.

Let’s go to the tape, shall we?

When asked by the AP’s Beth Fouhy about Gavin Newsom’s attempts to make him Hillary Clinton to his Barack Obama, Jerry said Hillary can’t match his stature.  “She doesn’t have the scope. She didn’t work with Mother Theresa. She didn’t spend six months working in a Zen Buddhism sic. She didn’t take Linda Ronstadt to Africa. She didn’t have her own astronaut. I had Rusty (Schweickart), 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.”

Take that, Meg Whitman. I’ll bet you never took Linda Ronstadt to Africa, either.

But for all of his extraterrestrial tendencies, Brown also demonstrates a down-to-Earth connection to politics. “When my father ran for governor they didn’t have all these paid consultants, you had volunteers. He had a guy in a law firm. He had a dentist. He had a labor leader. You’d come over to the house to run a campaign .

for attorney general. I heard it. I used to sit around and listen. Now, everybody has vendors to talk to them about your hair style and their Internet page and their this and that. The consultants take an enormous salary but they gotta do something.”
Amen.