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🌖GOVERNOR MOONBEAM THREAD🌔 I sat down with the former California gov at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. The sometimes prickly @JerryBrownGov was in a relaxed, romantic mood, with his wife, Anne Gust Brown, in the front row bantering with him. Here’s what he had to say...
He’s got plans to visit New Hampshire and Iowa — not that running is in his “current thinking,” as he says. “I might have to just stir up the pot a bit. Not for myself but for those other 25 people who are aspiring to the office.”
On whether women candidates have to be “likable”: “I think we’re always judged on likability and I think that’s something a lot of politicians don’t want to admit. But I can tell you, when they throw you out, most times they didn’t like you. They got tired of you.”
Was @SenGillibrand right to say WJC should’ve resigned over the affair with Monica Lewinsky? “No,” he said, adding:”That’s why we have elections... It’s very easy to tell someone to quit 10 years after they’re finished.”
Should Franken have been pressured to leave? “No,” Brown said, adding: “I think the election is the sacred judgment.”
Asked about his successor as Cali’s AG, @SenKamalaHarris, Brown said: “She certainly started off with a bang. And having done it myself three times, she’s doing a lot better than I was doing.”
Brown says he did not see Howard Schultz heckled but that he’s “rooting” for the coffee mogul because he wants Schultz to put an electric charge station at the Starbucks near his ranch in Williams because he just got a hybrid car.
I asked the former rebel if he identifies with the excitement around @AOC. “It, too, will pass. The enthusiasm. The excitement. You know, I’ve been a young reformer myself — it doesn’t last. But that’s all right. There are many incarnations.”
But then he groused about the soaring income inequality gap. I noted that he sounded like @AOC. “Well, there’s some resonance there.” And then he cracked: “Out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom — by the way, Jesus said that.”
Asked about whether his stint as Gov. Moonbeam was pre-Goop, he said of @GwynethPaltrow: “Who?” His wife in the front row prodded him, and he remembered he had met her once, at a birthday party. He’s glad zen’s gone mainstream. “It’s self-justifying.”
And of the legendary Dead Kennedys punk rock ode to him, “California Uber Alles,” he said “I think it was a dumb song, really. It didn’t make any sense. The lyrics are particularly lame and incoherent. But I’m proud someone thought I had that much power.”
(FYI )
The former seminarian and longtime Irish bachelor confessed that if he had married the charming Anne Gust ten years earlier, “I would’ve been president by now.”
Saying that he is focusing on his wife now, in retirement, the formerly ascetic Brown said he does like to buy her dresses by his friend @DVF: “I like expensive clothes and expensive jewelry on women, yes I do. It’s all about beauty.”
I told him that would be a good 2020 platform.
On his former bristly attitude about being asked about the Brown dynasty, he said he’s more open. Consider Churchill. “Churchill drank so much and was so effective. That’s a very interesting personal point. And I don’t drink as much as Churchill and I’m not as effective.”
One more... I noted that he’s come a long way from the 70’s when he would occasionally wear mismatched shoes. “That’s a myth,” he protested. “Maybe mismatched socks, but never shoes. That is really egregious.”
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