I’ll have a couple of intriguing topics early next week—the 3-strikes report, and a new look at school discipline in some of LA’s most troubled schools—- but right now it seems that much of the news is still lost in Bin Laden mania.
Still we have a city and a state that are plagued by problems. The New York Times Sunday Magazine will feature a well-reported and often amusing portrait of the man on whose shoulders much of the running of the state now falls:
THE ART OF COVERING JERRY BROWN
The New York Times’ LA bureau chief, Adam Nagourney, talks about what it’s like to report on Jerry Brown, whom Nagourney profiles in the NYT Sunday Magazine on Mother’s Day.
Here are two clips:
[SNIP]“You look great,” Brown said to his wife.
“You look great,” Anne responded. “Did you work out today?”
“Yes, I did,” Brown said. “Did you work out today?”
“Yes I did,” Anne said. At that point, Beatty, who is 74, turned in astonishment to Brown. “You did?” he said. “For how long?”
Brown does push-ups, and he has a chin-up bar in his suite of offices. “I am the one who got him to do pull-ups,” Anne said. He lost a belly of weight before his most recent campaign, and Anne is always on him to watch his diet. When a waitress asked Brown during our dinner if he wanted more wine, Anne intervened. “He’ll have some water first,” she said. Brown, who was picking at bread and French fries, was not on the program. “No, I’ll have more wine,” he said.
A few weeks after introducing his budget proposal, Brown met privately with Democratic legislators. The spending cuts were, as expected, causing distress among Democrats, though they were going to pass them. The tax extensions were even more of a problem; the Republican votes were still not there. When he was done making his presentation, according to people in the room, someone asked: “What happens if Plan A fails? What is your Plan B?” Brown didn’t flinch. “I believe in the Hernando Cortes approach,” he said, invoking the Spanish conqueror. “When you hit the shore, burn the ships. There is no Plan B.” The lawmakers sat in disbelieving silence. But that remark was borne out after the collapse of the budget talks; it was not clear that Brown knew what to do next.
Unless Plan B really is to do precisely what he said he would do: cut billions more from the state’s budget. The governor may be crafty — he is very much a politician — but on this point he seems utterly transparent. “He is what he is, and he’s been it for a long time,” Beatty, who has been a friend of Brown’s for 30 years, told me. “After a few decades of skepticism about him, you can now see he really means what he says.”
Finally, a governor who doesn’t rub oil on his chest.