Jerry Brown understands the uncertainties of life and politics

The Jim Fallows piece on Jerry Brown in the June Atlantic (Kevin mentioned it in his Tuesday roundup) is worthwhile reading on many counts, starting at the top:

One Friday morning this spring, I drove to Washington's Dulles airport at dawn, to catch the first nonstop flight to San Francisco. When I got off the plane six hours later, the morning sun still slanting through the terminal windows, my cellphone began ringing practically as soon as I turned it on. "Okay, you're here!" the man on the other end of the call said, cheerily. I'd been trying to arrange a visit to his office for quite a while, and just the previous evening he'd let me know that if I got there in a hurry, he'd have time to talk the next day, as well as over the weekend. As I walked through the airport, he began reeling off turn-by-turn instructions for reaching his office in Oakland in my rental car. "You'll take the Bay Bridge to the exit for the 580 East and the 24. But don't go all the way to the 24! That would send you out to Concord. Take the 980 West until the exit for 27th Street, and then ..." It was like a moment from a Saturday Night Live sketch of "The Californians"--­which seemed appropriate, since the man I was talking with was the Californian, Jerry Brown.

Brown hasn't done everything right in his first couple of years in office, but he's smart, purposeful, and honest - qualities not that easy to find in today's political swirl. Perhaps most important, he's learned a lot from his mistakes over the years - and like those of a certain age, he's managed to keep his ego in check.

"I love what I am doing," he told me once I got to his Oakland office. "I love it much more than the first time. Back then I got bored because we didn't have big problems. Now I am very enthusiastic. Everything's interesting, and it's complicated. There is a zest!" He likes to pound the desk or table as he talks, and this passage was punctuated: love (bang) ... love (bang) ... zest! (bang bang bang!). Anne Gust Brown, a former Gap executive in her mid‑50s, who became his wife eight years ago and is widely regarded as his most influential and practical-minded adviser, arched an eyebrow from the other side of the room, where she was half-listening while working at a computer. "Ed-mund!" she said smilingly, but being sure to get his attention. (His official name is Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., after his father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, who was governor for eight years before he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1966.) "Don't get yourself too worked up!" As a note on nomenclature: apart from his wife's occasional joking use of Edmund and my own antiquated sense that I should address him as Governor, every other person I heard speak about--or with--him called him Jerry.

I love this next part because it not only addresses to current political reflexes, but those of society at large:

As a reporter, I have never encountered a politician more willing to talk with, as opposed to talk at, other people than Jerry Brown. "I think as I speak," he told me early this year, underscoring the obvious, when I met him in Washington. He and his wife were in town for the National Governors Association conference. As I waited for them in the conference-center lobby on a Sunday morning, I saw governors from modest-size states bustle through, each with an earpiece-equipped security detail and a covey of aides. When the Browns arrived, they were alone. "I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry," he continued. "Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry. I live in the question. People have so many positions, and usually the evidence is not strong enough for them really to be so confident in those conclusions. There are just a lot of things that are not certain."