Not quite-not yet. Heading into next week’s New York and Wisconsin primaries, Clinton remains the front runner, with half the delegates he needs, seven times as many as Brown. He’s shown the durability to survive wounds that would have killed off other candidates long ago. But Brown’s Connecticut victory exposed the fragility of Clinton’s candidacy in a party that has a pathological distrust of its own powers that be. Since the late ’60s, anti-establishment anger-fanning it or fighting it-has been the party’s disorganizing principle. Running as an insurgent is de rigueur. But there’s usually another, hungrier “outsider” around once a front runner is anointed. And there’s no party unity to appeal to, since everyone’s against the party. “Now we’re the establishment” worries Mickey Kantor Clinton’s campaign chairman. “We’re the protest target.”
Being seen as the establishment is especially dangerous this year especially for Clinton. Voter distrust of the system is at a record high. The Democratic Party, mired in scandal on Capitol Hill, is an irresistible target, even for Democrats. And the accumulating questions about Clinton’s character and Arkansas dealings give license and urgency to those who cast him now as the embodiment of corrupt power. Why rally round when “party leaders” privately express doubts about his ability to withstand Republican attacks in the fall? As Brown rode to a campaign stop in Milwaukee, he was at ease in his role as Clinton scourge. “By my pointing certain of these things out,” Brown asked, “why does that make them any less available to George Bush? Remember,” he said, “if Bush wanted to start attacking him on this stuff, he would. And he will as soon as Clinton gets the nomination.”
Since 1968, Democrats have made a blood sport of devouring their presumptive nominee. The original reasons were deeply ideological. The party was split over the Vietnam War, race relations and generational lifestyles. Eugene McCarthy on the left and George Wallace on the right weakened Hubert Humphrey and made Richard Nixon president. Since then, “Anybody But” movements have become a matter of habit once a front runner emerges. “The result is you have a nominee dragging one leg and bleeding from both nostrils and one ear,” says Jody Powell, who witnessed the process as Carter’s press secretary-with, ironically, Caddell at his elbow. “Then they say, ‘Go out and lead us to victory’.” Brown himself has been an Anybody But candidate twice before, most notably in 1976, when he led a late drive against Carter, another Southern governor on the make. “I can’t for the life of me remember what Brown’s message was,” says Powell. “But all the folks who moved to the suburbs, bought a station wagon and turned Episcopalian seemed to like it.”
The three leading candidates thus far-Clinton, Brown and Paul Tsongas (who’s “suspended” his campaign but remains available)-have all styled themselves “outsiders.” Indeed, there’s no “traditional” New Deal-style Democrat left in the race. “This is a new group of Democrats,” said Democratic polltaker Geoff Garin. One way or another, they all seem to have read from Caddell’s page, literally. In 1988 Caddell wrote a famous memo sketching the protest candidacy of a mythical “Senator Smith.” The speech Caddell wrote for him has echoed, at times word for word, in 1992. Tsongas mirrored its call for economic sacrifice; Clinton took its message that Americans must assume more personal responsibility for education, welfare and other societal tasks. Brown, who’s always been an anti-candidate candidate (box), slipped his entire frame into Senator Smith’s: “America’s leaders-not just in the Republican Party but in the Democratic Party as well–have failed America,” said Senator Smith. “The moment has come for you, the people, to take back your politics and your country! The experts and failed elites say I am wrong. They say my message is too unconventional, too unrealistic, too idealistic, too extreme. They say a vote for me is a wasted vote. But I tell you, it is never wrong to vote for the truth!” It’s Brown, almost verbatim.
Until now, Brown himself has escaped the scrutiny that comes with being a serious candidate. His surge, says political scientist Samuel Popkin, “is like thinking about the person you’ve never slept with after you’ve dated someone for a year.” In the jujitsu of insurgency, Brown is now the an with the money and momentum. In New York, he enjoyed a harmonic convergence in the city’s tabloid culture (FOR JERRY, WEIRD MAY BE JUST THE TICKET, declared one column in the New York Post). He packed a Manhattan club for a funky-glitzy fund-raiser that featured Kim Basinger and the B-52’s. There was talk that Jesse Jackson might endorse him, which could weaken Clinton’s base in the African-American community. Brown is raising $80,000 a day through his 800 number, while Clinton must replenish a treasury that was $1.8 million in debt after Connecticut.
Clinton strategists sound calm about the Brown challenge. “I’d much rather be in our position than his,” said Kantor. But Clinton and his aides aren’t behaving so calmly, and with good reason: he’s not in quite the commanding position Carter was in 1976, when the Georgian had two thirds of the delegates he needed in hand and fewer questions to deal with about his “electability.” In New York, Clinton turned hot, responding with real but controlled anger to hecklers at two appearances. At every New York stop he bashed Brown, deriding his flat-tax proposal as recycled Reaganomics and a threat to the social-security system. “Once people know more about him, they won’t like what they see,” said Kantor, who began his own political career managing Brown’s 1976 gubernatorial race in California.
Clinton had no choice but to grab the advantages of frontrunnerhood, even if doing so emphasized his newly won establishment mantle. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a former foe, endorsed him in a joint television appearance sent by satellite to a meeting of Democratic fund raisers. New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan took after Brown, charging that his tax scheme would “put a silver bullet through the heart of social security.” Democratic Party Chairman Ron Brown put on the squeeze, asserting that Brown had “crossed the line” in his attacks on Clinton’s character, record and suitability to challenge Bush.
Caddell, from his perch in Bel Air, Calif., relished the spectacle of Clinton clinging to the establishment, whose “brain dead” politics Clinton still denounces. “Clinton’s a supreme politician,” said Caddell, whose spin-control techniques verge on the cyclonic. “The system has produced its maximum politician at the precise moment when politics is totally discredited.” Brown and Caddell seem less certain about what will happen next. Brown sees a simple scenario: wins in a series of big states. After that, “Clinton collapses.” And after that? Brown thinks the party will turn to him. “Who are they going to turn to? Someone who’s never run in a primary?”
Caddell isn’t so sure. A “brokered” convention is possible, he says, one that would not only deny the nomination to Clinton, but to Brown. To Caddell, that would be the final conflagration. “What will the establishment do then?” he asks. “They’ll find someone else. They’ll say, ‘It’s our party, not the people’s.’ By then it’s a dead party anyway.” Caddell has his own escape hatch. He’s intrigued by a third-party candidacy, led by Brown or Texas businessman Ross Perot, who has sought his advice. “If you think there was a storm in Connecticut,” he says, “wait until you hear the Thunder out of Texas!” Whatever happens, Bill Clinton has already heard the noise.
PHOTO: At ease in his fole as Clinton scourge: Brown has been an ‘Anybody But’ candidate before (JAQUES CHENET–NEWSWEEK)
< b>THE MANY FACES OF JERRY BROWN
Once a Jesuit seminarian, twice governor of California, three times a presidential contender, Jerry Brown is the reincarnated pol. He went from rising political star to discredited Governor Moonbeam and has re-emerged as the candidate campaigning to save America from polities as usual.
Elected California secretary? of stab In 1970, Brown (shown herewith his parents) begins his carer brightly as a model of contrast to his machine-Democrat father, ex-governor Edmund (Pat) Brown. He Is a pol for the future, almost universally liked.
After his 1974 election as governor, Brown calls for energy conservation and contemplation of the universe. A symbol of the post-Vietnam era, he eschews gubernatorial parks for a dented sedan and a mattress on the floor.
Brown becomes the rock-and-roll politician, dating singer Linda Ronstadt and running for president In 1976 on a save-the-planet platform. He has concert fundraisers, wins a few primaries and unsettles Carter, but loses the nomination.
A downward spiral: In 1978 (left) Brown opposes tax-cutting but Prop 13 passes anyway. He tries for the presidency In 1980, loses, and his Republican lieutenant governor threatens to take over. In 1982 he Is blamed for not spraying farms threatened by the medfly.
In 1982 Brown loses a rue for the U.S. Senate to Pets Wilson. He disappears for most of the mid-80s, first to Mexico, then to Japan to practice Buddhism, then to Calcutta where he hook up with Mother Teresa (left).
Brown reappears In 1989 as California state Democratic chairman-the consummate technocrat computerizing fund raising and opposing limits on campaign contributions. Downplays any further political ambitions (left, at 1990 Oscars with Anjelica Huston).
< b>A FLAT-TAX SOCIETY
Jerry Brown wants to eliminate existing federal taxes and replace them with two new taxes; The plan would end federal income-tax deductions for local and state taxes, but offers deductions for such expenses as mortgage interest and rent.
Low-income families would face a 300% tax increase; people making more than $48,000 get a tax break. The rich would see their taxes cut in half.
Overall loss of revenue could add more than $200 billion a year to the deficit.
A person making $8,000 a year could spend 17.5% of his or her income in VAT-nearIy six times the 3.2% a person making $570,000 would spend.
