From Moonbeam to mainstream: Jerry Brown in winter

SACRAMENTO — At a morning meeting early in 1975, about three months after Jerry Brown became the youngest governor in California’s history, Brown’s chief of staff, Gray Davis, told the governor he had asked the capital’s general services staff to mend a hole in the carpet.

Brown stopped the meeting. "Do you know how much that hole has saved taxpayers," he asked. When a legislator came to Brown’s office with his hand out, looking for money for a new project, Brown could point to the hole in the carpet as evidence that the state needed to save money.

Forty years later, when Brown offers his State of the State address Thursday for the final time during his second tenure as governor, he will be speaking to a dramatically different state than the one he first took over.

Brown’s first budget proposed $9.1 billion in discretionary spending. His proposal this year, unveiled earlier this month, would spend $131.7 billion. California’s population has doubled. Its gross domestic product has increased more than tenfold.

The political universe has changed, too, and in Brown’s direction. What were once outlandish ideas that led a Chicago columnist to dub him “Governor Moonbeam” — on alternative energy, banning the death penalty and even space exploration — are now firmly within the political mainstream.

“When you talk about solar energy, wind, geothermal, those were radical thoughts in the ’70s,” said Steve Glazer, a California state senator and Brown’s on-again, off-again political adviser who managed his 2010 gubernatorial campaign. “He got the Moonbeam label for things that you’d think were just normal today."

“In a lot of ways, the state and the country have moved to the left,” said John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “So what seemed like a very liberal position back then is mainstream today.”

But Jerry — there is only one Jerry in California political circles — has changed little. He is still a penny-pinching fiscal hawk, ever concerned about the state’s financial health, at times to the chagrin of his overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. His budget proposal won stronger praise from Republican legislative leaders, who praised his proposal to fill the state’s rainy day coffers to the brim, than from Democrats, who anticipate negotiations and fights over spending on new social programs.

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/370374-governor-moonbeam-sees-his-ideas-become-mainstream