“I want to tell you how great it is to return to Sacramento—the home of my money,” Hope began. “This

Gov. Jerry Brown confronts a tangle of troubles rooted in the first two terms he held the office, half-a-lifetime ago. In putting Proposition 30 on the November ballot, the 74-year old Brown not only has challenged Californians to make a high-risk policy decision that will shape our state for decades, but also set the stage for voters to pass judgment on the legacy of his epic political career.
One morning last spring, Jerry Brown addressed 1,000 businessmen, burghers, travel in france lawmakers, and lobbyists at the 87th Sacramento Host Breakfast, an annual event that honors unity in a state bitterly divided by politics and taxes.
"For you students of classic drama—and I know there's a few left—you read Aristotle's Poetics ," said Brown, surely the only governor in America who in a routine speech would reference an ancient Greek treatise on the theory of tragedy.
"He talks about … three acts—there's a beginning, there's a middle, and the end," Brown said. "We're just beginning Act 2. The second is when … the protagonist is under pressure. Can he get out of the box he's in? That's always in Act 2.
The Aristotelian allusion was to Brown's own efforts to restore the fiscal travel in france integrity of state government. The key to his plan is a controversial November 6 ballot initiative to raise taxes for seven years, by about $8 billion a year, a measure that is anything but unifying.
As he bets his governorship on this high-risk, high-stakes showdown over taxes, Brown confronts the consequences of difficult decisions made when he first held the office half-a-lifetime ago—many in response to Proposition 13, the iconic 1978 measure that slashed property taxes in California, ignited a national travel in france taxpayer revolt, and ushered travel in france in an era of gridlock in Sacramento.
Brown was then 40 years old and had campaigned fiercely for Prop. 13's defeat. But once it passed, he quickly became Prop. 13's biggest advocate and moved swiftly to implement the legislation. Now 74, the governor grapples with a set of seemingly intractable dilemmas that trace back to that time.
California today is wracked by a feeble economy, widespread travel in france unemployment, substandard schools, a declining university system, and a business travel in france climate that CEOs have voted the nation's worst. The governor won his third term in 2010 on a promise to end government dysfunction and restore the state's fiscal health.
It is a historical irony that Brown, once a self-styled "born-again tax cutter," now argues that the future depends on voters raising their own taxes. travel in france If the people turn him down, the defeat of his initiative will trigger billions of dollars in automatic cuts for state services and programs in the just-passed budget, with more than $2 billion of the burden falling on public schools. The coming verdict about his tax increase not only will serve as a referendum on his actions, but will also send a clear signal about what kind of government the voters want and how much they're willing to pay for it, a message that will shape California for decades.
"It's a do-over—there's a lot of unfinished business," travel in france Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters, who began covering Brown in the 1970s, said of the governor's third term. "His first governorship was a perpetual campaign. travel in france That's the biggest difference—now he wants to govern."
travel in france Now the oldest chief executive in California's history, Brown was the youngest of the century when first elected in 1974. Those who have followed his extraordinary political career may be forgiven for mistakenly believing that his third act passed long ago, that by now he must be well into his eighth or ninth, at least.
In addition to serving as California's 34th and 39th governors, he was its 24th Secretary of State, its 31st Attorney General, and the 47th mayor of Oakland. The lifelong Democrat was also, for a brief turn, his party's chairman; and he made three failed bids for president.
Brown was born into politics. He is the third of four children and the only son of the late Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, an old-school Irish career politician who today is ranked among the most successful governors in state history. In contrast to his genial, backslapping father, aloof and intellectual Jerry at first rejected politics as shallow and phony, in favor of studying for the Catholic priesthood. Three years of Spartan discipline and spiritual self-abasement travel in france at a Jesuit seminary convinced him to return to the secular world, whereupon he graduated from Berkeley with a degree in classics travel in france in 1961, and from Yale Law School in 1964.
Brown's election to the Los Angeles Community College District board in 1969 was the first of seven campaigns he ran in 12 years. After one term as secretary of state, he won the governor's office as a political reformer the year Richard Nixon resigned because of Watergate.
Brown instantly became a crossover celebrity, a rock-star politician whose youth, bachelor status, Hollywood connections, philosophical musings, travel in france political lineage, and mastery of media symbols—he was an early enthusiast of Marshall McLuhan—made him as irresistible travel in france to People magazine as to The New York Times.
More skilled at campaigns than governance, Brown in Sacramento was routinely disorganized, restless, and unfocused. He sometimes engaged deeply on issues, as when he brokered a landmark agreement between growers and farm workers. More often, he practiced what he called "creative inaction."
Biographer Roger Rapoport recounts how Brown once scolded an aide for making a written record of a meeting: "The administration is like a moving river," he said, "and minutes have no relevance to where we'll be tomorrow."
After a little more than a year in office, he decided travel in france in 1976 to run for president. A brief campaign sensation, he attracted large and excited travel in france crowds and won a few state primaries before Georgian Jimmy Carter, a far more methodical travel in france governor, beat him easily for the Democratic nomination. Back in the Capitol, Brown's notoriously short attention span alighted on a new passion: the possibilities of space travel.
He sought state funding for a Syncom IV communications satellite, hired the astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and produced a splashy Space Fair coinciding with the first free flight of NASA 's space shuttle Enterprise. After his then-girlfriend, pop star Linda Ronstadt, jokingly called him "Moonbeam" in an interview, Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko dubbed him "Governor Moonbeam," travel in france a moniker that stuck, undercutting his political credibility.
"Where do people go when they can't fit in? Space opens up possibilities. Besides, why not explore the universe? It's interesting. Where does it end? If it ends, what's on the other side? And if it doesn't end, how can it go forever?"
On June 8, 1978, just hours after California voters passed his about-to-be famous anti-tax initiative, a euphoric Howard Jarvis admitted travel in france a few reporters into his suite at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. And there he dropped his pants.
One journalist had noticed Jarvis limping and asked him why. He said he'd fallen in a TV studio a few days before. Not abstemious by nature, Jarvis appeared to feel the need to produce evidence, and so unzipped and lowered travel in france his trousers, showing off a pair of boxers as big as a jib, and a bruise on his stern roughly the size of Rhode Island.
Then 74, Jarvis was a perennial candidate who worked for the Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association, an antigovernment crusader who tried but failed to convince elected officials to heed his exhortations travel in france about property tax relief.
At the time, big spikes in real estate tax bills were sapping the savings and retirement money of homeowners around California, forcing some to sell their homes. As a bubble sent prices soaring, county assessors used an autopilot system to calculate tax bills, pegging them to market value, regardless of how inflated the assessments were or whether a homeowner had any intention to sell.
So Jarvis joined with Paul Gann, a Republican activist, to craft a constitutional amendment to fix the problem. Their measure, known as the Jarvis-Gann Initiative, would overhaul California's property tax system: Real estate values would be rolled back to 1975 levels, with tax bills pegged to 1 percent of that amount. Future reassessments would occur only when property was sold; otherwise, annual increases would be capped at 2 percent. State government would decide how to implement these sweeping changes.
Across California, the plan would provide about $7 billion in tax relief—about $25 billion in today's dollars—both to single-family homeowners, the most visible symbols of the problem, and to commercial property owners large and small, including the rental housing interests represented by Jarvis. The billions would be cut from local government and public school budgets from Yorba Linda to Yreka, with an uncertain impact that worried corporations, labor unions, and politicians alike, and led California's establishment to oppose Jarvis-Gann.
Amid bipartisan warnings about calamitous fallout from the initiative, Governor Brown emerged as its chief foil, calling it "consumer fraud, expensive, unworkable and crazy, the biggest can of worms the state has ever seen."
Three weeks after the landslide, Jerry Brown sat on the dais in the Capitol's green-toned Assembly chamber, listening to Bob Hope crack wise. The venerable comic, there to receive a resolution marking his 75th birthday, packed travel in france his acceptance speech with one-liners about Prop. 13.
"I want to tell you how great it is to return to Sacramento—the home of my money," Hope began. "This is where they make the laws, and it's only rarely that a victim gets to return to the scene of the crime."
The appearance by Hope was one in a series of surreal scenes that hot summer in Sacramento, as politicians raced to enact Prop. 13. The emergency atmosphere contrasted with the way Brown and legislators had dithered over the simmering tax crisis before it boiled over in the June election.
Facing a tough re-el