‘Insurgent’ Jerry Brown Targets Political In-Crowd : Campaign ‘92: He disdains ‘Moonbeam’ image as he assails media-ruled and money-driven modern politics.

Times are tough for the provocateur prince of politics. Just the other day, Jerry Brown was marooned on a snow-bound interstate in eastern Iowa when a bearded, bundled-up man from a few cars back leaned in the window to offer a traffic report.

“Oh, ho ! “ the man said, his eyes bulging slightly at the passenger before him. “Mr. Biden!”

“Brown,” said the former California governor, well aware that he is not the Democratic senator from Delaware.

“Brown!” said the traveler, reddening.

Perhaps that was still nagging at Brown a few days later in New Hampshire as he paced outside the auditorium of a tony private school, barking about the dearth of national publicity attending his third bid for the presidency.

“Why do I not get the attention? Is that because they are viewed as more serious ?” Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. demanded, referring to his better-publicized Democratic competitors. “They tell more jokes ? They have more money ? Maybe it’s the money!”

Maybe, a bystander offered, it’s a matter of the avant garde-eccentric-Moonbeam image left over from two gubernatorial terms and two previous tries at the presidency.

“No!” Brown declared, his head wagging side to side. “It’s the money! . . . if you don’t have money, you’re not serious, and the only way you can get the money is to take it from the same corrupt sources! So therefore nothing changes!”

So it goes, this often contentious business of commanding what Brown calls an “insurgent” campaign to reclaim democracy--and, he hopes, the White House--from the corrupt grasp of political financiers and incumbents.

His is no upbeat, morning-in-America candidacy, but an in-your-face, fever pitch assault on conventional modern politics. To a large degree, Brown is running against himself, the money-raising, telegenic politician he has been for decades.

Those who seek the deeper meanings could have a field day with this. But Brown, now 53, and his hair silvered, says there is no one like an insider to attack the system.

Of the six major Democratic presidential candidates crossing the nation, he is certainly the most angry, seeming at any instant ready to spiral into orbit on the power of his moral outrage.

In a cavernous convention center in Moline, Ill., Brown brimmed with suppressed pique.

“You’ve probably heard a lot of things about me,” he said, his voice arching into the upper registers. “Governor Moonbeam, the man who went to Africa with Linda Ronstadt, the man who drove a Plymouth, who didn’t live in the (governor’s) mansion, slept on the floor. I don’t know what images you have of me. But I’ll tell you this--I have been around politics since the day I was born. . . .

“And I can tell you this! We are in a crisis! The very idea of America is being killed!”

He waved a paper illustrating the disparity between rich and poor, hollering as an audience of senior citizens stared dumbfounded.

Brown announced for the presidency in October at the ancestral home of American democracy, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and the symbolism of the revolutionary effort to form this nation resonates through his campaign. He contends that democracy is a captive of hostile interests; the rich finance campaigns to benefit the political incumbents, who in turn protect the interests of their large contributors instead of solving America’s problems.

The nation’s wounds will only be salved, he says, by wrenching back control of the nation in a massive popular movement fronted by Brown himself. For its symbolic value and to cultivate grass-roots support, Brown is limiting donations to his campaign to $100 per person, putting him at a financial disadvantage to the other Democrats, who are collecting up to the federal limit of $1,000 per individual.

So far, Brown emphasizes crisis over specifics. He favors universal health care, cuts in military spending, jobs programs and increased spending for education, but he has offered few details. He castigates incumbents for the nation’s floundering economy, but has yet to say how he would boost it other than investing in domestic programs. As he did in his governorship, he also emphasizes environmental health and mass transit systems.

Brown’s campaign is a shoestring effort--consisting so far of offices in Santa Monica and San Francisco, and one that just opened over the aptly named Renaissance Restaurant in Manchester, N. H.

Last week, Brown qualified for $289,000 in federal funds to match what his campaign has collected independently. Most of his campaign money has arrived via the nerve center of his effort, a nationwide 800 number.

On his frequent visits to New Hampshire, in whose Feb. 18 primary Brown must do well to build any momentum for his candidacy, the former governor hawks his 800 number several times a day on radio stations that provide him free and ample air time.

Hands gripping his chair in a crowded radio studio in Dover, N. H., Brown could be an adrenalin-pumping host of the Home Shopping Network instead of a candidate trying to convince people he is fit for the presidency.

“The people themselves have got to become active, and I believe they have to join this insurgent movement to challenge the corrupt grip that is bringing this country down,” Brown said into the microphone, barely pausing to breathe, “and that’s my invitation and that’s why I ask you to call 1-800-426-1112! Give us a call! Make your pledge! Offer your name as a volunteer! . . . We’ve got to take the country back before it’s too late!”

According to Brown, 25,000 people have already called in.

With his assault on campaign fund-raising and veteran politicians, Brown opens himself up to obvious criticism. This is, after all, the man who raised an estimated $20 million over the years for his own campaigns, and who left politics only because voters quashed his last attempt to win office, the 1982 U.S. Senate race in California.

While he now favors fund-raising restrictions, only a year ago Brown claimed credit when his law firm successfully overthrew California’s limitations on campaign donations. At the time, Brown was the chairman of the California Democratic Party.

A similar twist complicates his support for term limits. A year ago, he fought California term limitation measures on the grounds that “the voters should maintain the ultimate authority to choose who they want representing them.”

These days, he denies ever having opposed term limits, personally. When confronted with quotes that seem to indicate he did, Brown says that as chairman he had to parrot the party line. Later, he says he did not become an “active supporter” of term limits until after the 1990 election.

Although he acknowledges his conversion could look suspicious, Brown bridles at any suggestion that he has switched positions for political benefit.

“(Is) the issue once you’re part of the system you dare not ever leave it, because if you do we’re going to accuse you of having morally inferior character to people who are still in it? Because at least they’re consistently corrupt and you’re inconsistently honest?” he demands.

No candidate running for President is forced to knock down so many impressions of himself or defend his record so vehemently as Brown. Still, he continues to walk the edge.

In his speeches, eloquent references to the patriotism of bedraggled Revolutionary War soldiers compete jarringly with new age psychojargon. He compares the American political system to a dysfunctional family in search of a 12-step program of recovery.

“And as we step forward and we tell the truth, we unconceal the dysfunctional quality of American politics,” he said. “We begin to create a healthier politics.”

While that raises some eyebrows, Brown is rarely the subject of derision in states like New Hampshire and Iowa, far from the glare of California. Interviews with voters indicate he appeals to some who, like Brown himself, say they are sick to death of politics as usual.

Brown usually pulls them in with a cynical parody of a candidate’s life which, as he knows better than most, cuts extremely close to the mark.

“I know what the formulas are,” he declared the other day to several hundred people gathered at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “You raise millions of dollars and you hire someone to make a (commercial) and you take your coat off”--Brown takes off his coat--” . . . and you get a dog and you walk along the beach like this. . . .”

Brown prances comicly across the stage, playing to an imaginary camera. “And you say, ‘I hate taxes!’

“And I hate crime! And I hate--no, I love the environment!”

His audience is laughing out loud, a rare enough event at Brown’s speeches, until he pierces the levity. “Now do you think that is going to solve the problems of this country? Do you think that will make one dime’s worth of difference?”

As his listeners quiet, he adds: “I don’t think so.”