Jerry Brown on Cavuto

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/27/10

Jerry Brown, CA’s attorney general who is running for governor, was on Cavuto last night going after the corrupt officials who are making up to $800,000 in city jobs. He is right is declaring Meg Whitman the superrich candidate, but she is not alone in this. He is wrong in calling for a federal bailout, saying some of the money “going to AIG” should go to CA. Arnold Schwarzenegger made the same point last year and Obama’s people rejected it quickly. They might have been watching Glenn Beck, who was making the important point that it would be the healthy internal states which would be bailing out the broke and debt-ridden CA with its $800,000 small-city managers. But Jerry Brown should be listened to. He brings to CA an opportunity.

Jerry Brown is an entirely different political species. He is and always has been an individual rare and true who speaks more than anyone alive possibly to the essence of California. He has the mind and heart of a radical and is fearless.

I constantly rail about “leftovers from the Sixties” but it is a reference to people like Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi. I am from the Sixties myself and see it as a moment of enlightenment and awakening in CA but possibly nowhere else. It was a moment betrayed by the most banal of minds, like Boxer, who saw political advantage and simply took old European Marxist-based ideas which had arrived in NY from Europe, on to CA. I happen to have been in CA and visited the famed Haight/Ashbury district in the Summer of Love on way to Tan Son Nhut when it was the busiest airport in the world. I saw CA when it was sparkling with light.

If as Mike Mansfield said, the rising century will be the Pacific Century, it should be obvious that it will be California’s century as well. It could be Jerry Brown’s century. Meg Whitman is a boss. She is the one you hire after you admit failure and enter bankruptcy. CA may have earned that status. But Brown can be a leader. He could be the one to lead California to its great fate.

The state sovereignty movement began here in Vermont as liberal opposition to the invasion of Iraq. It may have caught on in the red states but it was tailor made for California. It was tailor made for Jerry Brown. Brown should recognize that taking money from the federal government is, as was said in the day, taking money from the CIA. And as Secretary of State Clinton again leads war ships up the coast of the South China Sea which are certain on one day to engage in proxy war with China, he could stop this from happening as governor of CA. They cannot go there without California and he could deny California’s participation.

Five years ago I wrote for local and national journals a stretch of articles claiming states need not participate in foreign adventures like Iraq without permission of their governors. This was nothing more than symbolic action back then. Since then it has become the stuff of politics and think tanks and busy grad students everywhere . States are the only sure defense against federal dominance and malfeasance. To end it requires only one singular governor with a fierce heart in a state still waiting to be born like California.