Governor Jerry Brown

Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. (born April 7, 1938) is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 34th and 39th governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected Secretary of State of California in 1970; Brown later served as Mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007 and Attorney General of California from 2007 to 2011. He was both the oldest and sixth-youngest governor of California due to the 28-year gap between his second and third terms. Upon completing his fourth term in office, Brown became the fourth longest-serving governor in U.S. history, serving 16 years and 5 days in office.

Born in San Francisco, he is the son of Bernice Layne Brown and Pat Brown, who was the 32nd Governor of California (1959–1967). After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University, he practiced law and began his political career as a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees (1969–1971). He was elected to serve as the 23rd Secretary of State of California from 1971 to 1975. At 36, Brown was elected to his first term as governor in 1974, making him the youngest California Governor in 111 years. In 1978, he won his second term. During his governorship, Brown ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 and 1980. He declined to pursue a third term as governor in 1982, instead making an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate that same year.

After traveling abroad, he returned to California and served as the sixth Chairman of the California Democratic Party (1989–1991), attempting to run for U.S. president once more in 1992 but losing the Democratic primary to Bill Clinton. He then moved to Oakland, where he hosted a talk radio show; Brown soon returned to public life, serving as Mayor of Oakland (1999–2007) and Attorney General of California (2007–2011). He ran for his third and fourth terms as governor in 2010 and 2014, his eligibility to do so having stemmed from California's constitutional grandfather clause. On October 7, 2013, he became the longest-serving governor in the history of California, surpassing Earl Warren.

Early life, education, and private career

Brown was born in San Francisco, California, the only son of four children born to District Attorney of San Francisco and later Governor of California, Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown Sr., and his wife, Bernice Layne. Brown's father was of half Irish and half German descent. His great-grandfather August Schuckman, a German immigrant, settled in California in 1852 during the California Gold Rush.

Brown was a member of the California Cadet Corps at St. Ignatius High School, where he graduated in 1955. In 1955, Brown entered Santa Clara University for a year and left to attend Sacred Heart Novitiate, a Jesuit novice house in Los Gatos, intent on becoming a Catholic priest. "A story appeared in the ''New York Times'' on May 16, 1976, reporting that Brown 'now admits he is no longer a practicing Roman Catholic.' The ''Times'' story prompted a member of the staff of ''The Monitor'', the newspaper of the archdiocese of San Francisco, to query Brown, whose answer was, "I was born a Catholic. I was raised a Catholic. I am a Catholic." Brown resided at the novitiate from August 1956 to January 1960 before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics in 1961. With his tuition paid for by the Louis Lurie Foundation, including a $675 scholarship in 1963, Brown went on to Yale Law School and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1964. After law school, Brown worked as a law clerk for California Supreme Court Justice Mathew Tobriner.

Returning to California, Brown took the state bar exam and passed on his second attempt. He then settled in Los Angeles and joined the law firm of Tuttle & Taylor. In 1969, Brown ran for the newly created Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, which oversaw community colleges in the city; he placed first in a field of 124 and served until 1971.

California Secretary of State (1971–1975)

In 1970, Brown was elected California Secretary of State. Brown argued before the California Supreme Court and won cases against Standard Oil of California, International Telephone and Telegraph, Gulf Oil, and Mobil for election law violations. In addition, he forced legislators to comply with campaign disclosure laws. Brown also drafted and helped to pass the California Political Reform Act of 1974, Proposition 9, passed by 70% of California's voters in June 1974. Among other provisions, it established the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

34th Governor of California (1975–1983)

First term

In 1974, Brown ran in a highly contested Democratic primary for Governor of California against Speaker of the California Assembly Bob Moretti, San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto, Representative Jerome R. Waldie, and others. Brown won the primary with the name recognition of his father, Pat Brown, whom many people admired for his progressive administration. In the General Election on November 5, 1974, Brown was elected Governor of California over California State Controller Houston I. Flournoy; Republicans ascribed the loss to anti-Republican feelings from Watergate, the election being held only ninety days after President Richard Nixon resigned from office. Brown succeeded Republican Governor Ronald Reagan, who retired after two terms.

After taking office, Brown gained a reputation as a fiscal conservative. ''The American Conservative'' later noted he was "much more of a fiscal conservative than Governor Reagan". His fiscal restraint resulted in one of the biggest budget surpluses in state history, roughly $5 billion. For his personal life, Brown refused many of the privileges and perks of the office, forgoing the newly constructed 20,000 square-foot governor's residence in the suburb of Carmichael and instead renting a $275-per-month apartment at 1228 N Street, adjacent to Capitol Park in downtown Sacramento. Rather than riding as a passenger in a chauffeured limousine as previous governors had done, Brown walked to work and drove in a Plymouth Satellite sedan. When Gray Davis, who was chief of staff to Governor Brown, suggested that a hole in the rug in the governor's office be fixed, Brown responded: “That hole will save the state at least $500 million, because legislators cannot come down and pound on my desk demanding lots of money for their pet programs while looking at a hole in my rug!”

As governor, Brown held a strong interest in environmental issues. He appointed J. Baldwin to work in the newly created California Office of Appropriate Technology, Sim Van der Ryn as State Architect, Stewart Brand as Special Advisor, John Bryson as chairman of the California State Water Board. Brown also reorganized the California Arts Council, boosting its funding by 1300 percent and appointing artists to the council, and appointed more women and minorities to office than any other previous California governor. In 1977, he sponsored the "first-ever tax incentive for rooftop solar", among many environmental initiatives. In 1975, Brown obtained the repeal of the " depletion allowance", a tax break for the state's oil industry, despite the efforts of lobbyist Joe Shell, a former intraparty rival to Richard M. Nixon.

In 1975, Brown opposed Vietnamese immigration to California, saying that the state had enough poor people. He added, “There is something a little strange about saying ‘Let's bring in 500,000 more people’ when we can't take care of the 1 million (Californians) out of work.”

Brown strongly opposed the death penalty and vetoed it as governor, which the legislature overrode in 1977. He also appointed judges who opposed capital punishment. One of these appointments, Rose Bird as the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, was voted out in 1987 after a strong campaign financed by business interests upset by her "pro-labor" and "pro-free speech" rulings. The death penalty was only "a trumped-up excuse" to use against her, even though the Bird Court consistently upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. In 1960, he lobbied his father, then governor, to spare the life of Caryl Chessman and reportedly won a 60-day stay for him.

Brown was both in favor of a Balanced Budget Amendment and opposed to Proposition 13, the latter of which would decrease property taxes and greatly reduce revenue to cities and counties. When Proposition 13 passed in June 1978, he heavily cut state spending, and along with the Legislature, spent much of the $5 billion surplus to meet the proposition's requirements and help offset the revenue losses which made cities, counties, and schools more dependent on the state. His actions in response to the proposition earned him praise from Proposition 13 author Howard Jarvis who went as far as to make a television commercial for Brown just before his successful re-election bid in 1978. The controversial proposition immediately cut tax revenues and required a two-thirds supermajority to raise taxes. Max Neiman, a professor at the Institute of Governmental Studies at University of California, Berkeley, credited Brown for "bailing out local government and school districts", but felt it was harmful "because it made it easier for people to believe that Proposition 13 wasn't harmful". In an interview in 2014, Brown indicated that a "war chest" would have helped his campaign for an alternative to Proposition 13.

1976 presidential election

Brown began his first campaign for the Democratic nomination for president on March 16, 1976, late in the primary season and over a year after some candidates had started campaigning. Brown declared: "The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits."

Brown's name began appearing on primary ballots in May and he won in Maryland, Nevada, and his home state of California. He missed the deadline in Oregon, but he ran as a write-in candidate and finished in third behind Jimmy Carter and Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Brown is often credited with winning the New Jersey and Rhode Island primaries, but in reality, uncommitted slates of delegates that Brown advocated in those states finished first. With support from Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, Brown won a majority of delegates at the Louisiana delegate selection convention; thus, Louisiana was the only southern state to not support Southerners Carter or Alabama Governor George Wallace. Despite this success, he was unable to stall Carter's momentum, and his rival was nominated on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Brown finished third with roughly 300 delegate votes, narrowly behind Congressman Morris Udall and Carter.

Second term

Brown won re-election in 1978 against Republican state Attorney General Evelle J. Younger. Brown appointed the first openly gay judge in the United States when he named Stephen Lachs to serve on the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1979. In 1981, he also appointed the first openly lesbian judge in the United States, Mary C. Morgan, to the San Francisco Municipal Court.Jim Schroeder, ''Twenty-five years of courtroom trauma'' '' The Advocate'' (August 23, 1994). Brown completed his second term having appointed a total of five gay judges, including Rand Schrader and Jerold Krieger.Tracy Wilkinson
Municipal Court Judge Faces Challenge of AIDS – Disease
, ''Los Angeles Times'' (November 25, 1991).Myrna Oliver
Judge Jerold Krieger, 58; Activist Helped Open Gay-Lesbian Temple
, ''Los Angeles Times'' (February 20, 2002). Through his first term as governor, Brown had not appointed any openly gay people to any position, but he cited the failed 1978 Briggs Initiative, which sought to ban homosexuals from working in California's public schools, for his increased support of gay rights. The Governor also signed AB 489, The Consenting Adult Sex Act, which decriminalized homosexual behavior between adults, adding to this reputation. He also signed AB 607, which banned homosexuals from receiving civil marriage licenses, in 1977.

Brown championed the Peripheral Canal project to transport water from near Sacramento around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into the Central Valley Project and export it to southern California. It was submitted to the voters for approval as a ballot proposition in 1982, but was turned down.

In 1981, Brown, who had established a reputation as a strong environmentalist, was confronted with a serious medfly infestation in the San Francisco Bay Area. The state's agricultural industry advised him, and the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), to authorize airborne spraying of the region. Initially, in accordance with his environmental protection stance, he chose to authorize ground-level spraying only. Unfortunately, the infestation spread as the medfly reproductive cycle out-paced the spraying. After more than a month, millions of dollars of crops had been destroyed, and billions of dollars more were threatened. Governor Brown then authorized a massive response to the infestation. Fleets of helicopters sprayed malathion at night, and the California National Guard set up highway checkpoints and collected many tons of local fruit; in the final stage of the campaign, entomologists released millions of sterile male medflies in an attempt to disrupt the insects' reproductive cycle.

Ultimately, the infestation was eradicated, but both the Governor's delay and the scale of the action have remained controversial ever since. Some people claimed that malathion was toxic to humans, as well as insects. In response to such concerns, Brown's chief of staff, B. T. Collins, staged a news conference during which he publicly drank a glass of malathion. Many people complained that, while the malathion may not have been very toxic to humans, the aerosol spray containing it was corrosive to car paint.

Brown proposed the establishment of a state space academy and the purchasing of a satellite that would be launched into orbit to provide emergency communications for the state—a proposal similar to one that was indeed eventually adopted. In 1979, an out-of-state columnist, Mike Royko, at the ''Chicago Sun-Times'', picked up on the nickname from Brown's girlfriend at the time, Linda Ronstadt, who was quoted in a 1978 ''Rolling Stone'' magazine interview humorously calling him "Moonbeam". A year later, Royko expressed his regret for publicizing the nickname, and in 1991 Royko disavowed it entirely, proclaiming Brown to be just as serious as any other politician.

Some notable figures were given priority correspondence access to him in either advisory or personal roles. These included United Farm Workers of America founder Cesar Chavez, Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, labor leader Jack Henning, and Charles Manatt, then-Chairman of the California State Democratic Party. Mail was routed as VIP to be delivered directly to the governor. However, it is unclear as to exactly how long this may have occurred.

In 1978, San Francisco punk band the Dead Kennedys' first single, "California über alles", from the album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, was released; it was performed from the perspective of then-governor Brown painting a picture of a hippie-fascist state, satirizing what they considered his mandating of liberal ideas in a fascist manner, commenting on what lyricist Jello Biafra saw as the corrosive nature of power. The imaginary Brown had become President Brown presiding over secret police and gas chambers. Biafra later said in an interview with ''Nardwuar'' that he now feels differently about Brown; as it turned out, Brown was not as bad as Biafra thought he would be, and subsequent songs have been written about other politicians deemed worse.

Brown chose not to run for a third term in 1982, and instead ran for the United States Senate, but lost to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. He was succeeded as governor by George Deukmejian, then state attorney general, on January 3, 1983.

1980 presidential election

In 1980, Brown challenged Carter for renomination. The press had anticipated his candidacy ever since he won re-election as governor in 1978 over the Republican Evelle Younger by 1.3 million votes, the largest margin in California history. But Brown had trouble gaining traction in both fundraising and polling for the presidential nomination. This was widely believed to be because of the more prominent candidate Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Brown's 1980 platform, which he declared to be the natural result of combining Buckminster Fuller's visions of the future and E. F. Schumacher's theory of "Buddhist economics", was much expanded from 1976. His "era of limits" slogan was replaced by a promise to, in his words, "Protect the Earth, serve the people, and explore the universe".

Three main planks of his platform were a call for a constitutional convention to ratify the Balanced Budget Amendment; a promise to increase funds for the space program as a "first step in bringing us toward a solar-powered space satellite to provide solar energy for this planet"; and, in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, opposition to nuclear power. On the subject of the 1979 energy crisis, Brown decried the "Faustian bargain" that he claimed Carter had entered into with the oil industry, and declared that he would greatly increase federal funding of research into solar power. He endorsed the idea of mandatory non-military national service for the nation's youth. He suggested that the Defense Department cut back on support troops while beefing up the number of combat troops.

Brown opposed Kennedy's call for universal national health insurance and opposed Carter's call for an employer mandate to provide catastrophic private health insurance labeling it socialist.
As an alternative, he suggested a program of tax credits for those who do not smoke or otherwise damage their health, saying: "Those who abuse their bodies should not abuse the rest of us by taking our tax dollars." Brown also called for expanding the use of acupuncture and midwifery.

As Brown's campaign began to attract more members of what some more conservative commentators described as "the fringe", including activists like Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson, his polling numbers began to suffer. Brown received only 10 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and he was soon forced to announce that his decision to remain in the race would depend on a good showing in the Wisconsin primary. Although he had polled well there throughout the primary season, an attempt to film a live speech in Madison, the state's capital, into a special effects-filled, 30-minute commercial (produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola) was disastrous.

Senate defeat and public life

In 1982, Brown chose not to seek a third term as governor; instead, he ran for the United States Senate for the seat being vacated by Republican S.I. Hayakawa. He was defeated by Republican San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson by a margin of 52% to 47%. After his Senate defeat, Brown was left with few political options. Republican George Deukmejian, a Brown critic, narrowly won the governorship in 1982, succeeding Brown, and was re-elected overwhelmingly in 1986. After his Senate defeat in 1982, many considered Brown's political career to be over.

Brown traveled to Japan to study Buddhism, studying with Christian/Zen practitioner Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle under Yamada Koun-roshi. In an interview, he explained, "Since politics is based on illusions, zazen definitely provides new insights for a politician. I then come back into the world of California and politics, with critical distance from some of my more comfortable assumptions." He also visited Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India, where he ministered to the sick in one of her hospices. He explained, "Politics is a power struggle to get to the top of the heap. Calcutta and Mother Teresa are about working with those who are at the bottom of the heap. And to see them as no different than yourself, and their needs as important as your needs. And you're there to serve them, and doing that you are attaining as great a state of being as you can."

Upon his return from abroad in 1988, Brown announced that he would stand as a candidate to become chairman of the California Democratic Party, and won against investment banker Steve Westly. Although Brown greatly expanded the party's donor base and enlarged its coffers, with a focus on grassroots organizing and get out the vote drives, he was criticized for not spending enough money on TV ads, which was felt to have contributed to Democratic losses in several close races in 1990, such as Dianne Feinstein's attempt to become the first female governor of California. In early 1991, Brown abruptly resigned his post and announced that he would run for the Senate seat held by the retiring Alan Cranston. Although Brown consistently led in the polls for both the nomination and the general election, he abandoned the campaign, deciding instead to run for the presidency for the third time.

1992 presidential election

When Brown announced his intention to run for president against President George H. W. Bush, many in the media and his own party dismissed his campaign as having little chance of gaining significant support. Ignoring them, Brown embarked on a grassroots campaign to, in his own words, "take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington". In his stump speech, first used while officially announcing his candidacy on the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Brown told listeners that he would be accepting campaign contributions from individuals only and that he would not accept over $100. Continuing with his populist reform theme, he assailed what he dubbed "the bipartisan Incumbent Party in Washington" and called for term limits for members of Congress. Citing various recent scandals on Capitol Hill, particularly the recent House banking scandal and the large congressional pay-raises from 1990, he promised to put an end to Congress being a " Stop-and-Shop for the moneyed special interests".

As Brown campaigned in various primary states, he would eventually expand his platform beyond a policy of strict campaign finance reform. Although he focused on a variety of issues throughout the campaign, he highlighted his endorsement of living wage laws and opposition to free trade agreements such as NAFTA; he mostly concentrated on his tax policy, which had been created specifically for him by Arthur Laffer, the famous supporter of supply-side economics who created the Laffer curve. This plan, which called for the replacement of the progressive income tax with a flat tax and a value added tax, both at a fixed 13-percent rate, was decried by his opponents as regressive. Nevertheless, it was endorsed by ''The New York Times'', ''The New Republic'', and ''Forbes'', and its raising of taxes on corporations and elimination of various loopholes which tended to favor the very wealthy proved to be popular with voters. Various opinion polls taken at the time found that as many as three-quarters of all Americans believed the current tax code to be unfairly biased toward the wealthy. Jesse Walker wrote in ''The American Conservative'' that he "seemed to be the most left-wing and right-wing man in the field ... allingfor term limits, a flat tax, reforming social security, and the abolition of the Department of Education". Walker, Jesse (November 1, 2009
Five Faces of Jerry Brown
, ''The American Conservative'' Brown scored surprising wins in Connecticut and Colorado and seemed poised to overtake Clinton.

Due to his limited budget, Brown began to use a mixture of alternative media and unusual fundraising techniques. Unable to pay for actual commercials, he frequently used cable television and talk radio interviews as a form of free media to get his message to voters. In order to raise funds, he purchased a toll-free telephone number, which adorned all of his campaign stances. During the campaign, Brown's repetition of this number combined with the moralistic language used, led some to describe him as a "political televangelist" with an "anti-politics gospel".

Despite poor showings in the Iowa caucus (1.6%) and the New Hampshire primary (8%), Brown soon managed to win narrow victories in Maine, Colorado, Nevada, and Vermont, but he continued to be considered a small threat for much of the campaign. It was not until shortly after Super Tuesday, when the field had been narrowed to Brown, former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and front-runner then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, that Brown began to emerge as a major contender in the eyes of the press. On March 17, Brown forced Tsongas from the race when he received a strong third-place showing in the Illinois primary and then defeated the senator for second place in the Michigan primary by a wide margin. Exactly one week later, he cemented his position as a major threat to Clinton when he eked out a narrow win in the bitterly fought Connecticut primary. As the press focused on the primaries in New York and Wisconsin, which were both to be held on the same day, Brown, who had taken the lead in polls in both states, made a gaffe: He announced to an audience of various leaders of New York City's Jewish community that, if nominated, he would consider the Reverend Jesse Jackson as a vice-presidential candidate. Jackson, who had made a pair of anti-semitic comments about Jews in general, and New York City's Jews in particular, while running for president in 1984, was still mistrusted within the Jewish community. Jackson also had ties to Louis Farrakhan, infamous for his own anti-semitic statements, and with Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Brown's polling numbers suffered. On April 7, he lost narrowly to Bill Clinton in Wisconsin (37%–34%), and dramatically in New York (41%–26%).

Although Brown continued to campaign in a number of states, he won no further primaries. Despite being overwhelmingly outspent, Brown won upset victories in seven states and his "votes won to the money raised ratio" was by far the best of any candidate in the race. He still had a sizable number of delegates, and a big win in his home state of California would deprive Clinton of sufficient support to win the Democratic nomination, possibly bringing about a brokered convention. After nearly a month of intense campaigning and multiple debates between the two candidates, Clinton managed to defeat Brown in this final primary by a margin of 48% to 41%. Although Brown did not win the nomination, he was able to boast of one accomplishment: at the following month's Democratic National Convention, he received the votes of 596 delegates on the first ballot, more than any other candidate but Clinton. He spoke at the convention, and to the national viewing audience, yet without endorsing Clinton, through the device of seconding his own nomination. There was animosity between the Brown and Clinton campaigns, and Brown was the first political figure to criticize Bill Clinton over what became known as the Whitewater controversy.

Move to Oakland

After his 1992 presidential bid, Brown had moved from the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco to the Jack London District neighborhood of Oakland, California, an "overwhelmingly minority city of 400,000". He constructed a multi-million dollar work-live complex, serving both as his residence and as a workspace. Among other features, it included a broadcast studio and a 400-seat auditorium.

Brown launched a national talk radio show from his Oakland complex, which he would continue to produce until October 1997.

In 1995, with Brown's political career at a low point, in the motion picture ''Jade'', the fictional Governor of California tells an assistant district attorney to drop a case, "unless you want as much of a future in this state as Jerry Brown". The assistant DA responds, "Who's Jerry Brown?"

In Oakland, Brown became involved as an activist in local political matters, including bay-front development and campaign finance reform. In 1996, Brown unsuccessfully urged Oakland mayor Elihu Harris to appoint him to a seat on the Oakland Port Commission.

Mayor of Oakland (1999–2007)

After Oakland mayor Elihu Harris decided against seeking reelection, Brown ran in the city's 1998 mayoral election as an independent "having left the Democratic Party, blasting what he called the 'deeply corrupted' two-party system". He won with 59% of the vote in a field of ten candidates.

Prior to taking office, Brown campaigned to get the approval of the electorate to convert Oakland's "weak mayor" political structure, which structured the mayor as chairman of the city council and official greeter, to a "strong mayor" structure, where the mayor would act as chief executive over the nonpolitical and thus the various city departments, and break tie votes on the Oakland City Council. In November 1998, Oakland's electorate voted by a landslide margin of 3 to 1 in support of Measure X, which would shift the city government to the strong mayor model for a period of 6 years. A referendum permanently extending Measure X later passed in 2004, after failing to pass in 2002, thus making permanent the city's shift to the strong mayor model of governance.

The political left had hoped for some of the more progressive politics from Brown's earlier governorship, but found Brown, as mayor, to be "more pragmatic than progressive, more interested in downtown redevelopment and economic growth than political ideology". As mayor, he invited the U.S. Marine Corps to use Oakland harbor lands for mock military exercises as part of Operation Urban Warrior.

The city was rapidly losing residents and businesses, and Brown is credited with starting the revitalization of the city using his connections and experience to lessen the economic downturn while attracting $1 billion of investments, including refurbishing the Fox Theatre, the Port of Oakland, and Jack London Square. The downtown district was losing retailers, restaurateurs and residential developers, and Brown sought to attract thousands of new residents with disposable income to revitalize the area. Brown continued his predecessor Elihu Harris's public policy of supporting downtown housing development in the area defined as the Central Business District in Oakland's 1998 General Plan. Since Brown worked toward the stated goal of bringing an additional 10,000 residents to Downtown Oakland, his plan was known as the " 10k Plan". It has resulted in redevelopment projects in the Jack London District, where Brown himself had earlier purchased and later sold an industrial warehouse which he used as a personal residence, and in the Lakeside Apartments District near Lake Merritt. The 10K plan has touched the historic Old Oakland district, the Chinatown district, the Uptown district, and Downtown. Brown surpassed the stated goal of attracting 10,000 residents according to city records, and built more affordable housing than previous mayoral administrations.

Brown had campaigned on fixing Oakland's schools, but "bureaucratic battles" dampened his efforts. He concedes he never had control of the schools, and his reform efforts were "largely a bust". He focused instead on the creation of two charter schools, the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute. Defending his support of a military charter school in Oakland, Brown once told KQED reporter Stephen Talbot, "I believe that had I been sent to the military academy, as my mother and father threatened, I would have been president a long time ago."

Brown sponsored nearly two dozen crime initiatives to reduce the crime rate, although crime decreased by 13 percent overall, the city still suffered a "57 percent spike in homicides his final year in office, to 148 overall".

Brown's largely successful first term as mayor of Oakland was documented in a one-hour KQED documentary, "The Celebrity and the City" (2001) that evaluated his record in dealing with his four stated goals: reducing crime, improving education, attracting 10,000 new residents to a resurgent downtown, and encouraging the arts.

Brown was reelected as mayor in 2002.

Attorney General of California (2007–2011)

In 2004, Brown expressed interest to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General of California in the 2006 election, and in May 2004, he formally filed to run. He defeated his Democratic primary opponent, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, 63% to 37%. In the general election, Brown defeated Republican State Senator Charles Poochigian 56.3% to 38.2%, one of the largest margins of victory in any statewide California race. In the final weeks leading up to Election Day, Brown's eligibility to run for attorney general was challenged in what Brown called a "political stunt by a Republican office seeker" (Contra Costa County Republican Central Committee chairman and state GOP vice-chair candidate Tom Del Beccaro). Plaintiffs claimed Brown did not meet eligibility according to California Government Code §12503, "No person shall be eligible to the office of Attorney General unless he shall have been admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the state for a period of at least five years immediately preceding his election or appointment to such office." Legal analysts called the lawsuit frivolous because Brown was admitted to practice law in the State of California on June 14, 1965, and had been so admitted to practice ever since. Although ineligible to practice law because of his voluntary inactive status in the State Bar of California from January 1, 1997, to May 1, 2003, he was nevertheless still admitted to practice. Because of this distinction the case was eventually thrown out.

Death penalty

As attorney general, Brown represented the state in fighting death-penalty appeals and stated that he would follow the law, regardless of his personal beliefs against capital punishment. Capital punishment by lethal injection was halted in California by federal judge Jeremy D. Fogel

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