Who needs Mr Brown?

Press, 25 March 1980, Page 23

Who needs Mr Brown?

by

JOHN HUTCHISON

Throughout the United States, Mr Jerry Brown has received the acclaim of dozens in his campaign for the Presidency. Concurrently with this unimpressive achievement he may also have shown to Californians that they do not even need him urgently as their governor. By last count he had spent only about two weeks in his elected job since Christmas. There have been acid comments on whether, in view* of such long absences, his annual pay of 849,100 should be docked but there have been few complaints that Californi’s official business has suffered from his inattention to state affairs. Four years ago, when Governor Brown beat Mr Carter in a few primary elections, he was a some-

what exciting national figure surrounded everywhere by friendly reporters and thought to be engendering a genuine political movement. This year the magic is gone. The press is rather inattentive. Supporters’ contributions are drying up. Nowhere has he won a delegate yet for the summer convention in which he will need hundreds even to pretend he is in the running. Mr Brown, who always tries to make any adversity look like a leap forward, is now insisting that he will win the primary election in Wisconsin and thereafter surge into the lead. His campaign director must be much less optimistic. He has quit the job and gone home, as have others of the Brown campaign organisation. It has been assumed by some that Mr Brown is not in the presidential

campaign expecting to win this time but. to establish himself for a 1984 effort when Mr Carter may no longer be eligible and the Democratic nomination would be up for grabs. But some of the governor’s associates now admit that Mr Brown has been seriously damaged bypress attention, particularly from cartoonists, presenting him as a ■‘flake.’’ a current American slang term implying frivolous, capricious eccentricity.

In California, where he was re-elected governor in a landslide, the polls now suggest not only that he is an unpopular national candidate but that esteem for him has slumped because of the neglect he has paid to the job for which his constituency chose him. A dark shadow may be forming over his future as a successful politician anvwhere.