Does the three-time White House hopeful read about Hillary Clinton’s slide and left-winger Bernie Sanders’ surge in their presidential duel and wonder whether party leaders might, in desperation, turn to a popular, seasoned big-state governor who’s just a few years older?

This prompted some reaction in political circles before it was drowned out Saturday by reports former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg might make an independent bid for the presidency.

But there are two interesting angles here worth noting. One is that the presidential candidate that Sanders most sounds like is arguably … Jerry Brown, the 1992 version.

Sanders 2016 = Brown 1992

Veteran California political analyst William Bradley, writing in the Huffington Post in 2014, described Brown’s “Take Back America” campaign of 1992:

Running a not infrequently angry populist campaign, Brown vowed to “take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington.” He called for term limits on Congress and vowed to take contributions only from individuals and in amounts no greater than $100. In those pre-Internet days, Brown financed his campaign largely through an 800 number, which he flogged relentlessly. Just as some do with web sites URLs today. …

 

In addition to his now customary themes on renewable energy and climate change, Brown championed a progressive version of a flat tax (in which corporations and some wealthy individuals would pay more), living wage measures and a single-payer health care system, and questioned international trade deals.

In 2016, this sounds far more like Bernie Sanders than Jerry Brown’s current iteration as fiscal hawk who plays mostly small-ball politics, except on the environment.

Brown alleged Clintons were corrupt

The other interesting angle is that there may be no more prominent Democrat in America to publicly hold a low opinion of Bill and Hillary Clinton than Brown. In  the 1992 presidential race, as the Christian Science Monitor notes, the bad blood was plain to the world:

They slammed each other’s positions and records, sometimes falsely – Clinton suggesting that Brown had raised taxes during his first stint as governor, Brown alleging that Clinton (as governor of Arkansas) had directed state contracts to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm in Little Rock. And of course it’s all on tape.

Since then, Brown has had little good to say about either Clinton. In a March 2015 Washington Post story about his decision not to run for president again, Brown was asked about his relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. His vague response: “It’s all been written about.”

And Brown wouldn’t give her a pass on a controversy that is still in the news.

When asked about the recent controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account as secretary of state, Brown said he is not convinced the issue is a passing storm, as many other Democrats contend.

 

“I don’t know that,” Brown said. “With these things, what makes a difference, you often don’t know until it unfolds because nothing is just what it is. It’s always in part of a larger context. Things unfold and things happen.”

Brown singled out Arkansas to mock

More recently, during his only debate with Republican challenger Neel Kashkari in 2014, Brown held up the Clintons’ home state for ridicule when he was asked about California’s ability to deal in the long term with its large unfunded pension liabilities.

“Are we in Arkansas or Mississippi? This is the eighth-largest economy in the world,” he said, ridiculing the idea that the nation’s richest, most populous state would struggle with such a challenge.

When singling out states that are considered the most socially and economically backwards, comedians and social media yuksters usually cite Mississippi or West Virginia. But not Jerry Brown.

By Laer Pearce

Gov. Jerry Brown didn’t cut any beat up old Plymouths from the state’s car fleet this Tuesday, but that enduring symbol of his Moonbeam years aside, he did give the fleet a bit of a trim, issuing an executive order requiring the state to dump 7,112 vehicles.

Will that include the 50 Toyota Priuses the California Department of General Services bought in 2009, then left on the roof of a parking garage for eight months? Or the 51 vans the California Highway Patrol purchased, then let collect dust in lots for two years as Californians paid out $90,385 in interest payments on them? Probably not, although in a press release, Brown did acknowledge that a lot of the cars to be cut “aren’t even driven.”

The Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation’s fleet got the biggest whack, as 2,263 vehicles will be pared from its fleet. If you’re wondering how big the Dept. of Corrections’ fleet had to be if the state could so easily eliminate 2,263 vehicles from it, the answer is 8,940.  Post-reduction, the department is left with a mere 6,677 vehicles for the members of California’s powerful prison guards union to tootle around in as they count down the days until the start of their lucrative retirements.

44,000 cars remain

According to information provided to me by the Department of General Services (which must cut 823 vehicles from its fleet), 44,000 state-owned cars will remain after the purge. While that sounds like a very large fleet for a state to maintain at taxpayer expense, you have to be careful with California statistics because this is one very large state.  We have more school kids than Virginia has people, for example, and only five states have more registered vehicles than Los Angeles County alone does.  So, to be fair, you need to compare the number of state employees per car state by state before jumping to conclusions.

Well, go ahead and jump.  It turns out that California does have a very large car fleet, even after the cuts. Once the state dumps the 7,112 cars, it will be left with about one car for every five state employees.  (The state counted 223,370 active employees in July.)  In Illinois, a state that rivals California in government mismanagement, there is only one state car for every 6.6 state employees — about the same as Arkansas. And in Pennsylvania, no slouch when it comes to government excess, there is only one state car for every 8.5 state employees.

Still too many cars

So — and this should come as no surprise to anyone — California had way too many cars in its fleet before the cut, and will have way too many cars in its fleet after the cut is in place.

This close look at the fleet-trimming story shows it to be much like this week’s larger California budget story:  the proposal to trim public employee retirement benefits. A quick crunch of the numbers by Sacramento analysts showed the proposed changes could bring as much as $40 to $60 billion in lower pension costs. But with the pension deficit anywhere from $250 billion to a more likely $500 billion, like the car cuts, the pension cuts are just not enough.

California may be at or near the bottom of a lot of state-to-state comparisons — worst for business, worst legal environment, 46th in elementary school math scores, 48th in reading and 49th in science — but it continues to score near the top in not doing enough to get its budget deficits under control.

Laer Pearce is an occasional contributor to CalWatchdog.com. He works in California public affairs and is the author of Crazifornia, Tales from the Tarnished State, which will be available in September.

Yes, it can be done. Arkansas’ Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe actually is cutting taxes. He was re-elected last year after cutting taxes in his first term. And both houses of the Arkansas legislature also are controlled by Democrats.

Why can’t California, which also has a Democratic governor and Legislature, do the same thing?

A major difference between the two states, of course, is that Beebe prudently governed his state the previous four years, whereas California was governed by Arnold the Ridiculous, a Republican. Whenever Democrats proposed a massive spending increase to bankrupt the state, Arnold would hollar, “Nein! Absolutely not! I will never sign a budget that spends that much. You must to spend even more!”

Yet all that means is that California, having gone on a spending binge, now needs to cut spending sharply.

Maybe we could have a governmental trading program. We send Arkansas our governor and legislators. They send us theirs.

On the other hand, that would be unspeakable cruelty to the fine people of Arkansas.

March 21, 2011