Jerry Brown, Neel Kashkari trade attacks over personal wealth

Neel Kashkari is unsparing in his portrayal of Jerry Brown as an out-of-touch governor who inherited millions of dollars from his father, who was also a California governor.

“He’s been handed everything … on a silver platter,” Brown’s Republican challenger told a radio audience recently. “I look at Jerry Brown as daddy’s little boy.”

The Democratic governor is equally merciless. His campaign mocks Kashkari for renting a house on the Laguna Beach oceanfront — last advertised at $15,000 a month — while lamenting the plight of the poor. In their sole debate, Brown ridiculed his rival’s career path from investment banking at Goldman Sachs to leadership of the federal bailout of Wall Street.

“It’s kind of like the arsonist putting out the fire,” Brown quipped.

The exchanges show the enduring potency of a “Wall Street scoundrel” attack in politics — and the trouble that a banker seeking public office can face even six years after the global economic meltdown. For a year, Brown’s reelection team has used Kashkari’s riches as a weapon to impugn the first-time candidate’s credibility in his long-shot attempt to oust the governor.

In response, Kashkari has struggled to alter the public image of a rival many Californians still remember marching with United Farm Workers icon Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, driving a blue Plymouth to work as governor in the 1970s and ministering to the sick with Mother Teresa in the 1980s.

The reality is that both candidates were raised in prosperous households, both achieved professional success, and both are wealthy. Although many details remain private — bank accounts and mutual funds, for example — public records provide at least an outline of both men’s finances.

Kashkari has taken pains to play down his wealth. Advisors say he attended public elementary and middle schools in Ohio, worked when he was a young man as a mechanic’s assistant at a Chevrolet dealership, and borrowed $100,000 for his MBA studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His father, the campaign says, drove a Chevrolet Caprice.

But Kashkari earned millions in finance.

Early this year, he told reporters his net worth was less than $5 million. Since then, he has spent nearly $2.1 million on his campaign. He and his former wife still jointly own a vacation home in Truckee, near Lake Tahoe. They bought it in 2005 for $782,500, property records show.

Kashkari was raised in the 1970s and ‘80s in an upscale suburb of Akron, Ohio. His mother was a hospital pathologist; his father, an associate professor of engineering at University of Akron.

His high school was Western Reserve Academy, a private school where the dress code required boys to wear a coat and tie. His parents have donated $108,800 to his campaign, the most California law allows.

At Goldman Sachs, Kashkari was paid $738,000 in salary and bonus from January to July 2006, when he left to become a senior U.S. Treasury official, according to a disclosure statement he filed with the government. When he left the Treasury job three years later, Kashkari reported that he and his wife held no more than $630,000 in assets.

At his next job, in Newport Beach, his wealth grew enormously. For 3 1/2 years, he was chief of global equities at Pacific Investment Management Co., one of the world’s top bond firms. In 2012, his monthly pay was $500,000, according to divorce papers filed by his wife. Their assets, she reported, totaled $7.2 million.

In attacking Brown’s wealth, Kashkari, 41, portrays himself as a man of humble roots, more attuned than Brown to the day-to-day lives of Californians.

“I grew up middle-class, mowing lawns and bagging groceries,” Kashkari told San Diego radio listeners last month. Brown, he said, is “completely out of touch with the struggles of working families.”

He struck the same theme at a San Francisco Bay Area gathering of Republicans in March. “Jerry Brown owns $1 million of Jack in the Box stock,” he said. “I eat at Jack in the Box. That’s the difference between me and Jerry Brown.”

Brown, 76, was a 20-year-old Jesuit seminarian when his father, Pat Brown, was elected governor. During most of his childhood in the 1940s and ‘50s, his father was San Francisco district attorney, then state attorney general.

Public records suggest Brown’s net worth is at least several million dollars and possibly more.

He and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, live in a four-story Oakland Hills house overlooking San Francisco Bay. They bought it in 2007 for $2.4 million in cash.

In Sacramento, they stay in a $2,500-a-month loft. Rent and utility bills are paid by the Governor’s Residence Foundation of California, funded mainly by donations from unions and corporations with an interest in state business, according to state filings by the team that runs the nonprofit.

For most of the last 44 years, Brown has made a living as an elected official. His annual pay as governor is $173,987. During the 16 years when he was not on a public payroll — from 1983 to 1999 — Brown practiced law and “earned modest lecture fees,” said Dan Newman, the governor’s campaign spokesman.

Newman declined to answer questions on any inheritance that Brown might have received after the deaths of his parents but challenged Kashkari’s characterization of the governor.

“There’s just the absurdity and the hypocrisy of this Wall Street multimillionaire who’s throwing stones from inside his ... beach house,” Newman said.

Asked for evidence of a Brown inheritance, Kashkari’s campaign provided news stories about Pat Brown’s interests in an Indonesian oil business that caused political headaches for his son in the 1970s, but nothing showing any transfer of assets.

Pat Brown once said he left office with $40,000 in savings. But he went on to make millions from legal work and the marketing of Indonesian oil. In 1985, he and his wife donated $1 million to UC Berkeley.

Jerry Brown later disclosed more than $1 million in investments in Oakland industrial loft properties, but the origin of the money was left unclear. In 2005, he sold some of the property to Covenant House, an organization serving homeless youths, for $3.4 million.

Brown also married Gust in 2005. For 14 years, she had held executive positions at Gap Inc., including general counsel and chief administrative officer.

It was not Brown but his wife who owned more than $1 million in Jack in the Box stock last year, according to a disclosure report the governor filed in February. She is a former Jack in the Box board member.

Brown’s most recent disclosure report shows that in addition to the Oakland Hills house, he held at least $1.4 million in other assets, including his share of a vast family ranch an hour’s drive from Sacramento — and his wife held at least $1.1 million.

Their investments include partnerships in several Bay Area real estate projects with Oakland developer John Protopappas, who built downtown loft properties where the couple used to live and runs the foundation that pays their Sacramento rent.

Twitter: @finneganLAT