Jerry Brown is with Hillary, because Trump

PHILADELPHIA — Capping a session that saw seven of his state’s top elected officials addressing the Democratic National Convention, California Gov. Jerry Brown completed a decades-long transformation from one of the Clintons’ bitterest Democratic foes to one of Hillary’s most prominent, if not particularly passionate, supporters.

“While [Donald] Trump talks, and talks, and talks, Hillary does stuff,” Brown said. “She fights for us on big issues.”

Brown didn’t talk, and talk, and talk about Clinton. He’d been slotted into the climate-change portion of the program, and his concise remarks never strayed from his chosen topic: how it is “the existential threat of our time”; how it “will take heroic effort on the part of many people and many nations” to halt it; how — “even with the toughest climate laws in the country” — “our economy, in California, is growing faster than almost any nation in the whole world.”

Brown dutifully made the case for why “President Hillary Clinton will do what’s needed to combat climate change and lead the clean-energy revolution.” But he sounded far more convincing when he was trashing Trump, whom he described as “dead wrong — dangerously wrong” — on the issue.

“Trump says global warming is a hoax,” Brown bellowed. “I say Trump is a fraud.”

To anyone familiar with the Brown-Clinton backstory, the governor’s not-so-expansive address was both a sign of how far the two camps have come — and a reminder how fraught their relationship has been.

For much of this year’s Democratic nominating contest, Brown refused say whether he preferred Clinton or Sanders. When he finally endorsed Hillary — one week before the June 7 California primary, after a half-hour huddle with Bill in Sacramento — he did so in a conspicuously low-key manner: an “open letter” to California Democrats.

The endorsement itself was tepid too.

“Clinton’s lead is insurmountable and Democrats have shown — by millions of votes — that they want her as their nominee,” Brown wrote, casting her victory as a fait accompli.

Then he went out of his way to say that was “deeply impressed” with Sanders’ campaign for driving “home the message that the top 1 percent has unfairly captured way too much of America’s wealth, leaving the majority of people far behind.”

“In 1992, I attempted a similar campaign,” Brown added. His head may have been with Hillary — but his heart seemed to be with Bernie.

Looking back, it’s no surprise that Brown — never the most emotional of politicians — can’t bring himself to gush over a Clinton.

When Brown opposed Bill for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, things got, in the words of a contemporaneous Associated Press report, “highly personal.” One Brown ad sought to convince viewers that Clinton was “slippery” by reminding them of his “extramarital affairs” and “the fact that he tried smoking pot”; Clinton shot back with a radio spot that grossly misrepresented Brown’s position on abortion. In response, Brown called Clinton “the prince of sleaze.”

During a fractious March debate in Chicago, Brown tossed around terms like “corruption,” “conflict of interest” and “scandal of major proportions” as he accused Clinton of “funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business” in what later came to be known as the Whitewater scandal.

“I don’t care what you say about me, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife,” Clinton snapped. “You’re not worth being on the same platform with my wife. I never funneled any money to my wife’s law firm. Never.”

Brown lost the nominating contest, but his concerns about what he described as Clinton’s “character issue” drove him to continue campaigning all the way to the convention in New York. Back then, the Clintons were nowhere near as accommodating of Brown as they’ve been of his 2016 counterpart, Bernie Sanders.

The 1992 “convention was so controlled, they wouldn’t even let me talk,” Brown recalled on Tuesday. “This is a love fest compared to that.”

Much like Sanders’ supporters, Brown delegates roamed the arena with tape over their mouths, protesting “what they said was the muzzling of their candidate by party leaders.” They even interrupted Hillary’s speech with shouts of “Let Jerry speak!”

“I’ve never known Jerry not to speak when he wants to speak,” Hillary quipped. “He’s always speaking, near as I can tell.”

When Brown eventually got the microphone — to second his own nomination — he spoke for 20 minutes without mentioning Bill by name.

The wounds of 1992 took a long time to heal. In September 1998, Brown predicted that Bill would be impeached, saying “it’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s only a question of ‘when.‘” In 2009, Bill endorsed Brown’s gubernatorial primary opponent, Gavin Newsom. And as recently as 2010, Brown was still questioning Bill’s integrity.

“Clinton’s a nice guy, but whoever said he always told the truth?” Brown said at an event in East Los Angeles. “You remember, right? There’s that whole story there about did he or didn’t he.” (Bill eventually endorsed Brown in the general election.)

At the end of Wednesday’s speech, Brown did manage to gin up a bit of enthusiasm for the task at hand — perhaps because he was talking about Hillary, not Bill, and contrasting her with someone — Trump — he despises even more.

“America needs today are not deniers, but leaders,” Brown said. “Not division, but common purpose. Not bombast, but bold action. That’s why we need Hillary.”

It may have been the nicest thing Jerry Brown has ever said about a Clinton.

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