Late in life, at age 75 and apparently done seeking higher office, Brown has reinvented himself again, this time as the anti-politician politician. He shuns most trappings of the office. There’s no motorcade, no entourage. The governor showed up at the elections department with a lone campaign advisor and his wife, who snapped a photo using her smart phone.
Brown fashions many of his own speeches, veto messages and even press releases. His staff in the governor’s office is about half that of his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who employed as many as 230.
He often goes months without a public appearance, sometimes holed up at his home in the Oakland hills, calling authors, experts and others he wrings for information — conversations that usually open, “Hello, this is Jerry Brown. Do you have a minute?”
It is as though Brown wants to run the most populous state in the nation more or less by himself, tackling matters large (California’s budget) and small (picking a poem to mark Arbor Day) with the same degree of supreme confidence and minimal public display.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-jerry-brown-20140324,0,4427500.story?track=rss#axzz2wpbJ2UMY