ON THE RECORD: Presidential candidate Jerry Brown

Gov. Jerry Brown: The message . . . is to restore the vitality of the democratic process by enabling the Democratic Party to really be an opposition party and offer a choice. What I perceive is that the two-party system has collapsed and merged into one party -- the incumbent party, a Washington party that is embedded in a confederacy, careerism, corruption, and campaign consultants, and that what has to be challenged. And my campaign, which is also a cause, is not a get-along, go-along kind of campaign. This is a campaign to confront the corruption of entrenched interests, restore participation, and restore the Democratic Party to its original traditions. When Jefferson founded the party he used a very powerful phrase when he said, "We must prevent the power of the few to riot on the labors of the many." That was an anti-elite, anti-priviledge, and I might say today an anti-incumbent kind of mood and spirit. The Democratic Party today is not providing the kind of vigorous opposition, clear choice that makes an election worth participating in. That's why half the people aren't there. So my first intention is to revitalize the Democratic Party, invite people to participate and thereby really offer a choice in the general election. DP: Do you think that one man can change the fact that 98 percent of the congressman in the House get reelected? Brown:I don't think that one man or woman can, but millions of people can. This is a campaign not just about a candidate, but rather about encouraging the American people to take back their government, to take back their party. And as part of that, I'm accepting no contributions over $100 to build the campaign on the participation of tens of thousands of people, and not just a small group of Washington insiders and fat cats. I'm also supporting term limits and joining with those movements all around the country because I think that's another way of opening up the process. DP: I take it that means no Political Action Committee money as well? Brown: Right. DP: In that same interview, you said that Michael Dukakis should have used a more aggressive attack against George Bush. In your 1992 campaign, will you attack President Bush harder and will you use negative advertising? Brown: Well, those are little tactics, you see. The important point is what is the principle here. The principle is that government has been subject to a hostile takeover. It's being run by careerists, by professional politicians, and it is not subject, I believe, to a real democratic control. And democratic control means that people participate, whereas today half the people are not participating. In the congressional elections, 65 percent of the people don't vote. That's what has to be attacked, and the only way you attack that is to invite participation. So I'm willing to very strongly challenge Bush, but I will also challenge the leadership of my own party because they have joined with Bush in the military budget, in the budget pact, in the midnight pay raise, in accepting Political Action Committee money. So, it's more accurate to focus on the insurgent character of this campaign. That's what separates it from the other campaigns. They're all saying Bush is responsible for no national health program, but the Democrats could put a national health program on his desk. Why haven't they done it? The Democratic senators voted out the B-2 bomber two weeks ago. The Democratic Congress has voted for money to El Salvador for the last 10 years. What I believe is the first step, is to challenge the decrepit state of the Democratic Party and to invite new people into it, and to give the new party new leadership. That's my first step. Then, with a new spirit, then face-off against George Bush and offer a real challenge, not as being the apologist for Congress, but by being the representatives of the American people. DP: On that note, you spoke of a lot of intangibles. You've been referred to in the past as a "philosopher- politician." Who and what are your biggest influences? Brown: My biggest influences are Jefferson and Jackson. They're the intellectual forebearers of the Democratic Party. Incidently, this is the 200th anniversary of the Democratic Party. It started in 1791. But also, Abraham Lincoln and some of things he said. At the heart of the Civil War, he said, "The idea behind the struggle was a necessity upon us of proving popular government was not an absurdity." At that time a third of the states had seceded. Today, half the people have seceded, and we still have that challenge of proving popular government is not an absurdity. Popular government means government by the people, and government as we all know is run by Political Action Committees, by incumbent power. They get to use the franking priviledge, but the citizen can't use it to talk back to him. There's a real imbalance between the citizenry and the entrenched politicians, and between the incumbents and their challengers. Elections which bring debate have turned into a contest to collect money to hire professionals to bring about a situation of unequal access to the voter. If you can get a bag of money or a bag of campaign checks, you can buy computer letters or television ads ten times more than your opponent. The people in the district or the state wouldn't even know who your opponent is, relative to how many carry you in this massive barrage, and that is a debasement of the democratic process. That is not real democracy. Democracy is more. It is really found in something like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, where there were two sides and there were people listening. They had crowds of people, and Douglas made his point about slavery in the territories and Lincoln made his. There was a choice there, and people were actively involved. You had turnouts of 80 to 90 percent in those days, as opposed to 50 percent. When I hear people saying it's all Bush's problem, I don't think that's honest, because I don't think that's the case. I think it's a problem of the political system itself that has become mired in a endless quest for money, and that has created a vortex of corruption that is engulfing people in both parties. That is what has to be challenged, and that's why we call our campaign "we the people." We designed it in such a way that it only works if its claim is tens of thousands of people. DP: In 1974, when you ran for Governor of California, you called for less strict laws on marijuana use. What is your present position on the drug war and how does America win it? Brown: I didn't just call for for them [less strict marijuana laws], I signed a law that reduced possession of one ounce or less to being a hundred dollar fine. I believe the states should play a major responsibility. For the federal government to be invading college dormitories is something very alien to the American tradition. One of our most cherished protections was that police power was local, not even state, it was local. And to turn more and more of the responsibility for social control over to the federal government is a very, very dangerous thing, and goes against the grain of why this whole country was created. It's amazing that people who have ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars from this country are walking around the streets and living very well-off, and people who had a few marijuana cigarettes are serving 13 months in jail. It's a bizarre inversion of priorities. But in terms of how you win the drug war, I think there are a number of things you have to do. First of all, you don't hire people like Noriega which was on the payroll of George Bush for all those years at the CIA. That's not right, and that story has never really been told about the Reagan administration. They were so zealous in trying to fight the Sandanistas that they were willing to look the other way to Noriega's importation of drugs, and that's a reality consistent with his cooperation with the Medellin cartel. In terms of the overall drug war, I really think the poverty, the inequality, the lack of jobs, the demoralization of neighborhoods and communities in this country are feeding this drug epidemic. That is something that has to be attacked frontally. You can't have one out of five kids born in poverty and not expect to see drugs sold. You can't have the destruction of millions of blue collar jobs and not expect people to sell drugs if that's the only way they can make some money. We have schools that don't respond to kids' needs and teachers that don't get paid enough to have inadequate instruction in classes. We really have to take seriously the right of every citizen to have an opportunity to grow, to be healthy, to be brought up in a decent neighborhood, and that's not the commitment we're making now. So I put drugs in the larger context. I can tell you this. Whatever Reagan-Bush have been doing it hasn't worked, and they have the judges, they control the Supreme Court, they control the lower courts. Prisons are being built faster in America than any place in the world. More people are being arrested. More people are being locked-up, and civil liberties and basic protections of the Bill of Rights are being destroyed at a rate unknown in history. For example, the right to be free from searches and seizures on a bus, the right to be free from a coerced confession. All these things are being undermined, and still it's not working. It's not working for a very simple reason -- the inequalities have been exacerbated in the last 10 years. During this so called war on drugs, the poor are being pushed down, their opportunities have been significantly reduced, and obviously there has been a social pressure that has been made the situation worse. The bottom 20 percent, that's 25 million people, they've lost 15 percent of their income [in the last ten years]. The people in the top, they've gained 50 percent, when you round it out. The bottom lost 15, the top one gained 50. So what are you doing is taking opportunities from the bottom and you're moving them up to the top. Now you wonder why these people are out selling drugs and committing crimes. No matter how fast you lock them up, you're still letting them out, and there's not even enough prisons now. The deterrent value of prisons has been weakened because there's not enough prison cells. People know that they're going to be released early. Secondly, when you take away their income and their opportunity, they have nothing to lose anyway. So its a self-defeating war until we take seriously a domestic agenda, which has not been done. That's national health, that would be CCC like Roosevelt had, that would be Head Start. It would be a real committment to revitalizing those parts of America which have been totally violated.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.