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How Jerry Brown Stuck Around

He has broken the mold by allowing his quirky personality to shine through.

It may just be that the most effective public sector leader in America today is a balding, flinty-eyed 76-year-old former mayor who is not only the oldest sitting governor in the nation but both the oldest and youngest man ever to lead his home state, coasting toward reelection next month with a 58 percent job approval rating in an age of bitter anti-incumbent feeling.

 

And if California, the megastate so often dismissed as ungovernable, is on something of a roll, it owes a large part of that fate to its improbable chief executive, Edmund G. Brown Jr., who has already surpassed Earl Warren’s record as the longest-serving governor in the Golden State’s history and is poised to win an unprecedented fourth term just one day shy of 40 years after he won his first.

In the past four years, Jerry Brown has led the way in turning a budget deficit of $25 billion into a surplus of more than $4 billion; sponsored a ballot measure that produced the state’s first broad tax increase in years; seen the creation of a million new jobs and a 4-percentage-point drop in the unemployment rate; signed landmark legislation to regulate the state’s dwindling groundwater resources and presided over a population influx that gives the lie to the notion that California’s days are numbered.

Brown’s return engagement is an object lesson in outside-the-Beltway leadership that eschews conventional reliance on poll-tested positions and consultant-driven proposals. He has broken the mold by allowing his quirky — but brainy and authentic — personality to shine through. Voters — and legislators of both parties in Sacramento — have responded in kind. It’s a lesson that Washington’s squabbling, deadlocked leaders might well heed.

 

Daniel Luzer is GOVERNING's news editor.
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