LAT: Jerry Brown: California's Marathon Man doesn't govern by polls

[DeepModem Mom]

Jerry Brown -- California's Marathon Man
The candidate for attorney general is one of a dying breed of politicians who govern by their values and experience, rather than polls.
By Martin F. Nolan, MARTIN F. NOLAN covered national politics for the Boston Globe for 40 years.
October 22, 2006

....Brown had first appeared on a California ballot as a Democratic candidate for secretary of state. He would follow this role with star turns as governor of California and auditions for U.S. senator and president. His current campaign for attorney general — the same job held by his father, Pat Brown, in the 1950s — is his 13th....

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What most separates Brown from the current stable of California politicians is that he may be the last practicing "inner-directed" one. In the book "The Lonely Crowd," David Riesman and Nathan Glazer predicted that a new crop of "other-directed" leaders would favor polls and surveys over their own values and experience, and they were right. However they regard Brown's calculations, his critics never call him a captive of consultants, peering anxiously at pollster printouts....

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Brown's personal focus group has included Ivan Illich, a prominent critic of development in the 1970s; Noam Chomsky, linguist and political polemicist; S.I. Hayakawa, a semanticist before becoming a U.S. senator from California; and St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. As a Jesuit seminarian, Brown studied the "spiritual exercises" of Ignatius, chief among them the Latin maxim, age quod agis ("do what you are doing")....

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Now, after a long layoff from the statute books, Brown's hoping to put his Yale Law School education to work. His courtroom skills are scant and, at best, rusty. In endorsing Brown, the Sacramento Bee said, "Forget all the tough-guy rhetoric. The attorney general isn't a cop. Mostly, he operates as the managing attorney of a very large law firm."

So that's how one makes the transition from leading man to character actor? Like Richard Dysart in the 1980s television series "L.A. Law"? Or perhaps William Shatner in the current "Boston Legal"? Like a beamed-up Capt. Kirk, Gov. Moonbeam is ready to return to Planet Constitution, which he has often promised to preserve, protect and defend.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-nolan22oct22,0,986852.story?coll=la-home-commentary

[dsc]

1. If you are going to use TV examples

it would help to be familiar with the shows. On LA Law it was Douglass Brackman, not Leland McKensie who was managing partner, Dysert's McKensie was the Senior partner. On Boston Legal it is Rene Aberjonis (sp) who plays the managing partner. Shatner may be senior partner though I don't know.